Sounds of Defiance: The Holocaust, Multilingualism, and the Problem of English

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Sounds of Defiance The Holocaust, Multilingualism, and the Problem of English

alan rosen

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University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London

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Acknowledgments for the use of previously published material appear on page 243, which constitutes an extension of the copyright page. Copyright © 2005 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America Set in Adobe Minion by Kim Essman. Book design by Richard Eckersley. Printed and bound by Thomson-Shore, Inc. 䡬 ⬁ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rosen, Alan (Alan Charles) Sounds of defiance : the Holocaust, multilingualism, and the problem of English / Alan Rosen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-8032-3962-3 (cloth: alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-8032-3962-9 (cloth: alk. paper) isbn-13: 978-0-8032-0528-4 (electronic) isbn-10: 0-8032-0528-7 (electronic) 1. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. English language—Spoken English. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945), in literature. 4. Speech in literature. 5. English language—Social aspects. 6. English language—Style. I. Title. ps225.r67 2005 810.9'358—dc22 2005001442

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To Ruth with love, admiration, and gratitude

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contents Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Everything Is All Right, or The Problem of English Writing on the Holocaust

ix xiii

1

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1950: English in the Aftermath 1. Evidence of Trauma: English as Perplexity in David Boder’s Topical Autobiographies

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2. An Entirely Different Culture: English as Translation in John Hersey’s The Wall

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3. What Does He Speak?: English as Mastery in Ruth Chatterton’s Homeward Borne

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1960: Law’s Languages, Eichmann, and After

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4. Please Speak English: Babbling in Philip Roth’s “Eli, the Fanatic”

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5. From Law to Outlaw: Borrowed English in Edward Wallant’s The Pawnbroker

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6. Law’s Languages: Hannah Arendt’s Mother and Other Tongues

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7. Say “Good Boy”: Legitimizing English in Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker

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8. Cracking Her Teeth: Broken English in Cynthia Ozick’s Fiction and Essays

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9. The Language of Dollars: English as Intruder in Yaffa Eliach’s Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust

139

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1990: Two Generations After 10. The Language of Survival: English as Metaphor in Art Spiegelman’s Maus

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11. Eaten Away by Silence: English as Elegy in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces

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Conclusion: In the Thick of the Fray, or English as the Third Tongue

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Notes

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Source Acknowledgments

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Index

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p r e fac e Not far from where I live in Jerusalem, a sign directs motorists to Yad Vashem, site of Israel’s Holocaust memorial and education center. The sign is clearly apropos: the memorial is just a five-minute drive or a twentyminute walk. For my purposes, however, what is crucial is not so much the memorial as the sign that directs the visitor to it. This street sign, like many if not most in Jerusalem, states its instruction in three languages: Hebrew, Arabic, and English. The first time I noticed this fact I was astonished and elated. I had already for some years been at work on the topic of the Holocaust and multilingualism, and this sign seemed to vindicate the focus of my work. Here, in something so common as a street sign, multiple languages were bound up with the Holocaust. But this self-flattering justification for my work was only the first, and perhaps least important, level that the sign evoked. More important was the complex inbreeding of the languages. Though the sign denoted the name of the memorial in three scripts, the name of the memorial itself is given in a single tongue, Hebrew. The name, Yad Vashem, derives originally from the Bible’s Book of Isaiah and translates literally as “a hand and a name.” The story of how this name was chosen for Israel’s memorial is too long to rehearse here. But what is striking is that the sign’s apparent multilingualism was more exactly multiple transliteration. The three scripts, at bottom, refer to the same monolingual designation. The most astonishing feature of the sign was that it included Arabic. There is really nothing novel in its being on the sign, for Jerusalem street signs, catering to populations of Hebrew, Arabic, and English speakers (or readers, or pidgin readers), commonly have the three tongues. But for me the particular marvel of this sign was that it directs Arabic speakers to Israel’s Holocaust memorial. Were there really members of the Arab community who sought the way to the memorial? I would hope so. But in a sense, it did not matter. For whatever the answer to the question regarding Arab visitors to Yad Vashem, the sign announced to the Hebrew-speaking community that such a memorial was also meant for both the Arab and the Jewish communities. Lest one think that I am projecting more onto the sign’s multiple tongues (or scripts) than it warrants – and I, for one, thought that I was going too

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Preface

far – I recently passed by the same sign to find that the Arabic script had been blackened over and was now illegible. There was, it seems, at least one other person who had taken in the full meaning of what the Arabic signified. Envisioning such a broad community that could be drawn to the memorial was too much for the vandal to bear. I don’t imagine that the intent was to keep out this broader community so much as it was to protest the symbolic inclusion that the sign, with its three tongues, legitimized. Among the three tongues, Hebrew and Arabic have so far played the primary roles in my narrative, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. They are the languages of the indigenous residents of the area, those who clearly have the greatest stake in the demarcation of place, location, and memory. But the sign displays a third tongue, English, the language of the visitor. This book offers a commentary on the logic of its inclusion and chronicles the evolving status of English writing about the Holocaust, an account that begins with the period of the Second World War and concludes with the 1990s. The primary language of neither the persecutors nor the victims, English has generally been viewed as marginal to the events of the Holocaust. I argue that this marginal status profoundly affects writing on the Holocaust in English and fundamentally shapes our understanding of the events. Specifically, I will show that writing in the immediate postwar period expresses anxiety about addressing the Holocaust in English; whereas fifty years later, some works go so far as to celebrate the virtues of English as a language of the Holocaust. 1 Each chapter highlights certain representative works – psychological and sociological studies, memoir, tales, fiction, and film – and analyzes how these works reveal and then arbitrate the special status of English. Although I have included what I perceive to be a significant range of responses to the Holocaust, I have in the interest of focus omitted other kinds, particularly poetry and drama. 2 I also limit the contours of the study in another way: the postwar English-language responses that I feature were produced in the United States and (in the case of Fugitive Pieces) Canada. I deal, then, primarily with what German translators refer to as Americanish. I arrange the chapters chronologically, starting with the immediate postwar period (from 1946 to 1950) to recent publications (the 1990s) in order to best narrate the transformation of the position of English over fifty to sixty years. The story of this transformation will be at the forefront, accompanied by references to the roles of other languages (Hebrew, Yiddish, German) and accomplished through the analysis of the individual texts. I begin with a project conceived during the war and realized in its immediate

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aftermath then move through the postwar decades. Each reading builds on what came before. Cultural trends, moreover, shape and limit the readings. I could only make the arguments that I set forth by proceeding in this fashion. Such an approach might seem obvious: an event grounded in history would summon forth a historically minded analysis. But no book on Holocaust writing has taken this approach. 3 Further, those books that have attempted to chronicle English-language response to the Holocaust have either overlooked early responses or have seen these responses as exceptional rather than as representative. 4 By proceeding in this fashion, I thus hope not only to revise the way that English-language writing has been viewed but also to reconstrue the way Holocaust writing in general should be approached. [-11], (11) What happened with English-language writing on the Holocaust also came about because of the sensational and disputed status of English in the twentieth century. I thus also link my analysis of Holocaust writing to Lines: 232 to 2 a number of developments in the postwar period: the growing amount of writing on the Holocaust in English; the increasing prestige of English as a ——— global language; and, within the contexts of neocolonial and multilingual * 215.22847p ——— studies, the uncertain position of English that has emerged in this era. EngNormal Page lish, as it has addressed the Holocaust, receives my primary attention; the problem of English as a twentieth-century phenomenon plays a supporting * PgEnds: PageBr yet significant role in my analysis.

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ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s This book has benefited greatly from the counsel of friends and colleagues. Yisrael Cohen was the first to read through the manuscript; he has, moreover, helped in countless ways throughout its coming into being. His friendship is a sustaining light. David Roskies has been unstinting in his encouragement of this project from the outset and has time and again lent his erudition and intelligence to its betterment. His own work inspires my own and sets an uncompromising standard for the scholarly writing this subject deserves. Michael Shapiro’s generosity has been remarkable; his comments on the manuscript gave me an extraordinary sense of what a reader would care about. His friendship over the last several years has been engaged, resourceful, and inspiring. I am deeply grateful to Lillian Kremer and Nancy Harrowitz, who also read and commented on the entire manuscript; they, too, reinforced the sense that what it says hasn’t been said before. I am in the debt of others who read, commented on or in conversation shared their thoughts on various stages of sections or chapters: Aaron Appelfeld, Steven Aschheim, Michael Berenbaum, Alan Berger, Michael Bernard-Donals, Liora Bilsky, Janet Burnstein, David Chack, Jörg Drewitz, Eli Feen, Yaffa Eliach, Rob Franciosi, Deborah Geis, Elana Gomel, Tresa Grauer, Gershon Greenberg, Bonnie Gurewitsch, Annette Insdorf, Sam Kassow, Bill Kolbrener, Michael Kramer, Mordechai Leshnoff, Herb Levine, Naftali Lowenthal, Dan Michman, Lee Monk, Nehemia Polen, Joel Rosenberg, Alvin Rosenfeld, Murray Roston, Jeff Shapiro, Robert Shapiro, Werner Sollors, Susan Suleiman, and Hana Wirth-Nesher. I have had the privilege of teaching this material in a number of undergraduate and graduate seminars and the participants therein contributed vitally to its development. I particularly would like to thank Aden BarTura, Rachel Gwilly, Rita Horváth, Michal Levi, Yaakov Mascetti, and Jen Sundick. I have also lectured on aspects of this material in the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem and wish to thank its staff for fostering such a special and gracious environment: Stephanie and Ephraim Kaye, Katherine Berman, and Zita Turgemann. I presented versions of material included in Sounds of Defiance at various locations and wish to thank the following for inviting me to do so: Robert

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Acknowledgments

Ehrenreich and Paul Shapiro of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Michael Shapiro of the Center for Jewish Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Hana WirthNesher, Literature of the United States in Languages Other than English, the Modern Language Association; and Liora Bilsky of the Law and History Forum, Tel Aviv University. Thanks are due to a number of libraries: Special Collections, Research Library, ucla; Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University; Lilly Library, Indiana University; Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Library of Congress; Yad Vashem; National Library, Hebrew University; and Joseph Meyerhof Library, Baltimore Hebrew University. [-14], (14) Many friends have given constantly; several deserve special mention: Rachel Berman, Daniel and Beth Gordon, Bill Kavesh, Dov Leiman, Rabbi Moshe Leiner, Harry and Debbie Looks, Rabbi Joseph and Reizel Polak, Jeff Lines: 263 Shapiro, Barry Walfish and Adele Reinhartz, and Joel Walters. My mother, Rosalie Rosen, has resourcefully provided relevant materials and shared ——— * 202.428 her thoughtful reflections on them. ——— Finally, my teacher Elie Wiesel nourishes my life and work constantly. Normal Pa My wife, Ruth, has been a partner in the book’s production. Her profound scholarly gifts and keen intelligence have enhanced its content and style. * PgEnds: Pa She and my children – Shoshana Leah, Tzvia, Noam Dov, and Rina – have granted me daily blessings at a time when there were few to be had. [-14], (14)

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Introduction Everything Is All Right, or The Problem of English Writing on the Holocaust

The worldwide spread of English is remarkable. There has been nothing like it in history. Spanish and French, Arabic and Turkish, Latin and Greek have served in their turn as international languages, in the wake of the mission station, the trading post or the garrison. But none has come near to rivaling English. — The Economist, 1986 Besides, who, in what corner of the world, cannot string together a few words of English? — Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

“The Jewish Council of Warsaw,” writes Emmanuel Ringelblum, “shows the least interest in its people. The best of the councils is Radom, which often provides Jews in the forced-labor gangs with bread, medicine and so forth. But in Warsaw there are sick Jews working who have not been relieved. And Zabludowski says that everything is all right.”1 Historian and director of the Oneg Shabbes underground archive in Warsaw, Ringelblum refers here to the difficult situation in Warsaw in October 1940 and to how indifferent those in power – Jews as well as Germans – were to it. After living under German occupation for a year, the Jewish councils were clearly under duress. And things were to get worse. In mid-November 1940, a month after Ringelblum’s stinging reproach, Warsaw’s Jews were incarcerated in a ghetto, virtually sealed off from the rest of the world behind an eleven-foothigh wall. Aware of the demands on the councils even at the earlier stage, Ringelblum nevertheless takes them to task because, as the comparison to Radom makes clear, it was possible to do better. What especially irks Ringelblum is that those who commanded authority did not even acknowledge that something was wrong: “And Zabludowski says that everything is all right.” Benjamin Zabludowski was a member of Warsaw’s Jewish Community Council before the occupation and continued to serve in that capacity. He was on close terms with the head of the council,

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Adam Czerniakow (indeed, so close that he was known as Czerniakow’s right-hand man). 2 Ringelblum, however, refers elsewhere in his notes to Zabludowski’s less than humane approach. 3 In the October entry cited above, he clearly condemns Zabludowski’s response as an irresponsible whitewashing of an increasingly bleak situation; everything was clearly not all right in Warsaw. Interesting for what it shows of ghetto politics, I single out this exchange because of the phrasing of the whitewash: – Ringelblum writes “all right” in English. What exactly moved Ringelblum to interrupt the flow of his Yiddish text with the colloquial English phrase? We assume (but cannot be sure) that he was quoting Zabludowski. Did the phrase stand out because it was so exotic? Did “all right” capture Zabludowski’s urbanity, portraying him as not only ignoring the needs of the community but also doing so by uttering it in foreign tongue as if this would attest to a worldly wisdom? Or did Ringelblum’s use of the phrase emphasize Zabludowski’s connection to the “all-rightniks,” to those members of the Polish Jewish leadership who believed that American philanthropy was enough to mollify all existing socials ills? 4 It was rare for Ringelblum to import English into his notes. And his sparing use of English was not exceptional in his milieu. But it was not at all unusual for him to draw on Polish, German, and Hebrew, which appear time and again. This linguistic capaciousness bears out Chone Shmeruk’s assertion that Polish Jewry at the outbreak of World War II boasted a trilingual culture, wherein the majority of speakers had facility in Yiddish, Polish, and Hebrew. 5 Once the Nazis had occupied Poland, German, a language already having a measure of currency, became a regular addition to the linguistic mix. This mélange of languages was part of a larger historical inheritance. European Jews have had a long history of multilingualism. There was, first of all, the on-going relevance of ancient texts: the language of the Bible was Hebrew; the language of the Talmud, Aramaic. Added to these sacred tongues were the often multiple languages spoken in the various regions where Jews resided. Jews also devised specifically Jewish languages such as Yiddish, a Germanic language, or Ladino, a Spanish tongue – that were written using Hebrew script and transported to new regions when communities were forced to migrate: in the medieval period, French and German Jews, for instance, brought Yiddish to Eastern and Central Europe, while Spanish Jews brought Ladino to Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey after their expulsion from Spain. Conveyed to Poland, Russia, Hungary, and

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Rumania centuries before, Yiddish in these areas at the time of the Second World War had some seven to eight million speakers – most of whom had some facility in other tongues as well. 6 Although many Jews were competent in a number of languages, as David Roskies notes, “in Jewish eastern Europe, linguistic choices were never neutral.”7 True generally, these choices took on added weight in the Nazi ghettos: “One wrote,” continues Roskies, “to transcend the reality of the ghetto, to make sense of it through language, to communicate, to reach out. Depending on the future envisaged, one wrote either in Yiddish, Hebrew or Polish.” In the tumultuous career of the ghettos, moreover, the future envisaged often underwent change, compelling writers to switch from one language to another: when the Great Deportation of Warsaw Jewry to Treblinka began in summer, 1942, diarist Abraham Lewin exchanged Yiddish for Hebrew; poet Yitzhak Katznelson did the same when penning his elegy to this devastation; 8 and chronicler Rachel Auerbach traded Polish for Yiddish. Such changes attest to facility and diglossia, the ability to maneuver in more than one tongue, and to the changing need to do so in the tongue that mattered most at a particular moment. Page after page of Ringelblum’s notes bring home how choices were never neutral. On May 7, 1940, for instance: “Cafe Gertner is now Aryan. [Yet] only Jews go there. The Jewish waitresses must try to pretend to be Polish. Didn’t answer me when I asked a question in Yiddish.”Or a dramatic exhortation in October of the same year: “A Jew wearing a visor and with a red kerchief at his throat cries at a Jewish woman who is speaking Polish to him: ‘In the Jewish streetcar one must speak Yiddish!’ Someone else shouts: ‘And Hebrew, Hebrew too!’ ” And in a more subtle yet no less charged scene from the same period: “An elderly lady wearing the traditional headgear addresses Jewish children: ‘You might speak Yiddish.’ ” Even the children are caught up in the language wars. As adversity in the ghetto intensifies, Ringelblum monitors its effects by noting its linguistic fallout. His was not the only voice. Peretz Opoczinski, for instance, in his semiautobiographical, “The Jewish Letter Carrier,” chronicles the thankless labors of a mailman in the Warsaw ghetto, the prestige he so ambiguously acquires, and the increasing devastation he witnesses as he climbs the stairs in ghetto tenements. Often bringing money or promises thereof from relatives in Soviet Russia, letters are the lifeline for the ghetto dwellers. By the end of the story, when the Einsatzgruppen devastate Russia’s Jews, letters no longer arrive, a development that also signals the death knell for Warsaw’s Jews. Importantly, Opoczinski tells the story of these Jews

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through the languages they speak. One group favors Polish – “they were intellectuals and read in the Polish-Jewish sheet, The Jewish Gazette.” A second group privileges Yiddish: “If the Hasid did differ from the intellectual it was by the demand that the letter carrier speak Yiddish.”9 The variety and contentiousness of Jewish life, even (or especially) in such close quarters, emerges through the different tongues they speak – and those that they don’t. In the ghettos of Eastern Europe, Jews continued to be enmeshed in family and community life that, while subject to unprecedented deprivation and danger, still bore resemblance to what had preceded it, as was true of languages as well. Indeed, closing ranks in the ghetto held the promise that Jewish languages, like Jewish culture in general, could get a boost. But the concentration camps proceeded according to different criteria, linguistic and otherwise. Two things did however remain the same: the centrality of linguistic facility and the marginality of English. Primo Levi’s essay, “Communicating,” lays out the terrain. 10 Levi chronicles how in Auschwitz knowledge of one or another language often made the difference between life and death. Since commands were issued generally in German and since survival depended on an inmate’s capacity to readily carry out commands, those who knew German fared best, those who didn’t fared worst: We immediately realized, from our very first contacts with the contemptuous men with the black [SS] patches, that knowing or not knowing German was a watershed. Those who understood them and answered in an articulate manner could establish the semblance of a human relationship. To those who did not understand them the black men [again, the SS] reacted in a manner that astonished and frightened us; . . . whoever did not understand or speak German was barbarian by definition; if he insisted on expressing himself in his own language – indeed, his nonlanguage – he must be beaten into silence and put back in his place, pulling, carrying, and pushing, because he was not a Mensch, not a human being. 11

According to Levi, an absolutist linguistic chauvinism fueled this policy: for the persecutors, German was “language,” other tongues simply “nonlanguage.” With brutal irony, the Nazis not only dictated what had to be done, they also dictated the medium. 12 Levi shows how this wartime classification carried over into the postwar period:

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In Auschwitz “to eat” was rendered fressen [ . . . ] For “go away” the expression hau’ ab was used, the imperative mode of the verb abhauen; in proper German, this means “to cut, chop off,” but in Lager jargon it was equivalent to “go to hell, get out of the way.” I once happened to use this expression (Jetzt hauen wir ab) in good faith shortly after the end of the war to take leave of certain well-mannered functionaries of the Bayer Company after a business meeting. It was as if I had said, “Now let’s get the hell out of here.” They looked at me with astonishment: the term belonged to a linguistic register different from that in which our preceding conversation had been conducted and is certainly not taught in “foreign language” courses. I explained to them that I had not learned German in school but rather in a Lager called Auschwitz; this gave rise to a certain embarrassment, but since I was in the role of buyer they continued to treat me with courtesy. 13

In Levi’s retelling, the idiom that the camps had coerced comes back to haunt the “well-mannered functionaries” once the camps no longer exist. And, significantly, Levi went further in having the wartime idiom continue to act as postwar provocation: “I later on realized also that my pronunciation [of German] is coarse; but I deliberately have not tried to make it more genteel; for the same reason, I have never had the tattoo removed from my left arm.”14 What began as a means of subjugation – a stigmatizing linguistic tattoo – became a strategy of commemoration. His “coarse” mode of expression brought the life of the camps indecorously into everyday dealings. Once that happened, every word he spoke in German, even the most refined, bore the mark – to extend Levi’s analogy of the tattoo – of the camp. For Levi, vocabulary and pronunciation serve as organic artifacts of what happened in the camps, provocatively carrying with them the memory of that experience from the time during the war to the time after. And the notion of a linguistic tattoo will play a role later on, articulating as it precisely does the special iconic powers lodged in an accent. Others have emphasized the strange nature of the language spoken in the camps, whether in terms of a “protective language,” a code spoken by the inmates to elude detection by the guards, 15 or a mongrel language cobbled together to enable communication between those who did not share a common tongue. Having its genesis in the lethal conditions of concentration camps, this“lager jargon”has been termed by Sander Gilman a“discourse of death”: “It consisted of fragments of the language of the murderers, combined with bits and pieces of the languages of the victims and some words that were

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created only in the camps themselves.”16 As the concentration camps gave rise to special codes of behavior, they also created the need for inmates to invent a language of their own. At least one commentator has argued – with, to my mind, only partial success – that the nature of the lager jargon is fundamentally at odds with that of any normal tongue. A ghostly hybrid of the languages belonging to both murderers and victims, this discourse of death resists, according to Sander Gilman, being narrated by “purer” languages. Whereas Primo Levi views the coarse artifacts of language as transportable from the setting of the concentration camps to that of postwar society, Gilman maintains that there is a gap dividing these realms that cannot be breached. Strikingly, Gilman articulates this position by setting Levi against himself. Levi’s Italian, emblematic of the languages of European culture, narrates his experience from a falsifying distance: “The language of the camps, the language that signified the powerlessness of the individual,” Gilman notes, “vanishes in the post-war retelling of the account of the camps. The need to remember an intact world in the camps undermines the ability to remember the dislocation of language.”17 The languages of culture overwhelm the language of the camps, making it impossible to recover the lager jargon and the world that gave rise to it. This falsifying impulse comes about because the postwar world wants to believe that the concentration camps belonged to a different world (or history, or culture) than those they currently inhabit. Hence, every language is going to be unfaithful to the camp experience, taking what existed solely in fragments and rendering it in a medium that is intact. What one sees (or reads) then is the Holocaust filtered through civilized discourse, the Holocaust, as it were, according to the coherence of a single cultured tongue. The notion that language inevitably insulates the reader from horror leaves a number of questions: Why is it that the postwar reader cannot tolerate the camp’s fragmented discourse? If the fundamental impulse is to turn away, why should an author or reader be inclined to confront horrible scenes and brutal episodes at all? Gilman does not address these issues, but his analysis implies that the reader both wants and does not want to confront such scenes. Guided by this ambivalence, the postwar reader confirms that his world is fundamentally different than the world of the camps. The extremity of this judgment foreshadows Lawrence Langer’s censure of writing about the Holocaust for its aesthetic shaping of experience.

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Langer, too, believes that conventional narratives insulate readers, letting them rest easy with the conviction that the Holocaust can fit into normal categories of experience. 18 Gilman differs in that he claims the interplay of languages rather than the conventions of narrative can best reveal the insulating reflex. He is thus particularly helpful in locating literary response to the Holocaust in a plurality of languages. The notion, moreover, that the camps (all camps? certain ones?) brought about a “dislocation of language” gives the descriptions of lager jargon a broader significance, establishing a connection between the special linguistic culture created during the Holocaust and the effort to recount or represent in its aftermath what had happened. This step is clearly an important one to make and one that I take up in my study. Nevertheless, by positing an inherent need to remember (and thus recount) a reality different from (and contrary to) what happened, Gilman assumes more than he demonstrates. All languages are not equally transgressive of the reality of the Holocaust; Yiddish has a different relationship than does French, Hebrew than Italian, German than English, and so on. At bottom, Gilman sets forth a linguistic argument, averring that any literary language will possess a unity and coherence that communication in the camps, with its basis in an improvised language of fragments, could not command. Literary language implies culture, fragments denote the opposite thereof. Yet the severity of this formulation undermines the possibility that the languages of culture – and I am particularly concerned here with English – can develop strategies to overcome the gap between the discourses of death and of life. The division between the two realms, as Levi’s linguistic tattoo implies, is not absolute. And the languages of culture do not all occupy the same position in relation to the Holocaust. This becomes clear when considering the particular situation of English.

Y – You Know English? One of the languages of European culture, English occupies a specifically marginal position in relation to the Holocaust. A language of neither victim nor perpetrator, English appeared rarely in the main arenas of Holocaust life because English-speaking countries, although fighting on the side of the Allies, were not caught up in the matrix of ghettos, deportations, or concentration camps. 19 Another reason was that, in those countries at the center of the catastrophe, English was not one of the languages essential to commerce or culture. In elaborating the multilingualism of Polish Jewry,

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for instance, Chone Shmeruk quotes a memoir that comments on what qualified as a foreign tongue: Father, who went only to heder, since there was no money for the Yeshivah, knew five languages: Hebrew, Yiddish, German, Polish, and Ukrainian, although he apparently could not write Ukrainian. No one thought of this as anything extraordinary. I would even venture that no one even noticed. “True” foreign languages were French and English. If you had asked my father before World War I, he would certainly have answered that he knew no foreign language. 20 (emphasis added)

To a degree, English became less foreign as the war went on, and it became clear that hope for victory lay largely (if not exclusively) with the British and Americans. As ghetto dwellers tried to hold out until better times, the study of English came more into fashion. “Everyone is assiduously studying English,” writes Ringelblum in early 1942, “in preparation for emigrating after the war.”21 Dreaming of a life of freedom in the expanses of postwar America, ghetto dwellers did what they could to get ready for that eventuality. But the enthusiasm for learning English, coming in the midst of the war and acting as a spur to hope in a time of despair, testifies to the general insignificance of English in the preceding period. It was because so few knew English well that so many had to study “assiduously.” A latecomer to the ghettos, English had as little significance in the concentration camps. Indeed, the inconsiderable number of those who knew English emerges in reports of exceptional attempts on the part of camp personal to locate accomplished speakers. In these cases, out of hundreds of candidates, not even a handful qualified as possessing a rudimentary mastery of the language. In two later chapters, I take detailed note of the implications of such isolated situations where English became important enough to induce camp personnel to seek out fluent speakers, yet there were frightfully few who fit the bill. 22 The absence of English from the list of languages making up the lager jargon, moreover, confirms its general inconsequence. Primo Levi specifies German, Polish, Yiddish, Silesian dialect (of German?), and Hungarian as the essential the lager jargon’s essential constituents. 23 Others add Russian and Ukrainian to the mix. 24 No list that I am aware of includes English. It was truly a foreign language and hence one not generally known, or worth knowing. If English on rare occasions rose to prominence, it was the exception to the rule. Thus, when it came to writing about the Holocaust few had reason to believe English was one of the languages of literary consequence.

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There were, to be sure, some who by inclination or default chose to write in English. But they were the minority, largely because the languages deemed primary were German,Yiddish, Hebrew, and Polish. From the outset, translation into English played an important role; I will try to show how, at least in one case, translation was not only essential in acquiring basic information about the Holocaust but also inspired a major work in English. Eventually, many key works were translated, a development that while crucial in circulating classic works only reinforced the tertiary position of English-language Holocaust writing. Even when a lot more had been written, the marginal position of English in giving expression to what was essential of the Holocaust was not, at least until recent times, held in doubt. This view of English is nowhere so clear as in a place one would think least likely to find it: an anthology of excerpts translated into English from major diaries and memoirs, most of which had originally appeared in Yiddish. Presenting these writings to an English-speaking audience in the late 1960s, the editor’s introduction to the Anthology of Holocaust Literature does everything possible to ensure that the reader does not get the wrong idea about the position of English. 25 For whatever its accomplishments, English stands, as it were, in the shadow of the primary languages. “The Book of Books, out of the depths of the Sacred Martyrdom,” writes Israel Knox, one of the volume’s editors, “will not find its first and original home in English or French or Russian, but in Hebrew and Yiddish.” Even though some languages can serve testimony better than others, he continues, “no item was included or excluded [from the anthology] solely because of language.” Yet when Knox notes that works in languages other than the primary ones have been included – out of a wish to be “comprehensive and representative” – he does not refer to English: “There are items here from the French and German and Russian and Polish.” To be sure, he goes on to note that the “sensitive and perceptive” reader will be able to distill the essence from an English translation. But at best, English plays only a secondary role. Knox makes stunningly clear that a hierarchy of languages defines writing on the Holocaust, and that Yiddish, for evident reasons, stands at the summit of the linguistic mountain because in the editor’s view, the Holocaust was predominantly the destruction of Eastern European Jewry. Hence,“the essence of this civilization, its inner melody, its pervasive traits, achieved their crystallized expression in Yiddish.”26 But Knox knows that the Holocaust, if devastating to Eastern Europe, extended beyond as well, engulfing most of the continent and stretching to North Africa. In order to

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be accurate, the anthology, whatever its bias, had to take into account other regions, which meant drawing on sources penned in languages other than Yiddish: “Well, then, one of the features of this anthology is that it consists of selections from a large variety of books composed in many languages.”27 Knox thereby steers between a claim that Yiddish is the only language that can do justice to the Holocaust and an empirical recognition that victims have written about the Holocaust in many tongues. Knox also links the problem of languages to the shift in focus in the 1960s from the executioners to the victims and to the victims’ alleged passivity or complicity. This shift, often associated with the works of Hannah Arendt, Raul Hilberg, and Bruno Bettleheim – all of whom, though German- and Austrian-born, wrote their controversial works in English, sparked acrimonious rebuttals among those who believed that the victims had been maligned. 28 Clearly the victims’ defender, Knox views language as key: “What [record] there is of this [spiritual and physical resistance on the part of the victims] is mainly in Yiddish and partly in Hebrew, and the accusers who would sully the memory of the Six Million, rely chiefly upon nonJewish sources and have apparently little knowledge, if any, of Yiddish and Hebrew.”29 What one believes depends on the languages at one’s disposal. Further, the accusers’ choice of English as the medium of indictment may have made it more difficult to take seriously English writing on the Holocaust. I will discuss this debate in greater detail in chapters that follow. For now, it is important to note that Knox implies that this anthology comes to set the record straight, making Yiddish sources (albeit in English translation) available to those who might otherwise be forced to pass them by. The anthology thus cuts two ways. Even as the collection conscripts English to help redress the wrongs committed against those who have been maligned, English is decidedly kept in its place at the edge of the Holocaust. It stands far removed from the essential languages; it does not even make it into the catalog of tongues ancillary to those essential ones. Yet, if English was rarely found among the primary sources, it did early on play a significant role in secondary ones. Particularly noteworthy is its disproportionate role in the writing of comprehensive histories of the Holocaust. “The remarkable fact,” comments Jacob Robinson, “is that out of eleven volumes attempting to give a broad picture of the Holocaust, not less than eight were written originally in English.”30 These included such important works as Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution (1952) and Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of European Jewry (1961). 31 Together these

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two works combined to give Hannah Arendt the basis that she required to produce in English yet another attempt at a broad picture, a project whose linguistic complexity I will trace in a later chapter. Robinson does not speculate on what gave writing in English an exceptional capacity to render the “broad picture.” Was it, perhaps, the marginal position of English that provided a vantage point from which to survey the events? Did the fact that English played such a minor role in the events themselves and therefore that little documentation existed in English give it the leverage to stand back from the morass of harrowing detail? If so, then the inconsequence of English as a primary language finds its complement in the significance of English as a secondary one. 32 Being outside the inner circle of languages has offered its own distinct possibilities. Yaffa Eliach has speculated, for instance, that “writing in a new language” can buffer the survivor-writer from the trauma, a proposal seconded in the same forum by Israeli author, Jonat Sened. Both Eliach and Sened consider such an enabling barrier from the perspective of the survivor who writes about the Holocaust and who, when writing, is in thrall to a “constant searing pain”: “Those who were there,” comments Eliach, “and who held the white hot iron in their hands, their pain is still felt in everything they write.”33 Implied in Eliach’s and Sened’s remarks is the proposition that language, too, carries with it the “white hot iron,” that perceptions and memory funneled through the language in which the pain was experienced sharpens the pain. Language itself is the vehicle, if not the agent, of that which is searing. Language thus bears within it intolerable memory, a proposition that recalls Gilman’s idea of the unassimilable nature of lager jargon. For Gilman the turn to a “new language” falsifies the reality; for Eliach and Sened it enables the writer to do more justice to the reality that was. Eliach writes, Perhaps it is just that fact – writing in a new language – which is highly significant for one who tells about the Holocaust. For sometimes the language stands between the writer and the horrors of the Holocaust, in that it permits him to grapple with the Holocaust in a language other than that in which he experienced it. Consciously, or perhaps unconsciously, the new language has the power to attenuate slightly the fiery pain. 34

As Eliach’s phrasing suggests, survivors who attempt to recollect their experience undoubtedly feel the pain. But readers feel it almost as surely: “We feel the flame of the pain in their words, in their punctuation, in their silence.”35 Therefore, the neutrality that Eliach envisions serves authors and

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Introduction

readers, both the ones who went through the events and the ones who did not. To be sure, adopting a new language was often for reasons that are more pragmatic. The choice of language often depended on the country in which the survivor had settled and that had become the audience most natural to address. Eliach herself, for instance, has said that her decision to write Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust in English was motivated by her wish to make them accessible to her American students. 36 And yet, in tandem with the pragmatic concerns of readership, one wonders if her decision also provided a buffer against the almost suicidal forces that, as she describes them in her preface to the volume, were latent within the tales that she heard and rendered. 37 If Eliach and Sened speak about adoption of a new language in general, James Young comments on how English in particular has played this role. Speaking of oral testimony, Young notes that “many survivors have chosen after the war to speak and to tell their stories only in English, which they regard as a neutral, uncorrupted and ironically amnesiac language. Having experienced events in Yiddish, or Polish, or German, survivors often find that English serves as much as mediation between themselves and experiences as it does as medium for their expression.”38 Young posits this choice of English as deliberate – “survivors have chosen” to give up their native language and adopt a new one. Their use of English, in other words, is not simply a matter of audience or context; the only account that they give, according to Young, is in English. Indeed, if the neutrality of English were not available, the story might well not have been told at all. The choice of English is on some level counterintuitive. If what survivors try to do is to recount their memory of what took place, it seems illogical to use the medium that, in Young’s characterization of English, is “ironically amnesiac,” a medium that itself is lacking in the very memory that they are attempting to retrieve. But it is exactly this balance being struck between medium and message – between that which is “neutral and uncorrupted” and the memories themselves, which are traumatic – that makes recounting them in English so attractive. Not all critics agree that the special outsider status of English protects or mediates memory. Sidra Ezrahi has delineated the special “status of English” as being its remoteness from the events. In contrast to Yiddish and German, English was an “outsider,” and hence marked with “purity” and “autonomy.” Yet Ezrahi argues that “even the adoption of the English language could not provide a shield against private memory” (emphasis added). 39 The searing pain that Eliach refers to is here taken for granted;

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the memory of loss on this scale generates intense suffering. Ezrahi differs in that she believes no language can provide a sufficient barrier; no language is neutral enough, outsider enough, amnesiac enough. Even if one allows for this qualification, English still claims a distinct position. If any language could have done it, Ezrahi implies, English would be the one. Being outside the events did not, of course, necessarily make English neutral. As a main language of the Allies, English was associated with “defiance,” as Jakob Lind puts it, and therefore with a “different hierarchy of values,” values presumably informed by the democratic ideals associated with English-speaking countries. 40 Wartime English is thus a fusion of military and liberal idiom. The Allies were the liberators; the language they spoke, even when not understood, carried a message of defiant hope. Yet even this heroic dimension has its downside. When in Art Spiegelman’s Maus a Polish kapo speaks of wanting to learn English for its “worth,” he has in mind the capacity of English to raise his value in the eyes of the future rulers: Britain and America. The status of English in relation to the events of the Holocaust stands in striking contrast, of course, to the position of English from a global perspective. As the epigraphs suggest, English in the postwar years has become the international language, playing a more vital role in world affairs than any other. 41 Indeed, some view the position of English as a global tongue without parallel in history. The ascendancy of English is often linked to the growth and expansion of media and technology, which has, in turn, increased the number of speakers of English. Yet the special status of English derives not so much from the sheer number of speakers of English as it does from the political and economic dominance that English has acquired. Linguist David Crystal puts it sharply: “During the twentieth century, this world presence [of English] was maintained and promoted, almost single-handedly, through the economic supremacy of the new American superpower. And the language behind the U.S. dollar was English.”42 This partnership between English and American capital will be emphasized when in a later chapter English is dubbed “the language of dollars,” the association meant to be less positive than Crystal’s formulation. What English was in 1950 is different than what it became in the 1990s:“It has all happened so quickly,” writes Crystal. “In 1950, any notion of English as a true world language was but a dim, shadowy, theoretical possibility, surrounded by the political uncertainties of the Cold War, and lacking any clear definition or sense of direction. Fifty years on, and World English exists as a political and cultural reality.”43 Crystal actually sets out a two-

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stage evolution: the first, encompassing the entire postwar period, derives from developments in international relations, media (press, advertising, broadcasting, motion pictures), international travel, international safety, education, and communications. Groomed for international affairs by the British Empire and animated anew by its collaboration with the American dollar, English was at “the right place at the right time.” The second stage began in the 1960s, set in motion by movements for political independence on the one hand and the electronics revolution based in the United States on the other. While the two-stage model is intriguing, most important to note is that the ascendance of global English occurs in the period directly following the Second World War, as if English were the thing needed to console the world in the aftermath of its worst debacle. Crystal, for his part, does not explicitly link the English-language revolution to the Holocaust or even to the war (although others do). But he implies such connections. The way the history of the English language is told, says linguistic historian Dick Leith, can be viewed as a story with heroes and villains and a narrative shape implying the interests and motives of the one who tells it. 44 Seen in this light, Crystal’s narrative of “massive change” plots a story of English that celebrates its heroism, a Bildungsroman wherein the young protagonist, having been overzealous in its youth, finds that such excesses have provided the expertise and connections that can do much to save the world. To be sure, Crystal is admirably aware of the dangers courted by playing a starring role. But in the end, what appear to be dangers are either false alarms or, if real, can be averted. Others view global dominance less charitably. Rather than something to celebrate or extend, the enthronement of English as the lingui universi, in Domna Stanton’s terms, gives rise to worrying questions: “What should we, what can we, do about it?”45 The“we”that Stanton, a scholar of comparative literature, refers to is chiefly her colleagues in the field; but the problem she identifies with global English transcends the academy. To some degree, Stanton’s description of the English-language success story matches Crystal’s: the English language holds today “the preeminent role in imparting and storing knowledge and information”; it is, moreover, “the language of the media.”46 But if for Crystal this preeminent role qualifies English for world service, for Stanton it points to shrewd and even questionable manipulations of power: “Intimately connected to military and economic power, the dominance of English is an emblematic case of Foucauldian power-knowledge.” English dominance thus enables massive co-optation at a level difficult to know about or control.

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Crystal and Stanton initially share the term “global” to characterize the current status of the English-language. But Stanton switches terms in order to refine the particular nature of domination. “Even more than a global language, English can be viewed as an imperial tongue.”47 “Global” merely implies numbers; “imperial” what it does with the numbers it has. English is “not the most widely spoken language in the world – Hindi and Chinese are – but it is the elite language that other language speakers aspire to master, as an indispensable means of access to cultural and other forms of capital.” Mastery of English by those for whom it is not a native tongue provides the tools for mastery of the world’s most important resources. Imperial English is thus a means to rule rather than be ruled. As such, it widens the gap between the have and have-nots. It also, Stanton claims, turns speakers against what is native to them: the enthronement of English leads to “the internalizing of the norms, modes of thought, and cultural assumptions necessarily embedded in English, which cause cultural deracination and alienation.”48 Increasing the circulation of English may unite the globe, but it does so at the expense of what is familiar and local. Native languages and mother tongues thus suffer badly. Important for what follows, the dominance of imperial English, Stanton avers, “is sustained by the explicit or implicit devaluation of other languages,” making it seem as if they are no longer necessary or vital. 49 In Stanton’s scenario, English unifies on one front while increasing division on another. Hardly noble in its motivation, English is a protagonist pushed by ambition and self-interest, and more than a touch of megalomania. English strives to be everywhere and to do everything simply because no other language can ostensibly do it quite as well. Because of its need to be at the center, the English language as protagonist demands exclusive love and casts withering aspersions on former or potential rivals. These two contrasting stories of English in the postwar period play themselves out in English-language writing on the Holocaust. There we will see that English is savior and oppressor, both the medium that can thwart terrible evil and also the one that takes on many of the characteristics of an oppressor. The English of the United States has been pivotal in fashioning English into a global tongue. Yet its position in the United States itself, particularly during this same period, is hardly clear but rather contested, uncertain, and undergoing transformation. In American letters, scholars have noted the almost exclusive attention given to English-language writing in recent accounts of literary history and have attempted to redress this predicament by attending to American literature written in languages other than English.

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Introduction

According to this view, works written in America in Spanish, French Creole, Chinese, Norwegian, and Yiddish, among others, are crucial inclusions in the canon of American literature. 50 This realignment would be only proper given the contentious history of language and literature in America. According to Marc Shell, for America to cultivate a “foreign” language is not something new but rather integral to its polyglot history: Since 1750, “there had been a dialogue about whether there should be only one official language and which language that should be: English or one of the ‘foreign,’ that is, non-English languages, whether ancient or modern. That dialogue, barely recognizable, was sometimes expressed in the form of literary debates about whether the American language itself was not essentially a ‘foreign’ – that is, nonEnglish – language.”51 Exactly where English stands in relation to America is thus historically unclear. Greek, Latin, Hebrew, German, Dutch, English, and others have been contenders to be America’s official language – a position that has yet to be filled. Seen in this light, to integrate writing in other languages into the American literary cannon is not so much radical as conservative, an attempt to reveal the true history of American letters when viewed under a multilingual rubric. While those who propose this revision assert that works in English should remain integral to this canon, the precise cultural position of English is left unclear; one cannot take for granted that English is the language that essentially represents American literature. In the past few decades, writing on the Holocaust has turned with increasing frequency to English, reaching a point where in most types of literary production the majority of material on the Holocaust appears in English. Moreover, paralleling this escalating production, claims have even been advanced that English is the preferred language in which to write about the Holocaust. The uncertain position of English in the United States and its importance in Holocaust literature pull in contrary directions. In the first instance, English, formerly entrenched as the primary tongue of America, has been deposed from a singular position of authority; in the second, English, an outsider to the Holocaust and the responses to it, has been conscripted as a central language. English has been recruited to tend to the Holocaust at the same time that its preeminent stature in American letters has been challenged. It is the intersection of these forces that provides the context for the present study. In the chapters that follow, I examine how a specific set of English-language writings on the Holocaust make sense of this outsider

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tongue through many of the concepts outlined above: marginality, neutrality, purity, heroism, even globalism and imperialism. These writings, in turn, not only draw on but also shape these evolving conceptions of English in terms of the Holocaust. The starting point for tracing this process is the work of David Boder, who was himself a Johnny-come-lately to English, Boder nevertheless produced what is arguably the greatest work on the Holocaust to appear in English in the decade after the war. Based on testimony in a medley of Jewish and continental languages, Boder’s work appeared in English mainly to reach the American audience that was closest at hand. But having chosen English as the medium of his testament, Boder used it in ways that dramatize the process by which English established for itself a place both inside and outside the Holocaust’s domain.

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chapter 1

Evidence of Trauma English as Perplexity in David Boder’s Topical Autobiographies

Of Divergent Tongues: English as Perplexity In summer 1946, psychologist David Boder and his staff traveled to Europe to interview victims of the Holocaust who were in the displaced person camps and what he called “shelterhouses” of Europe. Boder, a Latvian Jewish émigré, who at the time of the project was on the faculty of Illinois Institute of Technology, carried out 109 interviews. Seventy were eventually transcribed, resulting in a manuscript of over thirty-one hundred pages. Boder undertook the trip because he felt that it was imperative to interview the victims-survivors while their memories were fresh and, in addition, to let them tell their story in “their own language.”1 Paying scrupulous attention to the victim’s language meant, of course, confronting a plurality of languages, a multilingual challenge that moved Boder to develop a new interview technology: It seems impossible to assume that there were or are enough newspaper correspondents versed in the languages of Russian, Polish, Jewish, French, Latvian, Lithuanian, Dutch, Flemish, and even German sufferers in concentration camps . . . so that such reports could be recorded with sufficient detail and precision for contemporaries as well as posterity by the usual “paper and pencil” method of interview.

Since “paper and pencil” interviews were out of the question, Boder continues, “the exact recording of their tale in their own voice seems the nearest and most feasible alternative,” which is how Boder accounts for his innovative use of the wire recorder (a 1940s forerunner of the tape recorder) to conduct the interviews. Forced by circumstances to record, Boder later speculated that the “art of verbatim recording of person experience” would take its special place in the fields of psychology, anthropology, and literature. 2

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Yet Boder’s emphasis on language and languages derives not only from postwar necessity but also attempts to be faithful to the circumstances of the victims during the Holocaust: I endeavored to keep the material [of the transcript] as near to the text of the original narratives as the most elementary rules of grammar would permit. I kept in mind that most of the displaced persons had spent their time of imprisonment in camps among inmates of divergent tongues and dialects. For years they had been deprived of all reading matter (even prayer books), of religious services, of radios, and often of opportunities to talk with others in their own tongue. It is no wonder that their language habits show evidence of trauma. Moreover, the emotional states aroused by the recollection of episodes of such unparalleled stress definitely contribute to the peculiar verbal structure and the discrepancies in time and place found on occasion in the narratives. 3

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Lines: 63 t Just as Levi never tried to refine his “coarse” Auschwitz-acquired German pronunciation, so Boder does not attempt to smooth over the “peculiar ——— 13.4000 verbal structure” of the interviewees in his transcripts. For both, preserving ——— the scars of language leads one as nearly as possible to the events themselves. Normal Pa Given Boder’s stress on original languages, what role does English, outsider to the events, play? One role is clearly pragmatic: living and working * PgEnds: Ej in the United States and funded by institutions there, Boder knew that his immediate audience was primarily English speaking. Hence, the interviews [22], (4) were, and have always been, printed only in English. 4 Yet this English-only memorial was clearly not Boder’s ideal: “The work is far from completed,” he wrote in 1957, noting that “the transcription of all the interviews in their original languages as recorded remains a task for the future.”5 His death four years later kept Boder from completing the envisioned task. But English plays a subtler role within the interviews themselves. In the midst of the German, Yiddish, or Russian language interview, English occasionally erupts, marking, in Boder’s words, a profound “perplexity.” The example I want to consider is a transcript of an interview in Yiddish (in 1946) with Udel Stopnitsky, thirty-one-year-old Polish Jew, who describes the entry of the Nazis into his town, Bedzin, and the terrible carnage that ensued: stopnitsky : So right away, the day when [the Germans] marched in, they took one hundred and seventy Jews and shot them. boder : Where?

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stopnitsky : In Bedzin. boder : Did you see it? stopnitsky : I have not seen it, but afterwards when we came outside we saw Jews sitting in poses like it would be Saturday night, they were sitting [in] their silk coats, with their heads/here one word not clear/leaning against the wall and in such a pose they were shot. boder : So that you did see? stopnitsky : Yes, I have seen it. boder : One could see that they were shot? stopnitsky : Shot, not once but several times shot. boder : Yes? stopnitsky : They were shot with so much suffering that one could not call it normal suffering. Entire pieces of flesh were torn away. boder : H-um, and who buried them? stopnitsky : The official Jewish undertakers. boder : The official Jewish undertakers. stopnitsky : The official Jewish undertakers had to bury some hundred seventy Jews. boder : They buried a hundred seventy Jews? stopnitsky : Yes. boder : Where were they buried? stopnitsky : In the cemetery, under/one word is not clear/[the] highway which/cemetery/exists until this day. boder : Were they buried in separate graves?/the interviewer inquired whether they were buried in individual graves but S. interpreted the word as separate graves/ stopnitsky : In separate graves, four graves, women separately and men separately. boder : Oh, in two graves? stopnitsky : No, in four graves, two for the men and two for the women.

In Boder’s next comment he unexpectedly switches from Yiddish to English: So they did not bury everyone separately [Man hat nichts begraben jenem eintzelem] in a nice . . . (emphasis added)

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story[,] which accounts for not having heard about the four graves when he mentioned them first, and also accounts for forgetting himself as to the language he was to use. 6

“Perplexity” is Boder’s way of describing the force of Stopnitsky’s account, one so strong that he, the interviewer, loses the thread of language, as it were. Indeed, Boder writes as if he were aware that perplexity would one day come under attack. 7 Yet by focusing her “reading the Holocaust” project on eliminating “perplexity,” Inga Clendinnen inadvertently shows why Boder’s emphasis on perplexity is crucial: “I have,” states Clendinnen in a study published forty years after Boder’s, “written neither for specialists nor for those for whom the Holocaust was a lived actuality, but for perplexed outsiders like myself, who believe with me that such perplexity is [24], (6) dangerous. In the face of a catastrophe on this scale so deliberately inflicted, perplexity is an indulgence we cannot afford.” For Boder, in contrast, it is Lines: 178 not a question of whether or not one can“afford” to be perplexed; he simply ——— wishes to chronicle what happened in an intimate attempt to follow Stopnitsky’s unbearable story. It may be that Boder is perplexed into English, in * 20.2000 ——— particular, as a kind of screen, a kind of “not having heard” registered in the Normal Pa retreat to a language of a different kind of world than the one Stopnitsky describes. For a moment, Boder by calling upon English can leave behind * PgEnds: Ej the horror of the past and enter a different idiom. Yet that is not how Boder himself expresses it. He refers to the eruption [24], (6) of English into the interview specifically as “forgetting himself as to the language he was to use.” The phrase, “forgetting himself,” suggests not so much an escape to a different era or world as it implies a blurring of time in a moment when boundaries became brutally unclear. This sense of unclear boundaries is of course what is inherent in Stopnitsky’s account of the Bedzin massacre: the carnage is so great that it is impossible to bury each person in an individual grave – in a place where the boundaries are carefully marked, a state that the English word “nice” precisely conveys: the normal, identifiable, honorable, customary. 8 As Stopnitsky attempts to make clear, however, the times no longer allowed for such niceness. Hence, the English phrase that surfaces here is terribly at odds with the circumstances at hand. To be sure, some critics would argue that since all language fails in the face of trying to recount such ordeals, English would surely fail as well. I am not, however, arguing along these lines but rather suggesting that the impropriety of English at this moment – both

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as an unsolicited response to perplexity and also as a medium strikingly inappropriate to the situation on which it seeks to comment – is what carries weight.

Somebody Who Knew English Boder knew that a phrase of English surfacing at a sensitive moment signaled a telling interruption. Its impropriety called attention to itself. Boder in his role as commentator felt moved to account for it. But through the course of the interviews that took place over a period of some two months, English was generally on the margins. German, Yiddish, Russian, Spanish, French, and Polish took precedence. Yet Boder’s multilingual sweep was so great that English, too, had its day: three of the seventy transcribed interviews were conducted in English. 9 In one remarkable case, English is not only the medium but the subject of the interview. English enabled Nelly Bundy, a native of Austria, to survive Auschwitz. That English could play such a role at all is instructive. Indeed, the Bundy interview marks one of the first points at which English first claims a position within the matrix of the Holocaust. 10 It does this in a way wholly mysterious and elusive. In Bundy’s account, English is both on the scene and not, central to her story while never truly putting in an appearance. Predictably, its rarity will be the source of its lifesaving power. Bundy was married to a Czech Jew who, as a member of the Czech army, was stationed in France. She and her three children traveled to France in 1940 to be close by him. Her husband was deported to Auschwitz and perished there in 1942; the children, in hiding with a nanny in the French countryside, were able to stay out of harm’s way. Bundy herself was eventually arrested, was imprisoned in the French concentration camp of Drancy, and then was deported to Auschwitz in June 1943. The emergence of English on the scene coincides with her arrival at Auschwitz. As Bundy recounts, a German pilot wanted to learn English and, of the three Birkenau candidates who were considered as instructors, Bundy was the one chosen: bundy : Jus . . . when we had arrived, even before we were tatooed [sic], there was a young Nazi. He was quite a boy. He came to ask for somebody who knew English. boder : Ja . . . bundy : We were three, and he took down our names; and he chose me afterwards. And so I was removed from there, and I came to Auschwitz to the Staatsgebaude.

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boder : Yes . . . bundy : . . . to be . . . to be working in the office. 11

Because of her proficiency – which, at points in the interview, she belittles – Bundy was transferred from Birkenau to Auschwitz, from extreme deprivation to decidedly more livable conditions. As it turned out, the German pilot who had requested the lessons and arranged for Bundy’s transfer never showed up: boder : Ja . . . They wanted somebody . . . take English lessons. All right. bundy : Yes. One of the Nazis wanted to take English lessons. boder : Yes . . . bundy : He never did afterwards, but anyway I was working in the office. 12

The capacity to speak English thus saves her life, for she moves (or, in Bundy’s chilling locution, “was removed”) from Birkenau to Auschwitz – a short distance, as Bundy notes, of “a few kilometers.” To be sure, this was a short distance, but the change of location also meant a change of status that brought with it a crucial set of privileges: bundy : . . . personally I had had a relatively good time in Auschwitz, you see working in the office. boder : Yes. I mean, relatively good conditions. bundy : Conditions, yes. I had a . . . when I was in . . . eh . . . the office, I had a bed for myself. We had a . . . a shower room. We had showers twice week. boder : Yes . . . bundy : They were . . . boder : Warm showers? bundy : Warm shower, yes. boder : Yes . . . bundy : There was . . . ah . . . hot water to wash oneself with. boder : Ja . . . bundy : Whereas in Birkenau there was no water at all. When we came home from the . . . “outdoor” /off camp/ work, we were . . . we were dirty and thirsty and everything; and there was no water, neither to drink nor to . . . to wash ourselves in. 13

That English could wield such power in Auschwitz is difficult to imagine, and Boder registers, in his mild way, incomprehension: “Why,” he asks, “did they need English there?”14 Simple as his question seems, he formulates it rigorously. For Boder seeks an institutional explanation: “why did

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they” (presumably the Nazi camp administration) “need English there” – in Auschwitz, a place so distant from where English might be useful. Why, in other words, did camp officials give importance to a language that had so little currency among the population of the camp and hence played no apparent role in its administration? However, Bundy is not gripped with the same degree of bewilderment as Boder and responds on a more mundane level: “Well, he [the boy?] had a pilot /word not clear/ who wanted to take English lessons.” For Bundy, the whim, whatever its motivations, is reason enough. But Boder still can’t fathom that the simple desire to learn English could have such leverage. He again seeks an answer that will show that an administrative need set in motion the chain of events: boder : He didn’t . . . they didn’t need you as a interpreter there? bundy : No, but anyway I was . . . safe, so . . . 15

In moving from “he didn’t” to “they didn’t” (with the pregnant pause between), Boder reconsiders just whose need it is that occasions the search for an English teacher. Learning English in Auschwitz makes sense if Bundy had to serve as an interpreter; perhaps she would be enlisted to translate during interrogation of prisoners who spoke English. But the Nazis apparently had no wish to exploit Bundy’s knowledge of English to help them with the war effort: “No,” replies Bundy, and then adds, “but anyway I was . . . safe, so . . .” Hence Boder’s effort to put the pieces in place falls short. English evidently had no place in running the camp, and its pivotal eruption into Bundy’s story has no clear explanation. Indeed, Boder’s frustrated attempt to pinpoint the role of English in Auschwitz confirms its marginality. Accordingly, Bundy’s story reads almost like a fairy tale: “We were three, and he took down our names; and he chose me afterwards.” We, our, me: chosen out of the magical three, whisked away out of danger to meet the redeeming knight, having arrived to find that he never appears – Bundy’s knowledge of English lets her enter a different order of experience. Although Bundy recounts her ordeal in Auschwitz for some twenty pages before she comes to talk of her English lessons, she evocatively backtracks when she finally does. The summons for an English tutor occurs just “when we had arrived, even before we were tattooed.” The search for a tutor could not have been initiated at a more propitious moment. Had the messenger been sent an hour earlier or later, Bundy would have lost out. To be sure, her knowledge of English does not work its magic immediately: she is initially

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compelled to spend time in Birkenau, under dreadful conditions. But her account makes clear that her deliverance because of her competence in English was set in motion as soon as she set foot in the camp. Hence, her arrival took place under the sign of English, so to speak. More suggestive yet is Bundy’s gauging the summons in relation to when “we were tattooed.” She indeed mentioned several times that tattooing was the“first thing”upon arrival:“The first thing to be done was to be tattooed.” But, as we now come to learn, tattooing wasn’t precisely the “first thing”; determining who was proficient in English preceded it. Bundy thus suggests the urgency of the search by indicating that testing of English competence usurped what usually was first in the camp’s admission routine. The search for English displaces the standard induction rituals. Momentously, the branding ritual particular to Birkenau and Auschwitz gave way in this case to locating the speaker of a marginal tongue. Bundy’s phrasing suggests that it was important for her that the “asking” after those competent in English and taking down the three names took place “even before” the arriving prisoners were tattooed. At this point, the prisoners had not yet been turned into numbers. Indeed, measuring English proficiency was the prisoners’ only experience before they were tattooed, before they were in other words stripped of their names and branded with a number. The initial episode related to English language competence took place in the singular liminal moment when the prisoners resided in Auschwitz but still retained their names. It is as if, standing at the threshold of the camp, the search for English, propelled by some unknown desire to learn the language, had to occur before Auschwitz could completely, and irrevocably, absorb them. Bundy’s association of language and tattoo bears further attention. We recall that Primo Levi linked his indelible tattoo with the idea of a language (in his case, a coarse German) emanating from Auschwitz. Bundy also speaks at length about her tattoo. She dwells particularly on the details of its postwar removal, showing Boder her scar, describing the operation by which she had the tattoo removed, and in response to Boder’s question if many chose to have such an operation, replying,“No, almost none of them.” More than most, Bundy implies that the tattoo stigmatized her rather than, as in Levi’s case, those who did the tattooing. Indeed, the fact that the tattoo continues to stigmatize even after it has been removed becomes clear at the conclusion of the interview, when Boder asks Bundy what she would wish for that would make life again tolerable. Bundy lists several things, then, in Boder’s words, “glancing at a horrible scar on her left arm produced by most clumsy surgery for the removal of her tatoo, she added, ‘I want some

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jewelry.’ ” She wanted it not so much for ornament as for concealment; “some jewelry” would cover over what can’t be kept hidden. It may be this shameful awareness of the tattoo and its residual scar that accounts for Bundy’s particular phrase:“even before we were tattooed” might demarcate a time before the experience that has left her damaged and scarred. In other words, Bundy being sought for her English prowess “even before” – perhaps especially before – the disgrace that the tattoo symbolized meant that English, too, was shielded from such contamination. And accordingly, the English uncontaminated by the ordeal of Birkenau contains the power to extricate Bundy from its lethal conditions. 16 That Bundy never instructs the pilot in the English lessons for which she was “removed” from the perilous conditions of Birkenau deepens the enigma. Something is left incomplete. Were she to have given English lessons, she would also have found out why exactly her student had gone to such trouble. But since he “never did” show up, she (and we) are left in the dark. How can English be so important in the currency of the concentration camp that the desire to learn it can be important enough to alter the camp’s usual routine? The aborted lessons imbue English with mystery, leaving unexplained why it of all languages should have been the object of such desire and yet been spurned so casually and, most profoundly, why should it have saved a life. The power to alter routine combines with the mystery as to what gave it such power. The mystery of English carries over into the interview itself. Why did Boder (or Bundy, or both) choose English rather than German (the language Boder employs most often) as the language of the interview? Bundy was, after all, Austrian by birth. Perhaps the choice of English implies a rejection of German, a tacit agreement that the language of the persecutor, unless necessity demands it, should be foregone. Yet the question regarding English is more pressing because, while Bundy clearly has facility, there are points where she displays and – more importantly, remarks on – her incompetence in English. Searching for the proper words to describe the primitive sleeping arrangements in Birkenau, for example, she stumbles: “They were . . . they were three . . . three – I don’t know. My English is not good enough for that.” The English that was good enough to have her chosen, removed, and ultimately saved is not good enough to describe the tiers of platforms that served as bunks for the prisoners in Birkenau. The tension between her competence in the camp and her (at least professed) incompetence outside it quietly punctuates the interview.

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Tellingly, Boder does not note here, as he does in his preface to the interview in English with Bella Zgnelek, that “the interviewee proudly insisted on speaking English.”17 Aware that Zgnelek is only twenty-two years old, Boder appears to share her pride in her relative mastery of English: “Considering that she learned it only in school,” Boder explains, “before her imprisonment in a concentration camp, which lasted for several years, she was doing indeed very well.” Here Boder places English in a context – where it was learned, for how long, at what age. He even accounts for what might have helped Zgnelek refine her skills further: “Of course, her present job with the JDC [Joint Distribution Committee], an American organization, must have given her ample opportunity for improvement.” Such opportunity should not, however, lead those who are listening to assume that her English will be perfect. And strikingly, Zgnelek, wishing to convey her feelings at the end of interview with particular eloquence, leaves off with English and switches to Polish. 18 Yet in a certain sense, the abandoning of English reinforces Boder’s initial appreciation of Zgnelek’s choice to conduct the interview in her newly adapted tongue. Choosing English after what Zgnelek endured affirms life in the present; switching briefly to Polish to convey her bitterness over what she has lost is a marker of the past. In Bundy’s case, English is chosen without fanfare. It is as if the mystery of English that she reports on as so crucial to her own survival silently moves Bundy and Boder to opt for English in the interview as well. To be sure, they never refer to this link between the role of English in the camp and its role in the interview. Nevertheless, by conducting the interview in English, Boder and Bundy nevertheless pay tribute to the medium that enigmatically saved Bundy’s life. In Boder’s massive corpus, this is the only occasion where English has the power to determine life and death. But that English should, even once, play such a role is surprising, in that it reverses the usual hierarchy of languages. That English should have its day in the very epicenter of the events is that much more surprising. On some level, the peripheral status of English accounts for its leverage here. Bundy’s life becomes valuable because she possesses such a rare skill; few knew English, we sense, because English was generally not worth knowing. In Bundy’s story, English rises to the surface, rescues her, and then, like a modest hero, retreats into the background. When we look at the role of English in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, we will once more see English play such a role in Auschwitz-Birkenau. But in that case English will work its magic

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again and again, ransoming a life not in one camp but several. In Maus, furthermore, the magic of English will not be hidden from view; we will see exactly how, with whom, and for what reasons English wields its leverage. Finally, as in Bundy’s self-conscious tale, in Maus the story of the power of English will be told in an English thick with error. Hence, the tension between the competent English that saves versus the incompetent English that recounts the events will return. At that point, Vladek Spiegelman’s story in Maus will intertwine with Bundy’s, each illuminating the other.

Awkward as They May Sound Boder renders all of the interviews that he transcribed into English, believing that a monolingual audience was all that could be hoped for in America of his day. Above all, the quest for transparency dictates how to present the material. But having submitted to this necessity, Boder reimports opacity back into his interviews by way of “verbatim translations” – translations that purposefully introduce language that he calls “awkward” into the translated English texts. Boder made clear that he was deliberately keeping the English ungrammatical. He was also aware that he would need to justify retaining this awkwardness. He argues the propriety of this strategy in his correspondence with the Jewish Publication Society, prospective publishers of the book version of Topical Autobiographies: The manuscript has been read by a number of non-Jewish readers from the English Departments of the Illinois Institute of Technology and of the University of Chicago and the consensus of opinion is that the original recording should not be altered and that my verbatim translations, awkward as they may sound, greatly enhance the effect of the material – in this respect they differ apparently with the viewpoint of Mr. [Maurice] Samuel, who has so greatly Anglo-Saxonized the beautiful writings of Perez [I. L. Peretz]. 19

Boder knows what he is up against. His wish to keep the English awkward went against prevailing standards when dealing with Jewish literature. But Boder also knew that he was dealing here with a different order of experience and that the standards, unlike those of literature, were not beauty or eloquence. One had to turn to other criteria besides beauty. In truth, Boder was not proposing a text teeming with mistakes and distortions. Truly fractured English in Holocaust writing would surface

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only decades later in works by Cynthia Ozick and Art Spiegelman. In comparison with these, Boder’s verbatim translations are quite mild. But Boder believed that misshapen language was crucial to the message the dps had tried to convey. Awkward English, translation though it may be, came closer to reproducing the “evidence of trauma” that shaped language in the concentration camps. To his mind, moreover, there was no conflict between being true to the traumatic dimensions of the event and representing it to a reader. He was convinced that the awkward-sounding English would enhance the rhetorical effect. Indeed, he drew on the opinion of the most objective readers he could think of – non-Jewish English professors – to back up his own intuitions. Such support, however, was evidently not persuasive. Despite Boder’s diplomatic correspondence, his intransigence on the English-language issue may have been one of the reasons why the Jewish Publication Society decided not to publish the book. When he eventually brought out the book with University of Illinois Press, the Yiddishisms, as Boder refers to them, remained. Boder, then, tries to steer a middle course, submitting to the necessity of English translation while simultaneously incorporating into the English a “peculiar verbal structure.” He makes English read as if it was not originally English – which it wasn’t. He thus makes the English go beyond itself and reflect the languages that it supplants. Having translated everything into English, the original language, at least in principle, continues to shape (or distort) the English that replaces it. Only at one point does Boder resist the imperative to translate. Significantly, this concerns a word emanating not from the interviews but from Boder’s own Hebrew addition: “I am tempted,” writes Boder to his friends Francis and Maggie Coughlin in 1957, “to enclose the four pages of the addenda to volume XVI. The three kriptic [sic] letters at the end are the Hebrew word Khazak meaning ‘be strong’ and they are imprinted at the end of each book of the Torah.”20 It is not clear if Boder sent the Coughlins the addenda or, for that matter, why he might have hesitated to do so. But he did conclude the three-thousand-plus pages of Topical Autobiographies with the “three kriptic letters” – cryptic because they are written not only in a language but in a script different than that of English. Why did Boder here import the foreignness that elsewhere he took so much trouble to weed out? Perhaps he could run the risk of alienating the reader because khazak in the Hebrew appears inconspicuously only on the final page of an immense text. Yet Boder also deals here with a different order of foreignness. It is not the foreign language testimony

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that he retrieves; khazak derives from a source other than that of a dp. He rather adds a Hebrew word that itself stands outside of the languages that he used for the interviews. It is as foreign to most of the interview languages as it is to English. The addition of khazak, moreover, does not attempt to communicate new information. By concluding Topical Autobiographies with the word khazak, Boder means to clarify the status of the project. Although presented as the work of an academic psychologist, Boder signs it, as it were, with the signature of Torah. At least for those conversant with Hebrew and the rituals of Jewish life, its concluding word transforms Topical Autobiographies from simply an academic work to a work of liturgy.

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chapter 2

An Entirely Different Culture English as Translation in John Hersey’s The Wall

Engaged in a heroic effort to salvage memory through an acute sensitivity to language and languages, Boder was a scholar-clinician writing mainly for colleagues. 1 In contrast, John Hersey’s The Wall, first published in 1950, was a best-selling novel, using conventions of the family saga, among others, to chronicle the annihilation of Polish Jewry. 2 Yet for Hersey, too, multilingual issues and the status of English play a pivotal role. Hersey had already by the late 1940s made a name for himself as a novelist and journalist. Born in China to parents who were Christian missionaries, Hersey spent his first eleven years there. His relation to American letters, suggests Werner Sollors, thus has similarities to that of an immigrant’s. 3 Yet from early on he pursued a career as a writer. He was a correspondent for Time and Life; received a Pulitzer Prize for his novel, A Bell for Adano; and, in 1946, published a long essay, “Hiroshima,” based on interviews with six survivors of the atomic bombing of the city. The essay appeared as an entire issue of the New Yorker, was widely excerpted and discussed in editorial pages, broadcast on radio, and even distributed at no charge to Book-ofthe-Month Club subscribers. It was published as a book simultaneously in England and the United States at the end of 1946 and later included in Hersey’s collection, Here to Stay (1963). Chronicling Japan’s devastation intensified Hersey’s resolve to address the fate of the Jews in the Holocaust. 4 Based in Moscow at the end of the war, Hersey had in the spring of 1945 visited several concentration camp sites and the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto (which he later referred to as “a Sahara of downcast bricks”). 5 Having decided to write a book on the ghetto, Hersey was eager to proceed but nonetheless daunted by the question of languages: “Soon I found that there was a tremendous amount of material about Warsaw and other ghettos written in Polish and Yiddish . . . all sorts of testimony. None of this had been published in English, and it appeared that little of it would be.”6

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Hersey’s sizing up how to approach the task before him was thus allied with his realization that English was – and would likely remain – a language foreign to the events.

Intensely Moving English Faced with the difficulty of obtaining material in English, Hersey took some unusual steps. First, he hired two researchers – Lucy Dawidowicz, who would later become a noted historian, and Marc Nowogrodski, a Polish Jewish survivor – who, in addition to their skill in dealing with historical materials, translated Yiddish and Polish into English. 7 But this step was only the beginning. Hersey hit upon the idea of having the translators dictate their translations into a wire recorder – the same kind of machine that Boder used to record the testimony of the dps. For Hersey, however, the wire recordings were not meant to result in verbatim translations of the original languages; it was not exact reproduction that he was after. The technique rather enabled English to come into its own. This is how Hersey recollected the process a few years later: In the end we stumbled on a wire-recorder, and found that both the translators were so deftly bi-lingual that they could read directly from the foreign text onto the machine in rapid – and, I can tell you, intensely moving – English. 8

It is because the translators were between linguistic worlds – are so “deftly bi-lingual” – that such a project could be carried out. But, as Hersey emphasizes, it was also the effect of their reading, of their dramatization of the texts, which gave the project its greatest benefit. The dramatization renders the “foreign text” into a rapid English, an English that, as Hersey explains, goes a long way toward telling the story that he himself wants to: For weeks, for months on end, I heard those two people tell me about the ghetto. And because they skipped, and summarized, and retold, and dropped in interjections, what they told me was filtered away from the documents. They were the storytellers. It cost me very little in the way of fantasy to seem to experience the astounding story they passed on. 9

For Hersey, documents are inert, unyielding. The English in which the translators read overcomes the inertia of the document. Strikingly, the reading acts, in Hersey’s evocative word, as a “filter,” a device that takes away whatever it is in the document that blocks apprehension. Hence, translation

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into English makes the events truly accessible. Translation is not only the rendering of something from one language into another (if it is ever only that), translation is also dramatization, the capacity to imagine, the ability to compose a narrative. Rather than functioning as a poor substitute for an another language, English serves as a necessary mediating step: Why was this technique fortunate? When it came time for me to absorb the material, I did not see it as documentary matter, which I would have retained by visual memories; instead, I heard it as felt experience. 10

In a formulation reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s, Hersey positions himself as one who receives a story steeped in experience. To be sure, Hersey always maintains a sense of what he is doing as tertiary, as being twice removed. But what began as a problem of access becomes a “fortunate” (and crucial) step to storytelling. Had there been material in English, one gets the sense that Hersey would have been less able (and hence less likely) to make a novel from it.

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The Task of the Translator It comes as something of a surprise, then, when the fictional editor of The Wall laments the problems posed by translation into English. Their [the translators’] task was very difficult: they had to try to convey in English the life of Eastern European Jews without falling into the colloquialisms, word orders, and rhythms which, as taken over and modified by the American Jewish community, have become part of an entirely different culture: the connotations would have been misleading. 11

This cautionary reflection comes at the conclusion of the editor’s prologue with which Hersey opens the novel. Modeled on the format of Emmanuel Ringelblum’s wartime log, The Wall is ostensibly a collection of notes discovered beneath the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto soon after the war ends. 12 The prologue chronicles the discovery and editing of the notes, including their translation into various languages and the transfer of the manuscript to various postwar archives. Along with the caution expressed, the prologue also attests to a positive dimension of translation into English. Indeed, the English edition of the notes will be the first edition published. Both the original Yiddish and an earlier Polish translation were unattractive to publish “because of their wordage and because they are, in their raw state, rather chaotic.”13 Slimmed

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down and shaped up, the English edition has the honor of bringing Noah Levinson’s notes to the public. This progression does not mirror the fate of Ringelblum’s. As we have seen, very little was available in English in the late 1940s. It would be only in 1956 that a segment of Ringelblum’s notes appeared in English and 1958 before an abridged book-length translation was published. But in Hersey’s reworking, English is the language in which the notes can be ordered and thus read. Hersey, moreover, had clearly not lost sight of the significant role played by his translators; the fictionalized translators who faced such a difficult task nearly match those who labored so “deftly” on his behalf. Mendel Norbermann and Mrs. L. Danziger, the Levinson archive translators have the same initials as Nowogrodski and Dawidowicz, lost relatives in the ghetto as did the actual translators, and thus have a special intimacy with the subject. Hersey plainly wanted the echo to be heard. Yet he distinguishes the fictional translators from his own by representing the task of translation as a problem. Writing in English about an event in which Yiddish-speaking Jews play the central role, Hersey was clearly tempted to make his English sound Jewish. This would have authenticated the voices, rendering them European. But Hersey was also aware that doing so would not so much authenticate as “mislead.” Those Yiddishized voices, bred in America, would not reflect the voices of the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto. They could, however, lead some readers to think that that is what they were hearing. For this reason, Hersey resisted the temptation and virtually excluded dialect from the novel. Hersey didn’t resist in his first story on the Holocaust, “A Short Wait.” Published in 1947, some three years before The Wall, the story recounts a postwar encounter in New York between a survivor and her American (or Americanized) relatives. The story begins with a mild twisting of English, a strategy meant to emphasize the foreignness of the survivor and the English she tries to “affect”: When Luba finally managed to board a cab, she pronounced for the driver the words she had rehearsed several times:“Park Avenue, five hundred and sixty-one.” The driver started up his taxi without hesitation, and Luba was pleased, for it was one thing to affect English in Prague and another to be able to have it understood in New York. 14

English here, too, presents a problem, though one that comes from the other, Europe-to-America, direction. Can the English that was learned on one continent actually prove effective on another? It can, and the story

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thus begins by chronicling the successful journey of English from Europe to America – from rehearsal, as it were, to understanding. But the problem of English betrays a deeper problem, implying the gulf between the Jews of Europe and those of America. The alienation between the two communities turns out to be the central issue in the story. Luba sent a letter to America during the war appealing for help but never received an answer. She interprets the silence to mean that her relatives in America did not care what was happening to her and, more generally, that American Jewry had no time to give to the tragic fate of their brethren in Europe. Hence, even when Luba speaks English upon her arrival, she still speaks it as a European, indicating her status as a stranger in a strange, and estranging, land. When, with The Wall, Hersey’s narration moves from America to Europe, from postwar reckoning to wartime perplexity, immigrant English will no longer work. Yet abstaining from dialect in The Wall was not enough. Hersey therefore uses the editor’s prologue to reflect on the process of writing in English and transforms what had been in actuality a fortunate event into a difficult task. Why would Hersey be moved to preface his novel with these reflections on the “task” of translation? Construing translation in the novel as difficult helps preserve the distance between the novel that he writes and the events it describes. Without maintaining such a distance, without writing in an English that resists the strategies of dialect,“the connotations,” as his editor says, “would have been misleading.” So much part and parcel of American life, English threatens to mislead, to give false impressions, to take the experience that it knows best and universalize it, not revealing but obscuring what actually happened. 15 At the outset of his six-hundred-page novel, Hersey’s remarks suggest that setting and medium are painfully mismatched, that English itself – the English on which Hersey himself depends – is a source of great anxiety. Having fashioned the novel by means of translation, Hersey nevertheless wants the reader to know the problems that English – translation or original – necessarily engender.

The Jewish Police, or Multilingual Crossings Once begun, however, The Wall endeavors to reconstruct life in the ghetto in meticulous detail. The reconstruction includes many ghetto institutions that were created to replace services the Polish government no longer provided. Strikingly, Hersey dramatizes the essential role of languages in the

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novel in connection with one of the most controversial of these institutions – the Jewish police. Because the Judenrat and, to an even greater degree, the Jewish police were forced to carry out the will of the enemy, both were considered suspect. While the Judenrat worked mainly behind closed doors, the police often acted in full view of the ghetto population and, in some circumstances, resorted to physical force to achieve their goals. Eventually, they even worked together with the enemy to round up the victims slated for deportation to concentration camps and killing centers. Members of the Jewish police justified their role by arguing that they limited the violence and, if they refused to participate, “the number of victims would [have been] much higher.”16 But most ghetto dwellers thought that the police performed these horrible [39], (6) actions to gain exemption from deportation or to receive privileges. As one historian summarizes, “It is common knowledge that no member of the Judenrat and no Jewish policeman in any ghetto ever had the confidence Lines: 164 to 1 of the population. Leading members of both the Judenrat and the police ——— were assimilated or converted Jews who in pre-war days had separated from * 21.20001pt their people. With no conception of Jewish problems or of Jewish strivings, ——— 17 Normal Page most of them acted out of ignorance as well as selfishness.” Hersey shows not only the ignorance and selfishness of these tragically PgEnds: TEX compliant institutions, but also the hatred aroused toward them. When armed resistance first comes on the scene in The Wall, it begins with the [39], (6) assassination of leaders of the Judenrat and of the Jewish police. Nonetheless, Hersey consigns one of the novel’s heroes, Dolek Berson, to periods of service with both the Jewish police and the Judenrat. To be sure, Berson puts on the garb mainly to elucidate the problems with these institutions. From the beginning, he recognizes that the power he wields as a member of the police comes at an exorbitant price. But that recognition is not enough to get him to resign. Such a level of understanding arrives only by way of a multilingual scene. Berson is stationed at one of the crossing points in and out of the ghetto when a group of Jews begins to walk past. He then addresses them in the rather harsh tone of Yiddish that had become his habit while on duty: — Stop here for inspection, please! A short man at the head of the group turned toward Berson, and Berson recognized the miserable gnarl that serves Fischel Schpunt for a face. Schpunt, in German:

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— I beg your pardon, I am meshummed – a convert. I don’t speak Yiddish. A titter could be heard in the group. Berson says he thought he remembered having heard Schpunt speak Yiddish but realized he might be mistaken, so he said in German: — Inspection here before the gate. Schpunt, politely, speaking this time in Polish: — Excuse me, I was born and raised right here in Warsaw – Ceglana Street – all my life. My German is rusty. Excuse me. Dolok [Berson] heard open laughter in the group of men who had been following Schpunt, and who had now fallen back in an audiencelike semicircle. Berson blushed and said sharply in Polish: — Your documents. Schpunt began fumbling hurriedly and humbly in his pockets. He asked in German: — Do you mean my work card? Or my ration card? Or my Judenrat pass? 18

Fed up, Berson sends them on their way. But the multilingual gag (Schpunt serves regularly as the character who perpetrates such jests) has a more lasting effect on Berson himself. For he immediately leaves his post and runs to the Judenrat, where he throws “his [police] insignia” on the desk and resigns from the force. Later in The Wall, when we see the kind of terrible compromises that the Jewish police are compelled to make, we understand that Berson’s resignation was momentous. Indeed, his alter ego in the novel, Stephan Mazur, remains in the force and eventually, in order to save his wife and himself, feels justified in rounding up Jews for the deportation center (including, as it turns out, Berson’s wife). Berson’s resignation early on spared him from pursuing a similar course. Why is it that Hersey casts Berson’s epiphany through a play of languages? Language here is closely aligned with identity – the scene is one of “inspection,” the demand is made for “documents,” the case is complicated by the reference to “conversion.” But in spite of Berson’s facility – he conducts the interrogation ably in three languages – he cannot get language to perform the policing task that he would like; confirmation of identity remains out of his grasp. Moreover, the kaleidoscopic swirl of languages is meant to ridicule Berson. He can order and demand all he wants, but he cannot control the language that responds to his commands. Hence, the incessant movement of languages suggests that language cannot be policed. Indeed, the inability to do so brings home the folly of policing per se.

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To be sure, English is not directly at issue here; the languages that trip Berson up and have him stumble (or run!) toward insight are those of the victim, persecutor, and Polish bystander, not the outsider. But that anxieties around languages become the medium through which The Wall narrates such a crucial moment – arguably the crucial moment in the novel – suggests a more general anxiety about locating the proper language of narration. And so the failure of multiple languages to establish identity points back to the specific problem of using English. That this crucial episode revolves around satirizing languages in their effort to communicate salient information hints at the potentially ridiculous position of English in trying to, in the words of the prologue, convey “an entirely different culture.”19

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Schpunt, or Multilingual Conversions Hersey usually glosses foreign words. But names generally remain without a gloss and thus are one of the elements that do not submit to translation. Fischel Schpunt, the clownish antagonist in the border crossing episode, is a case in point: His name is Yiddish for “bung,” a stopper, something that plugs up the opening of a barrel or cask. Schpunt is hence the one who keeps things from pouring out of the container, the instrument for keeping the contents in, or letting them flow out. In the broader perspective of the novel, he is able to keep a check on the immense pressures generated as a result of the ghetto persecutions. As in the case of mocking of Berson’s policing efforts, Hersey typically makes Schpunt accomplish this task by provoking laughter, which in this scene is directed at Berson. But Schpunt’s masquerade as a convert elicits a milder laughter as well, for he, among Hersey’s characters, is least ambivalent about his Jewish identity. As such, he is an unlikely candidate for conversion. This repartee associated with conversion can be compared to its role in the ghetto more generally. Least attached to the Jewish community, converts were most likely to receive positions of power or special privileges. Conversion within the ghetto, moreover, served as a way to gain such privileges. It thereby was taken as a flagrant symptom of the Polonization of the ghetto about which Hillel Zeitlin and Emmanuel Ringelblum, among others, write with such bitterness. Hersey incorporates conversion but tones down its negative connotations. The Wall’s main example of Jewish converts to Christianity, Jan Jablonski and his son, Wladislav, resign themselves to incarceration in

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the ghetto, even though they have no ties to the Jewish community or to Judaism itself. Their relation to the Jewish community is not so much opportunistic as it is tragic. Moreover, Jablonski’s prewar disaffection with Judaism is of a piece with that of the novel’s heroes, Berson and Levinson, both of whom, hailing from religious families, break with them. In their case, the ghetto compels a return to Jewish life. In the Jablonskis, where conversion made the break more absolute, the ghetto does not effect such a return. Significantly, Hersey marks the distance that separates the Jablonskis from the Jewish community by reference to the inaccessibility of a mother tongue: the father remarks that his son “has been brought up Polish in every way. He cannot speak a word of Yiddish.”20 Lacking the language of their native element emphasizes how isolated they are. Inability to speak the language of the Jews thus measures the convert’s distance from the community. But the passage above illustrating Berson’s epiphany complicates the convert’s linguistic position. The only nonEnglish word appearing in the passage is the Yiddish word “meshummed,” which Hersey (or his character) translates as “convert.” Hersey thus begins the series of multilingual pranks by having Schpunt use a Yiddish word to account for why he can’t “speak Yiddish,” which clearly contradicts his stated ignorance. On top of this, Schpunt, having converted from being a Jew (a meshummed is an apostate), could well have spoken Yiddish. His leaving the faith would not have had any effect on his ability to speak his native language, no more than changing the citizenship would cause one’s mother tongue to vanish. Though Schpunt’s gag invokes religious boundaries as demarcations for who speaks what languages, Yiddish would in this case have crossed the boundary between Jew and non-Jew. Schpunt hence reasons cogently (certain groups speak certain languages) but absurdly (leaving a group does not automatically nullify the capacity to speak a language). Hersey’s own translation of the passage’s single non-English word further complicates these multilingual entanglements. As mentioned above, the more precise translation for “meshummed” is apostate – one who has left the Jewish faith. Hersey employs “meshummed” this way earlier in the novel when Levinson first refers to Jablonski: “this man was a meshummed, a convert,” and notes that “Jan Jablonski, ne Isaac Zeligstein, had become converted to Catholicism in 1921.”21 The connotation of apostasy in this initial reference is clear but in the border-crossing episode is less so. By using “convert,” the more general term for moving from one faith to another, Hersey leaves the reader unsure how exactly to negotiate the passage: Is

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Schpunt speaking absurdly, offering a nonreason for his inability to speak Yiddish? Or is “convert” here meant to imply that Schpunt is a convert not from but to Judaism – and hence, more plausibly, would not have facility in Yiddish? Did Hersey, in other words, by choosing meshummed instead of ger – the Yiddish word that refers to a convert to Judaism – make an error himself (replicating perhaps both Schpunt, comically, and Berson, satirically) in negotiating these multilingual intrigues?

Leather Boxes and the Problem of English A stopper that contains what could dangerously spill out, Schpunt is associated with one of many containers with which Hersey fills The Wall. Indeed, the wall enclosing the ghetto is the dominant symbol of a container: “In hard fact, there was nothing left of the ghetto except the encompassing wall.” In Hersey’s vision (but not in the hard fact of history) the “encompassing wall” remains as testimony to what the Jews of Warsaw endured. Hersey joins this concrete dimension to an artistic one. In addition to forming the barrier between the inside and outside of the ghetto, the wall also symbolizes fabrication. As the Jews of Warsaw unwittingly take part in constructing the ghetto wall, Hersey constructs (in this case, quite deliberately) the novel bearing the name. Indeed, in the opening section of the novel, while Warsaw’s Jews still live freely but with the ongoing rumor of being compelled to live in a ghetto, Hersey describes the act of constructing the wall. Many of the novel’s key figures are among the bricklayers; several pivotal scenes relate directly or indirectly to the wall’s erection. The direct link between bricklaying and writing comes by way of the character Mordechai Apt, who is admonished by his father: “You are a writer, not a . . . not a hodcarrier!”. 22 As it turns out, Apt is both. The parallel between the ghetto wall and the novel entitled The Wall appears, moreover, in the specific way they are constructed: “The occupation authorities are building this wall as they do everything else – section by section, episode after episode, separately, without apparent sequence. . . . Yet I think we are going to wake up one of these mornings, hear a loud click in the sky, and see all these puzzle-parts fall into place around us.”23 To describe the building process as taking place “episode after episode” sounds more like the unfolding of a novel than it does the stacking of bricks to make a wall. The analogy is hard to miss. The terms that Hersey uses to describe one are meant to evoke the other.

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Indeed, Hersey decided on the diary form to create the literary illusion that entries were “without apparent sequence”: Levinson never had time to go back over what he had written and revise it. In fact, he chose not to . . . “the rule I set myself long ago that I should never destroy anything from this record: the principle value of these jottings for later use will be as a guide to the reactions of the moment.”

“We can be glad of this rule,” continues the editor, “for it gives us an opportunity to see the shifting opinions, the inconsistencies, the resourceful self-delusions of a man in final difficulties.”24 Giving the texture of moment-to-moment existence, adherence to the rule also permits the wall and the novel to share essential structural features. Hersey makes the novel, like the wall, appear chaotic in form but actually methodically planned and carried out. Even on the level of form Hersey was determined to link his commemorative artistic enterprise with the plight of Warsaw’s Jews. Just as they were compelled to erect a encompassing wall, Hersey constructed an artistic replica the structure of which mirrors it. Complementing Hersey’s focus on the wall, the novel highlights other metaphors of containment, wherein boxes and receptacles protect and give meaning to what lies within. The opening paragraph tells of “a search party [that] found the Levinson archive buried in seventeen iron boxes.”25 Out of these strongboxes buried beneath Warsaw’s ruins comes the book we are reading. The book itself is thus linked to the protective dimension of a box. 26 There are many more such images. Early on, Levinson is invited to give a housewarming speech for one of Warsaw’s new families. His point of departure is the concept of a box: “What is a home? Is it just a box to contain furniture and people?”27 He will go on to demonstrate that it is not, that a home is constituted by the atmosphere created by the people who live there. Beginning with the premise that container and contained are two discrete entities, Levinson clarifies how their relationship is necessarily interdependent. This realization finds expression in the next chapter where, during a Nazi raid on a makeshift synagogue, the tefillin Schpunt wears as he prays and dances serves as the emblem of resistance:“In that little leather box,” comments Levinson, “was housed our monotheistic faith”; The words, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one God. And thou shalt bind these words for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. This our religion, which sets us apart, which keeps us erect in the face of no matter what affronts, which even maintains the

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spirits of those who profess to be faithless, our very Jewishness, the whole incredible nightmare we are experiencing now – all this bounced up and down before Schpunt’s eyes and ours. 28

With pointed allusion to the housewarming speech, Hersey invokes a box specially crafted to house the scriptural words articulating the essence of Jewish faith. In this case, the box is made for no other purpose than to hold these words. The sense of interdependence between box and what is kept within, between container and contents, could hardly be greater. Eventually, Levinson conceives of his role under the rubric of this metaphor: “What a receptacle I have become! Because I listen patiently, because I ask penetrating questions in a sympathetic tone of voice, people have begun, not only to trust me, but also to use me as a vessel into which to pour their anxieties and privacies.”29 Imagining himself a vessel for the ghetto dwellers words, Hersey’s archivist also becomes a container. Levinson’s metaphor is the bridge by which the entries in the diary take on the character of contents within a container. Indeed, what the people pour into him constitutes for the most part the notes he sets down. Hersey further refines the relationship between container and contained when, in part 4, two ghetto dwellers who are obliged to cart off the contents of empty apartments find a rosewood box containing a letter composed as a final will and testament. The box symbolizes the family’s children who couldn’t be born; the letter inside the box explains the legacy bound up with it: “I leave this box, representing those [unborn] children; in it I leave the memory of the Farbszmuls. If you be a German who takes this box into your home, you must know that you have taken Jewishness into your home, you have adopted the Farbszmuls, forever and ever.”30 Importantly, this episode occurs almost directly after the ghetto’s emissary, Slonim, has secretly visited Treblinka and sent back a report confirming the unbelievable rumors concerning the mass murder of Jews. The discovery of the rosewood box thus takes place at the dawn of a new, even more, terrible era. At this stage, when the objects of murdered Jews are plundered to enrich Nazi coffers, Hersey fashions the box into an article of perpetual defiance. The evolution is important to note. Even an ordinary box now carries the message of “Jewishness” previously housed in the tefillin; what is inside the box is the meaning of the box itself. Container and contents together bespeak the persistence of Jewishness in the face of all efforts to vanquish it. At the novel’s conclusion, the string of images – strongboxes, home, tefillin, rosewood box – culminate in the “culvert,” the sewers that

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serve as the attempted means of escape from the destroyed ghetto in May 1943. There the intense constriction of space enables an equally intense focus of discussion, where everyone was “talking about one question: What has made our lives worth living?”31 Nervously biding time in the sewers as they await passage to safety, Hersey’s characters, enduring containment of an unprecedented intensity, are elevated by a “heightened sensibility.” Himself the fabricator of a wall, Hersey figuratively participates in the task that the Jews were compelled to participate in literally if unwittingly. From the Nazis’ point of view, the wall was meant to incarcerate; from Hersey’s, it liberates. By including so many other containers that resist the Nazis, Hersey also allows the wall to take on a set of similar associations, the enclosure allowing for the release of what is within. Hersey’s emphasis on the encompassing nature of the wall reverberates in his frequent use of other words featuring the prefix “en” – “encircle,” “encase,” “enclose.” This prefix, coming by way of the Latin into English, has the sense of “to put something into or on.” The prefix thus is emblematic of the institution of the ghetto – a place the Jews were (brutally) put into. The “en” also reveals Hersey’s concern with the relation between what is put in and structure which contains it. One of the containing elements is the English language itself. Posing as a translation, Hersey’s English gives form and shape to experience that borders on what he refers to as the “subhuman.” Strikingly, the etymology of the word “English” invokes the notion of containing and even constricting. English derives from “angle” (hence the Anglo of Anglo-Saxon), the Angles being the specific group of people who settled in the district of Holstein. The name was bestowed upon these people because the district’s shape was that of an angle. This being between or within a confined space has other associations: a bend (as in the shape of a fishing hook, whence comes “to angle,” “to fish”) or to compress or fold. In the final association, a sense of devastating constriction takes over: “angle,” “bend,” “fold” lead to the connotation of “strangle” – apparently the breathless eventuality that ensues when the space within the angle becomes intolerably small or tight. Ultimately, the etymology of “English” (a yet different way of telling its story) has acquired lethal connotations, bearing overtones not so far removed from that of the ghetto itself. If English bears within its own story a hint of intolerable constriction, the ghetto enclosed within the wall serves for Hersey as the decisive emblem of the Holocaust. Indeed, the wall over against the fence – the ghetto over against the concentration camp – marks the kind of Holocaust rep-

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resentation that Hersey chose to chronicle. Hersey wrote, reflecting on his approach to the subject, For a long time, I thought I would write about one of the great concentration camps. Early in 1947, I had extended, intensive conversations, for several days running, with an alumnus of Auschwitz, an iron-hearted man who had clawed his way over the backs of his fellows until he had reached the eminence of camp officialdom, as a hated, but secure, Kapo. A few weeks after those talks, and after having done further reading, I concluded that the people in the concentration camps had been degraded by their experience to a subhuman, animal level; whereas in the ghettos, the people had lived on as families to the very end, and had maintained at least vestiges and symbols of those things we consider civilization – theaters, concerts, readings of poetry, and the rituals of everyday human intercourse. I resolved to try to deal with the ghetto. 32

Hersey’s swing from one setting to the other actually took place over several years. Although he visited Warsaw and Lodz in 1945, visits to concentration camp sites were, he notes, “probably more important in the genesis of [The Wall].” For a time, what he witnessed at the camps loomed as the subject about which he would write. This prospect led to Hersey’s conversations with the camp alumnus. But the encounter seems to have steered him away from viewing the camp as the appropriate subject. Inclined at first to the most dehumanizing venue, Hersey ended up turning back to the ghetto and its humanity. If the camps epitomized total discontinuity with life before the war, the ghetto maintained a vestigial continuity, what Hersey described evocatively as “a kind of mimicry of pre-ghetto urban life.”33 In addition to summarizing his own path to composing The Wall, Hersey’s remarks on his progression from camp to ghetto points to the problem shadowing a recent attempt to theorize Holocaust literature under the rubric of “traumatic realism.” Indeed, Michael Rothberg’s eloquent analysis takes as its departure point the image of barbed wire, “a frequently reproduced and cited ‘piece’ of the camp world.” More specifically, Rothberg wants to show how survivor and scholar Ruth Kluger in her memoir “transforms barbed wire . . . into a tool for prying open the multiplicity of relations within the camps.”34 Yet Hersey’s deliberations reveal an assumption in Rothberg’s study that is never subjected to scrutiny. Rothberg’s subtle analysis aside, his emphasizing barbed wire already presupposes that the Holocaust begins (and, in a way, ends) with the concentration camps. Such an approach filters out the experience of the ghetto, implying

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that whatever took place there, however noteworthy for chronicling the full history of the Holocaust, does not figure in formulating its terms of representation. Indeed, Rothberg’s study, pivoting on two memoirs of Western European writers (written, one might add, in Western European languages), can almost not help but exclude the phenomenon of the ghetto, the institution that was limited to the cities and towns of Eastern European Jewry. The literature that emerged from numerous ghettos and that chronicles the special aspects of life and death within their confines, plays no role for Rothberg in configuring the nature of trauma in relation to the Holocaust. Hersey’s and Rothberg’s contrasting strategies are, moreover, representative of a broader line of contention in approaching Holocaust writing. As Alan Mintz has recently expressed it, “The very notion of the concentration camp as the prototypical site of Holocaust literature is put in question by the constructivist model.”35 Mintz goes on to explain the constructivist model and why focusing on the concentration camp often has unexamined constraints: In its critique of this notion, the constructivist model asserts that, although the world of the camps does indeed occupy the ultimate station on the continuum of horror, what it has to tell us about Jewish behavior during the Holocaust is contingent on and, in a number of crucial respects, less interesting than behavior in other venues. 36

The other main venue that Mintz juxtaposes to the camps is the ghetto. Drawn to write of the camps, Hersey nonetheless opted at an early juncture for the ghetto, intuiting that the wall (in contrast to the barbed wire fence) would be precisely the symbol needed. Having interviewed survivors of concentration camps, he nevertheless set aside those tales as featuring a subhuman form of society, one seemingly outside the ken of the novel. Hersey was of course not shy about rendering the extreme. 37 For the author who had provided an explicit portrait of nuclear devastation to draw back from the camps says a great deal about the camps in terms of representing the extreme. Eventually, Hersey would publish essays based on the interviews he had conducted. Appearing in a 1963 collection, Here to Stay, their belated publication indicates that times had clearly changed enough – both in Hersey’s sensibility as well as his readership – to air what had been previously overwhelming. Yet even here there is a trace of English’s shortcomings: “I met [the interviewee], still in the enclosure of the Klooga Camp, in Tallin,

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Estonia, about a week after the culminating events of this story, and he and a couple of his friends laboriously told me about them with the help of a Polish-English dictionary.”38 Strikingly, the story can’t be told without the accompanying comment on how English both serves and doesn’t as a medium. And it is intriguing to consider that “laboriously” refers not only to the difficult work of describing camp life and conditions but also to the onerous task involved in picking through a dictionary to hit upon the correct word for their ordeal. Hersey’s syntax, moreover, leaves unclear who exactly was helped by the dictionary, the interviewer or the interviewees. What we are left with is the image of a dictionary playing the role of a midwife, the role that eventually Hersey’s distinguished translators took over. Although the on-site interviews have their own story to tell, Hersey’s lasting contribution remains his earlier effort in The Wall to let English serve as a receptacle for holding the contents of a ghetto, even when the tragic events described constantly threaten to spill over.

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chapter 3

What Does He Speak? English as Mastery in Ruth Chatterton’s Homeward Borne

Having newly arrived in America, the survivor protagonist of John Hersey’s story“The Short Wait”was filled with anxiety at the prospect of meeting her American relatives. The rendezvous was presented as a clash between past and present: Will those relatives who were indifferent to her fate during the war be more forthcoming in its aftermath? The story thereby explores the collision of cultures, the gap between the trauma sustained by one community (the European Jews) versus the normality enjoyed by the other (their American counterparts). The anxiety that she experienced also pertained to her command of a foreign tongue: Will her European-rehearsed English enable her to make her way in America? Writ large, Hersey’s story examines more generally whether the resources that the European Jew transports to her new home, including the rehearsed but untested tongue, will build a bridge between one community and the other. But Ruth Chatterton’s Homeward Borne flips the focus, the immigrant not guiding the narrative but instead embodying the strange world that America must confront. In Chatterton’s novel, the character filled with anxiety is the native-born American, unsure of what or whom she will encounter. Strikingly similar scenes give rise to the anxiety. In both cases, the protagonists journey to New York in order to meet for the first time those who eventually will become part of an extended family. But if in Hersey’s story the anxious protagonist worries about her own English, in Chatterton’s she worries over that spoken by an orphaned boy adopted by American parents. The limits that English faces thus become even more pronounced when the Holocaust reaches, as it were, American soil. Homeward Borne, published like Hersey’s The Wall in 1950, serves as an example of postwar fiction where small-town America is compelled to deal with survivors of the war – and with the languages that they do and do not speak. In Chatterton’s tale, a New England woman, Pax Lyttleton, decides to adopt a boy orphaned in



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the Holocaust and, in doing so, tries to respond to its enormous suffering. The novel thus explores why a blue-blooded American would act so eccentrically as to bring into her pastoral surroundings such a child – and, along with him, the specter of the Holocaust itself. Chatterton’s decision to write a survivor’s tale suggests the seriousness with which the Holocaust was taken even at this early postwar juncture. In contrast to Hersey’s sense of obligation to put into words what he as a reporter had seen and heard, Chatterton herself had no special reason to chronicle such a story. Born in New York at the close of the previous century, she had at a young age achieved renown as a stage actress and eventually as a film celebrity. Having written a play earlier in her career, she turned in earnest to writing in the 1950s, publishing four novels before her second career was cut short by a brain tumor in 1961. 1 Homeward Borne was her first novel; this initial effort to master the conventions of the genre perhaps impelled her to make language a central theme in the novel. Dorothy Bilik has discussed Holocaust literature in the context of immigrant issues, particularly contrasting writing about the immigrant-survivor with earlier chronicles of immigration. Language figures as a persistent subtopic, serving as a crucial measure of distinguishing the two periods of immigration. The immigrant novels written in the wake of the Holocaust differ from earlier works, writes Bilik: They focus on the preservation of cultural identity that is implicit in the retention of fragments of Yiddish and Hebrew; they do not chronicle the inevitable loss of language and the acculturation that it prefigures. 2

Earlier to later thus moves from “inevitable loss of language” to “retention of fragments” – from a more or less deliberate erasure of all traces of native tongues to a tentative conservation of something of them. Strikingly, in neither case is a language preserved in toto. The best that can be done is to hold onto fragments, a formulation that, as I will soon suggest, is resonant in the context of Holocaust writing. Both prewar and postwar immigrants shared issues of language dislocation, the ordeal of acquiring the language of a new home and the implications for the continued relevance of previous tongues. But in the case of immigration in the wake of the Holocaust, Bilik does not consider the radical language dislocation of the concentration camps that preceded immigration to America. More specifically, immersion into the lager jargon of the camps was its own form of immigration, coming as it did at the end of a devastating journey from one’s home and imposing upon the

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inmate an unknown language the mastery of which was often the key to survival. The absence of the camps in the literature that she reviews is a feature of American writing on the Holocaust. But its absence from the literature is paralleled by the absence from Bilik’s own assessment of the linguistic legacy of the camps. The lacuna of the legacy thus distorts the way of conceiving the relation between language and immigration. For as Homeward Borne shows, the legacy is not simply holding onto a mother tongue in the face of pressure to relinquish it but rather locating a self in the midst of multiple contending languages. Bilik also connects the movement from inevitable loss to retention of fragments to a shift in focus from child to adult, a claim that Homeward Borne shows to be problematic. According to Bilik, Henry Roth, in Call It Sleep, uses these various parts of his protagonist’s linguistic environment to convey the pattern of language disassociation and acculturation that was central to the immigrant experience of that time. Post-Holocaust immigrant fiction treats the linguistic experience quite differently.

Here the immigrant survivor is depicted as an adult with deeply embedded language habits and an established mother tongue that he seeks to retain rather than relinquish. 3 This shift from child to adult signifies a parallel shift in terms of languages from linguistic limbo to “deeply embedded language habits.” Thus the distinctive feature of postwar immigrants is their command of a tongue – or perhaps, more in line with Bilik’s phrasing, of their being constituted by it. Bilik somewhat waffles between terms of agency (seeks to retain) or of subjection (habits), making it difficult to see how much control an immigrant has over the fate of their native languages. Bilik posits an adult as the postwar norm and places the association of language and children in the background. To be sure, she argues the priority of the adult even as she brings Elie Wiesel and Jerzy Kosinski – two authors whose initial works focus on children – as important writers in this literature. In the case of Homeward Borne, however, we see a child refugee placed in greater linguistic limbo than was his earlier prewar counterpart. Indeed, this child has no language to retain. Committed to a model of stability, Bilik nevertheless attempts to integrate a notion of fragmentation. Hence, she conceives of “fragments” as an artistic strategy, a means to show a “retention” of tradition through a

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disturbance of standard English dialogue. The concept of fragments has to do with the imprint of the mother tongue on the adopted one, with showing the residue of what is left, what is purposely held onto. But having excluded the special linguistic circumstances of the camps – the immigration before the immigration, as it were – from her equation, Bilik’s formulation cannot factor in a more complex model of immigrant languages. This is at least partially connected to her positing the paradigm of the survivor as an adult; the idea of multilingual fragments defining the essence of the immigrant remains locked into an earlier stage of writing about immigrants. Bilik several times refers to the mythic substratum of the Tower of Babel to anchor the connection between language and immigration. But she tellingly uses it for conflicting purposes. On one hand, immigration mirrors Babel by moving from one language to many: “One aspect of Diasporal life frequently depicted in immigrant literature is the linguistic dislocation involved in the loss of mother tongue and the need to learn other tongues. Loss of linguistic unity is prefigured in the biblical myth of the Tower of Babel with its movement from a universal language to a multiplicity of languages.”4 Immigration is itself a kind of replaying of Babel, with the confusion of multiple languages serving as the punishment. On the other hand, immigration invokes the reverse of Babel, moving from many languages to one: “In part the linguistic acculturation is a reverse of the biblical myth of Babel, with the diversity of the immigrants’languages being exchanged for the unity of American speech.”5 To be sure, Bilik’s picture of Americans speaking only one tongue is overstated. Yet this reworking of Babel powerfully sees unity as a cursed condition where the one is the many and the necessity of speaking a single tongue similar to the punishment of speaking a multiplicity. Much of immigrant literature centers on the enormous transformations that the immigrants’ changes of milieu require of and render upon them. By focusing first on the native born and only secondarily on the immigrant himself, Chatterton complicates all issues, including those of language. Strikingly, the heroine recounts her own family history through the prism of language. Specifically, she associates her father’s multilingualism with harboring questionable religious leanings: “He’d studied [ancient religions] in their own languages,” Pax continued. “You see, he was completely familiar with all the Far Eastern languages and their various dialects. I’m afraid Father didn’t live his life in this century.

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He lived it in those thousands of years before our Christian God was ever thought of.”6

For the father, arcane languages give one access to unconventional, heterodox knowledge. Unlike her father, Pax does not have a yearning to become familiar with Far Eastern languages. But the prospect of learning these languages does begin Pax’s education about Jews. Questioning her mentor, Phillip, about them, he informs her “the Semitic languages possess records of great antiquity. In other words, it’s about as far back as you can go.”7 History is thus indebted to Semitic languages for providing a starting point; they serve Pax in a similar capacity. For if Phillip, playing the philologist, takes particular pains to assign Semitic tongues to various peoples – “Arabic, Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic” – the young Pax links “the Semitic languages” specifically with Jews. “Hebrew,” she interrupted. “That’s Jewish, isn’t it?” Identifying the language of Jews leads her to try to identify Jews of the present. The only Jew she has heard about, however, turns out to be a Catholic: Papa Leclerc, the town’s soda jerk, was called “a dirty old Jew” because he was stingy. Having no Jews per se, the town of Mapleton is moved to invent one. But Pax doesn’t stop there; she will not be satisfied until she is given the basis by which to recognize who truly is a Jew: “would I know a Jew if I saw one?” – a question posed in association with classifying ancient tongues and their modern speakers. The issue will not be so much one of seeing as of hearing – of coming to know what languages are (and are not) spoken by Jews who emerge from the Holocaust. This language lesson thus sets in motion a chain of associations tied to Jews and Judaism: the invented Jew, the actual Jew, the European Jew. In Chatterton’s scheme, each is bound to the other. The interest in real Jews culminates in Pax’s tragic romance with Jake Felder, the single Jewish student at the college of which her father served as president. The combat death of Felder leads to a concern with the murder of European Jewry and with what she might do in response to it; her response is to adopt Jan, the Polish Jewish child survivor. Set in motion by her attempt to grasp the mysterious identity of speakers of Hebrew, Pax’s initial meeting with the boy, Jan, both situates and satirizes English: Standing in the doorway, the mouthorgan still in his hand, was the brownhaired boy she had seen in the surgery. For a moment Pax didn’t move. Then she said quietly, “Hello.”

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The child didn’t answer. He stood there looking at her soberly. Mrs. Harris leaned forward and spoke to him in a strange language. Swiftly Pax turned to her. “Doesn’t he speak any English?” “Did you really think he would?” Mrs. Harris laughed gently. 8

Chatterton’s heroine, representing the insularity of rural America, fantasizes that English should be enough, that English is beyond doubt a global tongue. 9 But reckoning with what happened in Europe begins through Pax’s recognition that English is not universally accessible. Even on American soil, English can fail to get through. And while Mrs. Harris’s chiding – “Did you really think he would?” – emphasizes Pax’s naiveté, we later hear that Phillip, the novel’s wise man, harbors the same fantasy regarding the global sweep of English: “You know, Pax, we’ve both been utter damn fools. Neither of us had the sense to realize that the boy wouldn’t speak English.” Even though Phillip impugns himself and Pax as “utter damn fools,” it is by no means clear that anyone in their New England village would have “had the sense” – would have, in other words, been able to conceive of those who, no matter where they may reside, had no facility in English. For the village dwellers, the world speaks English, even within concentration camps. If English is fraught with a sense of naiveté and imperial reach, German carries powerfully divergent associations. For the boy, German is the language of the persecutors – “the hated language.” When Jan hears it spoken, his expression on his face changes to “horror,” and he runs away. Yet in Homeward Borne, German is the one foreign language that Americans know, even know well. 10 It is, for instance, the language that Pax first tries to use to communicate with the boy. And Phillip speaks German fluently. This mastery of German, however, does not make communication easier and thereby minimize the gap between the insular Americans and the boysurvivor to whom they play host. Inversely, the greater the facility with German, the more does it evoke the tongue spoken by the Nazis. 11 Indeed, it is when Phillip gives voice to his fluent German that Jan runs from him. That German circulates easily among Americans cuts two ways. On one level, its presence reinforces the Cold War assumption that America and Germany are allies with common interests. Yet on another level, German evokes the Nazis and their inhumanity. That the speakers of this stigmatized German are benign Americans suggests that the Nazi presence has a hold even among its antagonists. Indeed, Chatterton demonstrates the continued influence of the German Nazis most clearly in Pax’s husband, who brings virulent racism back with him from his tour of duty in Germany.

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This negative portrait of Germany appears to go against the grain of the Cold War representations of a benign Germany that dominate American writing about the Holocaust in the postwar period. 12

A Few Words of Many Languages Horrified by German and unfamiliar with English, Jan, the boy who came of age in a concentration camp, is fluent in no language. According to the social worker, Mrs. Harris, he knows “a few words of many languages – mostly the Slavic ones, I should judge. Yiddish, of course.”13 Chatterton intimates the perverse nature of concentration camp life through the fragmentation of language. Others have made this case. As we recall, David Boder hoped to understand better the legacy of the Holocaust by taking note of the evidence of language: I kept in mind that most of the displaced persons had spent their time of imprisonment in camps among inmates of divergent tongues and dialects. For years they had been deprived of all reading matter (even prayer books), of religious services, of radios, and often of opportunities to talk with others in their own tongue. It is no wonder that their language habits show evidence of trauma. 14

But Boder was here thinking of adults, of those who had already formed “language habits.” These speakers, suffering what Boder referred to as “deculturation,” returned in the postwar period to speaking the language that they had at the war’s beginning. But there were abnormalities that persisted. It is this evidence that Boder was after. Sander Gilman, too, in speaking of the lager jargon as “fragments” and “bits and pieces,” was focused on the adult concentration camp inmate. A special case, however, were the children who came of age in the camps. Lacking parents and the routine of school, they also lacked a tongue of their own. Tellingly, it is the through the example of a young child that Primo Levi demonstrates the particular tragedy of language in the camps: “an extreme case of necessary and failed communication: that of the three-year-old Hurbinek, perhaps born clandestinely in the Lager, whom nobody had taught to speak and who had an intense need to speak, expressed by his entire body.”15 The case is more complex than Levi’s summary might lead one to think. As his expanded discussion in The Reawakening shows, the boy to a certain degree overcame the initial neglect. To be sure, at first he was capable of only “inarticulate sounds.” But even in the course of Levi’s short vignette, the

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boy’s relation to language evolves: he could, we find out, “ ‘say a word.’ . . . It was not, admittedly, always exactly the same word, but it was certainly an articulated word; or better, several slightly different articulated words, experimental variations on a theme, on a root, perhaps on a name.”16 He was not, then, altogether without language. Levi emphasizes the disregard for, the curious and tragic predicament of a child who had no one to nurture him. Once care is forthcoming, however, language is as well. Yet for this child such kind solicitousness arrives too late. For one thing, despite all his effort to make himself understood, his language remains opaque: “Everybody listened to him in silence, anxious to understand, and among us there were speakers of all the languages of Europe; but Hurbinek’s word remained secret.” Levi pictures an ideal audience: attentive, good-willed, and versed in “all the languages.” But such an audience can only bear witness to mystery, to an utterance without meaning. In Levi’s moving chronicle, the child in the camp, warped by privation, invents a language of his own. He never, however, has an opportunity to enter the realm of shared language. Perhaps Benjamin Wilkomirski’s intuitions led him, when choosing how to begin his (fabricated?) story some forty-five years after Chatterton’s, to proceed in a similar direction: “I have no mother tongue, nor a father tongue either. My language has its roots in the Yiddish of my eldest brother, Mordechai, overlaid with the Babel-babble of an assortment of children’s barracks in the Nazis’ death camps in Poland.”17 It is precisely this lack of mastery of any language, and only fragments of many, that defines a child who, according to Wilkomirski, grew up in the camps. Although the “Babel-babble” enabled survival, Wilkomirksi dubs it “gibberish,” a characterization he uses to distinguish the non-language spoken in the camps from actual languages spoken outside them. Hence, this gibberish, as he terms it, had no value except within the camps; whatever was learned could simply be abandoned thereafter: “So it was no great loss,” as Wilkomirski reports, “that I more or less forgot this gibberish which lost its usefulness with the end of the war.” Left in a linguistic vacuum, Wilkomirski eventually develops fluency in several languages. But the lack of a native language and survival on the basis of a composite one had its own postwar consequences: “The languages I learned later on were never mine, at bottom. They were only imitations of other people’s speech.” Able to command much more than fragments and no longer compelled to converse in gibberish, Wilkomirski nevertheless conceives an eternal distance from language, a lack of mastery not in terms of fluency but rather in terms of intimacy and ownership.

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As the social worker in Homeward Borne itemizes the fragments that make up the boy’s linguistic heritage, Chatterton implies a history of Babelbabble: the boy speaks, “A few words of many languages – mostly the Slavic ones, I should judge. Yiddish, of course.” She paused as she saw the consternation on Pax’s face. “These children learn very quickly, Mrs. Lyttleton,” she said. “I shouldn’t worry too much if I were you. He’s already picked up a few words of French – in the Distribution Center, I suppose – and he knows quite a few phrases of German. The poor little devil has probably heard plenty of it, God help him!” Then she smiled. “He speaks quite a lot of Polish.” “Oh, dear!” said Pax. 18

The reference to the child’s special gift for acquiring languages is meant to calm Pax. But the inventory of tongues does the opposite. So even when she learns that he speaks more than a few words of a language, this information provokes Pax’s exclamation revealing her sense of just how foreign is the world that the boy inhabits. Even later when Jan comes to learn enough English to attend school and make friends, he still at crucial moments reverts to the mélange of foreign tongues. An anti-Semitic incident at school, for instance, moves Jan to “burst into sounds [his classmates] didn’t know. Polish, German, Yiddish spilled from his lips. Then, just as suddenly as he had begun, he stopped.”19 When attacked, Jan’s response shows that a multilingual mix still defines who he is. Within the terms of Chatterton’s novel, the capacity to speak many languages can indicate either a cultural surplus (Pax’s father) or a cultural lack (Jan). In both cases, there is a sense of living at the extremes of history as it is known. In the case of her father, his knowledge of arcane languages allows him to dwell in a period before the Common Era. In the case of the boy, his multiple languages are a symptom of the end of that era. The boy’s many languages thus parody the antiquarian’s philologist project, whereby the scholar develops a repertoire of languages in order to reconstruct the past. In contrast, the few words the boy speaks bear witness to a past that has come apart.

Tragic Mastery English as mastery has two facets: one is the sense of achievement, the learning that ends with developing a competence that testifies that one has mastered the language. In this way, mastery refers to a skill. The second

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association of mastery is with domination, with a sense of superiority, triumph, and conquest. The mastery of a language and the skill with which one speaks it serves as an index to power. Both cases have implications for the foreign speaker of English. The first sense of mastery chronicles the stages of progress by which the foreigner acquires the new language; it narrates, in other words, a linguistic Bildungsroman. The second addresses the imperial status of English, both its actual dissemination as well as the fantasies that attend it. Homeward Borne interweaves these two dimensions of mastery. Focusing on the significant fragments of multiple tongues, the novel also chronicles Jan’s progress in learning English, representing first his broken English, eventually his tentative facility, and finally his mastery of it. Strikingly, command of English terms relevant to his own traumatic past marks his attainment of fluency. At one point, Jan asks Pax why her husband, Robert, has remained in Germany even though the war is over: “Why he is in Ger-r-rmany so long time? He is in” – he hesitated, then proceeded very slowly – “con-cen-tr-r-ra-shun camp, no?” Her heart missed a beat. It was the first time he had ever used that word. She wondered where he’d heard it in English. 20

First-time use clearly indicates an achievement. But Pax’s response also suggests that the boy’s accomplishment rests on being able to invoke a word that in English is used so rarely. This puzzlement about “where he’d heard it” intimates, moreover, that terms special to Nazi persecution are, at least to Pax’s mind, still mostly foreign to English. 21 Accordingly, Chatterton’s orthography, writing “concentration” phonetically to convey Jan’s struggle, renders it not quite a normal English word, but rather something malformed. Eventually, however, Jan masters English, an accomplishment marked by his ability to pun. 22 In keeping with the integral role of language in the novel, Jan’s coming to master his new tongue forms a turning point in the plot. Pax’s husband Robert has finally returned from his stay in Germany and has brought back with him a number of souvenirs, including a foot locker containing the bulk of them. Having misplaced something that he thought was secure within, Robert questions the locker’s dependability. Jan uses this as his cue: “Foot locker-r,” said Jan softly. “Do not people ever-r lock foot locker-rs?”23 The play on “locker”-“lock” not only confirms his mastery but also hints at self-destruction. For the unlocked locker has enabled Jan to steal a gun, the weapon as it turns out that Jan uses to shoot

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himself. The theft of the gun from the unlocked foot locker thus makes possible an act of desperation undertaken to prevent his expulsion from Pax’s house and his return to the orphan existence with which the novel began. Instead, he opts for suicide as a way to forestall the unwanted end. At the novel’s conclusion, the boy, having survived the attempt to take his own life, faces a future nearly as uncertain as his past. Both language and action here bespeak control, the attempt to master one’s fate. But the point at which English is mastered is also the moment at which destruction takes over. Chatterton ends by demonstrating a radical suspicion of the language in which she writes her novel about the Holocaust. Intriguingly, her plot pivots around the protagonist’s increasing skill with his new language, only to have his command of it implicated in his failure to fit in. Mastery of English brings not eloquence but rather a sense of despair. At this point, Jan can finally speak the English that others originally (but mistakenly) presumed that he could. Yet when reality catches up with fantasy, when English penetrates the recesses of a survivor’s consciousness, facility does not enable him to participate in the life of the community. It rather moves him to realize his distance from it. In the case of Boder and Hersey, English tried to venture into the domain of the Holocaust, and understandably (if significantly) expressed anxiety about such an enterprise. But on American soil, among the rural splendors of New England, English would seem to have cause to feel at home, to be in its element. It is however nothing of the sort. Writing in the late 1940s, Chatterton in Homeward Borne represents the challenge that the Holocaust poses to American sensibility as a function of the crisis English faces when attempting to assimilate these events. Homeward Borne tests out two possibilities: the first is that there is no problem, simply because everyone speaks English. Hence there is always a shared basis of experience, even between those – New England Protestants and Polish Jews – whose circumstances differ radically. Chatterton entertains, then demolishes this colonialist fantasy of imperial English. This two-part movement is the first step to making room for the unfamiliar (what Phillip refers to as the “monstrous”) events of the Holocaust. The second possibility is for the foreigner himself to acquire a mastery of English. Yet once he obtains mastery he knows how truly different his experience is. For Chatterton, English signifies either the illusion of a completely transparent understanding or the recognition that there is none at all.

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As we have seen, by the end of the 1940s, major efforts were underway to come to terms with the Holocaust. Psychologist Boder had recorded a wealth of testimony and was in the process of transcribing and circulating it: a major university press had published a first sample. Hersey, an increasingly important figure in American culture and letters, had written a huge work detailing both losses and resilience; the novel would become a best seller. And actress Chatterton, turning to the written word, had felt a call to bring the specter of the Holocaust to America. English had already been put to the test. During the war years, English was on the edge of the events; it mainly nurtured a dream of life in the aftermath of the war. Once the war was over, English, like other languages, took to chronicling what had happened. But, as Boder, Hersey, and Chat[61], (12) terton show, to resort to English presented a cluster of problems. Each author makes transparent the struggle that English went through to try to find a foothold. Their strategies also overlap when, against the grain of Lines: 291 to 3 expectation, they place English in the foreground. Yet the more that English is brought into the limelight, the more this prominence draws attention ——— to the uncertain position of English. Nothing dramatizes this uncertainty * 166.40004p ——— more powerfully than for English, as told about in Boder’s sober interview, Normal Page to be able to “remove” a Jewish women from the terrors of Birkenau. In the decades to come, the problems remain. Indeed, as we will see, * PgEnds: PageBr English will be directly taken to task as it attempts to address the Holocaust. But in the years ahead, English-language writing, inspired at least in part by [61], (12) its increasing global prestige, also becomes more ambitious in its efforts to find an uncompromised position from which to speak about the Holocaust and in the name of its victims.

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chapter 4

Please Speak English Babbling in Philip Roth’s “Eli, the Fanatic”

Philip Roth’s 1959 story, “Eli, The Fanatic,” published nearly a decade after Chatterton’s Homeward Borne, also charts the legacy of the Holocaust by way of an immigrant survivor clashing with the insulated culture of Protestant America. But Roth shifts the coordinates in three important ways. First, the setting is not rural New England but suburban New York, not in other words the heartland of America’s origins but the trendy boundary area between city and country living that defined post–Second World War American life. Second, the survivor arrives not alone but in community. And third, Roth makes the clash take place not between Christian and Jew, but between one set of Jews and another. The linguistic fantasies projected by the American Jewish community shift accordingly. The suburban Jews don’t foolishly believe immigrants can speak flawless English; they wrongly believe they cannot. Moreover, although Yiddish is conspicuously on the scene, the Jews of suburbia nevertheless presume it to be a dead language – an assumption nowhere to be found among Chatterton’s New England gentiles. Ultimately, the story, written in English, takes the side of Yiddish, and hence makes English a problem in several ways.

Mysterious Babble The story relates the attempt of the acculturated Jews from the New York suburb of “Woodenton” to expel from the community a group of European Jews who, maintaining traditional codes of dress and behavior, have recently set up a yeshivah. Roth’s antihero, Eli Peck, is a lawyer hired by the community to use legal measures to evict the yeshivah. 1 He endeavors to accomplish this through persuasive legal argument, both through a series

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of meetings with the head of the yeshivah, Leo Tzuref, and by sending him a number of pointed letters. 2 The first meeting sets out the linguistic parameters. Initially, English seems solid enough for both parties – Peck, the American lawyer, and Tzuref, the European immigrant. But soon Eli is (or imagines himself to be) outnumbered, the community of those who speak Yiddish (or, in the narrator’s freighted term, “babble”) far outweighing those who speak English: Some children ran under the open window and their mysterious babble – not mysterious to Tzuref, who smiled – entered the room like a third person. 3

There is ambiguity in the passage whether the babble spoken is “mysterious” or not. Able to move from outside to inside, the language is dubbed mysterious by those for whom it is unfamiliar and incomprehensible. Designated as such by an aggressive narrator, mystery would seem to carry the day. But Roth provides an alternative perspective, one that takes what is mysterious and shows it to be smilingly familiar. At first only appearing on the margins of the story, Yiddish quickly becomes central. Indeed, by referring to Yiddish as an interloping third person, Roth personifies it, attributing human agency to language. He more specifically casts it in the role of a character, indeed in one of the starring roles. 4 For if the story opens with Eli the lawyer facing-off against Tzuref the headmaster, Yiddish quickly joins the fray, contesting from the outset the right of English to set the story’s terms. Yiddish acting as a character erodes what Eli at first takes to be his professional native-born advantage. He attempts to compensate for his weakened position by conjecturing about his adversary’s problem with the English language: “Yes, that’s what residential means.” The dp’s English was perhaps not as good as it seemed at first. Tzuref spoke slowly, but till then Eli had mistaken it for craft – or even wisdom. “Residence means home,” he added. 5

But the reader knows better, aware that Eli has made English a problem even though it is not. Operating on shaky legal ground, Eli hopes that his command of English – especially the English terms associated with place and domicile – will prop up his spurious position. Yet the problem resides

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not in the immigrant’s skill with English but rather in the native’s Orwellian manipulations of it. English becomes an issue when the interlocutors debate whether the yeshivah is a “home,” something permissible to establish and maintain in a “residential area.” Eli speculates that what prevents closure on the issue is semantic, an inability to clarify the terms for “home.” Yet behind the semantic issues lies the unconventional family that resides in the yeshivah: multiple children, uniformly male occupants, and the absence of a wife. In the story’s terms, the Holocaust has bequeathed a grotesque family – absurdly monstrous in size and perversely uniform in gender. In Woodenton’s twisted vision, the Holocaust not only destroyed families, it also created abnormal ones. Eli thus finds it impossible to fathom how the building that houses such a family can constitute a “residence”: “So this [says Tzuref] is my residence.” “But the children?” “It is their residence.” “Seventeen children?” “Eighteen,” Tzuref said. 6

Too large to begin with, the unnatural family grows in size even as they speak. Indeed, the conversation wherein Eli attempts to clarify basic terms – to define and pose limits – ends with an increase in numbers, as if the conversation itself were an act of illicit procreation. It was exactly this kind of monstrous family that zoning ordinances of the 1950s were devised to keep at bay. In general, community groups usually invoked zoning ordinances – first introduced in the 1920s but increasing popular in the 1950s – to protect single-family residences, restrict the intrusion of lower classes, and prevent the erection of multiple-family dwellings. “Regardless of what zoning may be in theory,” wrote one analyst, who attempted to expose the full story behind zoning, “in practice it has become the chief means of protecting and isolating the single family residence.”7 Zoning ordinances were thus established and fortified as the single-family residence was evolving into a premier American value, and they helped to ensure its success. Put forth as a way to achieve the goals of urban planning, zoning actually served as a legal means of discrimination, keeping out those who did not fit the single-family profile. Roth could count on these resonances when he has Eli in urbane legal parlance inform Tzuref, “It’s a matter of zoning.” A tactic of polite discrimination on the American front, the word “zone”

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has a yet more sinister association hailing from the Cold War period: the Gulag. Elana Gomel notes: Originally, the Zone was the legalese for the places in the North [Siberia] where troublemakers were exiled. Eventually the prisoners in the Gulag picked up the expression, calling the camps “the small zone” and the rest of the country “the big zone,” in a mocking inversion of the Soviet-speak. The expression was known in the 1930s but became part of the unofficial vocabulary only in the 1950s. 8

Coming into regular use in the same period that “Eli, the Fanatic” appeared, the Soviet associations of “zoning” eerily parallel the diabolical penal connotations that it takes on in Roth’s story.

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Owning English At a second meeting, Tzuref appears to concede to Eli his mastery of English. Tzuref summarizes his yeshivah partner’s pitiful predicament, enumerating the losses heaped upon “the gentleman,” – whose abnormal behavior obviously represents the trauma of the Holocaust: “But I tell you he has nothing. Nothing. You have that word in English? Nicht? Gornisht?” “Yes, Mr. Tzuref, we have the word.”9

As the native speaker, Eli becomes pegged as the owner of English, representing a community of English speakers: “You have that word in English?” Ostensibly relinquishing to Eli the authority to judge what English has or doesn’t, Tzuref in practice lets English slide into Yiddish; in a extraordinary narrative sleight of hand, “nicht” and “gornisht” become incorporated into the English language. And the twisting of English that enables these Yiddish words to enter – perhaps here, too, like a third person – works in reverse as well. For it is English that, making room for what seemingly does not belong, metamorphoses into Yiddish. Such a transformation signals the movement to a different register, one better able to count the losses suffered by the Jewish community as a whole. To be sure, it’s neither “nothing” nor “nicht” that provokes the ire of Woodenton’s non-Jewish Jews but rather what remains of the gentleman’s European life – the hat, clothing, beard, walk, bearing, and face. But what he doesn’t have also extends to language: Roth makes the gentleman silent as if his language was one of the things – along with wife, baby, and community

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– that was taken away. This muteness contrasts pointedly with the other members of the yeshivah. Unlike Tzuref, he doesn’t give voice to “the dp’s English.” And unlike the children, he doesn’t speak a “mysterious babble.” For the Jews of Woodenton, the gentleman has no language at all; he is, in Hana Wirth-Nesher’s phrase, “the mute Holocaust survivor” and, as such, serves as “a cipher for the unspeakable.” For them, his is truly a “dead language.”10 But a moment of epiphany comes when Eli discovers that the gentleman indeed speaks, that his presumed defining silence is actually projected on him by Woodenton’s Jews. As Tzuref tells Eli, “He shops two, three times a week, he gets to know [Woodenton’s Jews].” “He talks to them?” “He sees them.” “And he can tell which is my wife?” “They shop at the same stores. He says she is beautiful. She has a kind face. A woman capable of love . . . though who can be sure.” “He talks about us, to you?” “You talk about us, to her?”11

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——— The silence so much a part of the gentleman – of the survivor who had lost Normal Page all, including, apparently, the capacity to speak – does not ultimately define * PgEnds: PageBr who he is. Only if viewed through the prism of English does the survivor appear mute. If one relinquishes a hold on English, one finds that he can, [69], (7) and does, speak with the best of them. 12 Strikingly, Eli learns that the gentleman talks by hearing that he tells stories, a fact reported in such a way (“He talks about us, to you? “You talk about us, to her?”) as to emphasize how much the gentleman’s talking mirrors that of the lawyer himself. What is told in English has its mirror in Yiddish and vice-versa. Finally, not unlike the narrator of the story, the gentleman, too, reports on the everyday doings of Woodenton’s Jews. If English is the language of talking to, Yiddish is the language of talking about. There is a Yiddish story unfolding even as (and parallel to) the English one that we read, a story that, narrated by one who has “absolutely nothing,” has beauty and love at its center.

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Counting Hats For Roth’s story, too, there is a Yiddish shadow. Of all that flies in the face of Woodenton’s Jews, one thing upsets them most: the gentleman’s hat. There he was, wearing the hat, that hat which was the very cause of Eli’s mission, the source of Woodenton’s upset. The town’s lights flashed their message once again: “Get the one with the hat.”13

Like Roth’s story, Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish tale, “On Account of a Hat,” deals with a crisis of lost identity. And as its title indicates, in this story, too, a hat is ostensibly the villain – the cause, the source of the conflict in the story. Returning home for Passover, the hero falls asleep while awaiting his train, losing his head covering. Upon waking, he mistakenly grabs and puts on the hat of a Russian official, a sign of importance that garners him innumerable privileges. When he finally learns that he wears not his own but rather the official’s hat, he returns to the station, missing the train and Passover with his wife and family. Published in a cycle of stories written between 1917 and 1925, “On Account of a Hat” remained almost unknown, occupying a marginal position in Sholem Aleichem’s oeuvre. 14 That changed only in 1954, with the publication of Howe and Greenberg’s A Treasury of Yiddish Stories – an anthology it was hoped would bring the literature of European Jews to a new audience in the wake of the decimation of the bulk of Yiddish readers. Translated by Isaac Rosenfeld, “On Account of a Hat” was given a prominent position in the collection – indeed, it is one of three opening stories from the Fathers of Yiddish that introduce the numerous selections of Yiddish prose writing that follow. Judged to be a foundation of Jewish storytelling, the story went on to achieve renown in its adopted tongue. 15 Writing in the late 1950s, just a few years after the anthology’s initial publication, Roth was in a perfect position to harness the effects of the story’s new acclaim. Yet he turns the Yiddish story inside out. To be sure, in both stories the hat in question does not fit in. In the earlier story, the protagonist could not imagine himself wearing the hat of a Russian official; even the pretense of a Jew claiming a distinguished place in general society is too much to bear. In Roth’s version, the hat also makes it impossible for the one who wears it to find a place in society at large. But where in the earlier story wearing the hat meant becoming decidedly less Jewish, in Roth’s, donning the hat transforms Eli into a vicarious member of the

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yeshivah community – into more of Jew than the Woodenton community can endure. Roth thus moves Sholem Aleichem’s crisis of identity fable in the opposite direction. The crisis of identity is not whether one can leave the community but whether, and how, one can enter it. Yet whatever inversions Roth performs, his debt to the earlier story is clear. Behind his own story lies the Yiddish one, freshly adapted, to be sure, but nonetheless serving to define the issues and to provide the props with which they can be addressed. Yiddish tales are hence shadowing Roth’s story inside and out, informing the English and suggesting its limitations. If Roth adapts and rewrites one fable, casting it in American postwar garb, the gentleman tells his own Yiddish story of beauty and kindness within the interstices of the English one. The gentleman thus serves as Roth’s artistic double, a kind of omniscient narrator (yet another version of the third person) who, like Roth himself, construes the everyday affairs of Woodenton’s Jews into a romance. Viewed simply as mute in the context of English, as a passive cipher made to embody the unassimilable features of the unassimilated Jew, the shift to a Yiddish context liberates his voice – a voice that, significantly, “talks about.” When the gentleman is shown to have a voice, a language, and a capacity to create narrative, his muteness thus is understood as a construction created by and within English – a language that has no room for Yiddish and for the stories, beautiful or bleak, that it has to tell.

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Yiddish Rhythms Having arrived within a few years of the end of the war, at least one of Roth’s survivors speaks a surprisingly idiomatic English: “May and it’s like August,” says Tzuref, his mastery of New York’s seasonal patterns mirroring his command of idiomatic ones. 16 Clearly, Roth doesn’t opt for dialect to set his survivors apart from the natives. Indeed, the colloquial English makes it difficult to see Tzuref as a foreigner, as someone who doesn’t belong. He speaks as much as an American as anyone, and his facility suggests why Roth might have changed the original reference to Tzuref as “foreigner” to “dp” in the story’s emended version; foreigners speak with an accent, Tzuref does not. 17 Roth surely was aware that this fluency strained mimetic credibility. Indeed, Roth’s wish to flaunt the imperatives of accent goes hand in hand with the changes to the time the story is set in the successive editions. The earliest published version of the story sets it in 1953 (Tzuref dates

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his “incendiary” notes 5/8/53 and 5/10/53). 18 It is plausible (though not probable) that, some eight years after the war, immigrants could have shed their accents. But Roth’s revised version – the one that forms the basis for every critical reading of the story – moves the date back five years to 1948, heightening the sense that a thick accent would carry the day. 19 Nevertheless, in this version, too, Tzuref, having arrived in America no more than three years before, continues to speak the same flawless English. The speech of Roth’s survivors – there is here not just one – represent every option except for an accent. Tzuref ’s English vies with that of the natives; the children’s babble makes them unintelligible but articulate; and the gentleman is subarticulate. One is either conversant in English or not. There is no middle ground, no being “caught between cultures” – a liminal predicament that, according to Kathryn Hellerstein, epitomizes how Roth uses Yiddish inflection elsewhere. 20 Despite covering a wide spectrum of fluency, the three different kinds of survivors nevertheless include no accented speaker. Tellingly, Roth may have withheld an accent from the yeshivah Jews in order to bestow it on the non-Jewish Jews of Woodenton: “The Jews of Woodenton,”writes Jay Halio,“are real enough. Though they speak English, they talk like Jews; Saul Bellow, for one, picked up the Yiddish rhythms that characterize their speech.”21 To Halio’s mind, Bellow, who in a review of the story referred to the accent of a single Woodenton character, did not go far enough; Halio himself believes the circle of Eli’s associates who speak with an accent is considerably larger. 22 More importantly, Woodenton’s nonJewish Jews speak with Yiddish rhythms – rhythms, in other words, of the language they refer to as dead. 23 The Yiddish language, then, returns from the dead and in so doing works its own revenge. For the community who so much wants to overcome the marks of difference that distinguish the Jews from non-Jews still “talk like Jews.”“Talk” here becomes the inheritance of Jewish Europe that is beyond control, an indelible aspect that assimilation cannot reach. In this assessment, although Yiddish is marked as a dead language, its rhythms continue to live, drawing the Jews of Woodenton closer to their Yiddish-babbling neighbors even as they push them further away.

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Babble Redeemed Late in the story, Roth intensifies the inroads that Yiddish makes into the terrain of English by reconfiguring English as babble. English, in other words, becomes transformed by apparently being made into less of an articulate tongue. The crucial episode takes place at the sartorial denouement of Eli’s crisis of identity. Having exchanged clothes with the gentleman – trading a green up-to-date suit for the gentleman’s dark, sober one – Eli, “draped in black,” pays him a visit. Having gone as far as he thinks he can go – he felt that “he was one person wearing two suits” – what’s left unchanged is language. Indeed, Eli wants his opposite number not only to speak but to do so in English: “ ‘Please . . . please,’ Eli said, but he did not know what to do. ‘Say something, speak English,’ he pleaded.”24 Anxious for English to surface from nowhere, Eli’s pleas nevertheless go unanswered, but they tip the scales. Unable to command a tongue that will link them, Eli sees his own language turn to babble, to an approximation, one might conjecture, of the “mysterious babble” that he heard at the story’s beginning: He was talking to himself, yet how could he stop? Nothing he said made any sense – that alone made his heart swell. Yet somehow babbling on, he might babble something that would make things easier between them. 25

First heard as a disruptive force, a third person that enters from without, babble is here redeemed. Initially designating a language mysterious and incomprehensible, babble now, represented by Roth as a heart-swelling English without any sense, becomes the key to comprehension. Eli can at this point abandon the lawyer’s sense-making English and turn toward the babble that makes the “heart swell” – a language of compassion that can enter the world that the gentleman has lost.

English as the Language of Law It is questionable whether a reformed and recast English ever fully sloughs off its legal diction. To find a way to address the Holocaust, English had to become virtually another language. Roth’s story is clearly about this linguistic metamorphosis. But it is also about the position of law in attempting to formulate a response to the Holocaust, a response in which English plays a major role.

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Another exchange between attorney Peck and headmaster Tzuref shows English to be inextricably linked to the law. Tzuref again appoints Eli the custodian of English in order to emphasize its (and Eli’s) insufficiencies: “You have the word ‘suffer’ in English?” “We have the word suffer. We have the word law too.” “Stop with the law! You have the word suffer. Then try it. It’s a little thing.”26

Opposing suffering (and the connotations of compassion that it implies) to law, the dialogue recalls oppositions that stand at the center of The Merchant of Venice. There, too, in the trial scene where Shylock claims his pound of flesh, law attempts to exact inhuman payment, while the compassion that responds to suffering attempts to mitigate its claims. Shakespeare, following in the footsteps of Christian theology, aligns law with the hard-hearted Jew and mercy with the softhearted Christian. Indeed, the resolution of the trial comes when Portia, symbolizing the merciful Christian, wins the case by making a mockery of the law. Law is shown to serve as a questionable means to an unjust end. In “Eli, the Fanatic,” Roth shows law – epitomized in the figure of Eli, the lawyer – in a similar light. As with Portia’s petition for mercy, Tzuref ’s exhortation, “Stop with the law!” tries to show its limits when dealing with human anguish – the anguish in this case not of a Christian martyr but of a community of Holocaust survivors. Hence, Roth’s layering of this clash between law and suffering based on the prototype of Merchant brings surprising results. The modern Jews, who turn to the law, are associated with Shylock; the yeshivah Jews, who invoke suffering and compassion, parallel Portia and the Christian community. Indeed, Tzuref summarizes his position in a phrase that could easily be intoned by the arch-Christian figures in Merchant: “The heart, Mr. Peck, the heart is the law! God!” Roth uses Yiddish speakers who mime Christian postures to criticize what is commonly taken as the stereotypical Jewish view. The interplay between law and suffering in Roth’s story dovetails with recent reflections on their essential role in representing the Holocaust. Specifically, Shoshana Felman has argued that the opposition between law and suffering is crucial to understanding the Holocaust. For Felman, two works, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, together articulate the central issue: It is not a coincidence if the two works that have forced us to rethink

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the Holocaust were . . . on the one hand, a trial report and, on the other hand, a work of art. We needed trials and trial reports . . . to demarcate a boundary around a suffering that seemed both unending and unbearable. Law is a discipline of limits and of consciousness. We needed limits to be able both to close the case and to enclose it in the past. Law distances the Holocaust. Art brings it closer. We needed art [i.e., the film by Claude Lanzmann, Shoah] – the language of infinity – to mourn the losses and to face up to what in traumatic memory is not closed and cannot be closed. 27

For Felman, the contrast between the two works creates the framework necessary to gauge the appropriate response. In the case of “Eli, the Fanatic,” however, the tensions of art and law exist not in two different works but within one. Roth’s story entwines law and art; the story could not be what it is without both playing a vital role. This duality, moreover, devolves upon language. English is both the language of law and the language of art, its dual status showing the limits of each. Felman examines how the Eichmann trial and Arendt’s response to it produced a watershed in considering the Holocaust. Her focus, in other words, is on the trial and its aftermath. Yet “Eli, the Fanatic,” written at the end of the 1950s, comes at a point just before law and the courtroom become – in the trial of Eichmann and those trials of Nazi war criminals that follow in its wake – crucial vehicles for arbitrating the memory of the Holocaust. Hence, the function of law in “Eli, the Fanatic” differs notably. The law is not used to prosecute those who committed crimes but to put the victims of the Holocaust out of sight. In order to do this, the law conscripts the apparently neutral term of “zoning.” But the term is nonetheless used to try to evict the dps. This use of the law harks back to its perversion during the period of the war. One hesitates at the thought of comparing the legal methods that Eli employs with those used by Nazi Germany. But Eli is clearly worried about such a comparison when he writes to the yeshivah headmaster: “I am not a Nazi who would drive eighteen children, who are probably frightened at the sight of a firefly, into homelessness.”28 Trying to convince Tzuref that his actions will not have dire consequences, Eli’s declaration suggests that his efforts to evict the yeshivah – to have them “go away” – could be viewed as a shadow of World War II. And there are other ways his apparently benign tactics recall those used by the Holocaust’s perpetrators. In an earlier letter, for instance, Eli argues that the moderation of extreme practice – of which the insularity of the yeshivah is the exemplar – not only

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is the key to harmony in Woodenton but also would have prevented the friction in Europe that ended in the Holocaust. Eli speculates, Perhaps if such [harmonious] conditions had existed in pre-war Europe, the persecution of the Jewish people, of which you and those 18 children have been victims, could not have been carried out with such success – in fact, might not have been carried out at all. 29

Eli’s speculation takes the local antagonism of suburban politics and gives it a historical context and mission. From this perspective, suburban American life, filtering out extremes, does nothing less than correct the conditions of pre-war Europe. Yet the yeshivah members, by ostensibly introducing into suburbia the malignant conditions of Europe, risk activating the fanatical sentiments and reactions that led to the persecution and murder of millions of Jews. The yeshivah thus seems to operate at cross-purposes. Hoping to find a refuge from persecution, the yeshivah members are accused of instigating the very animosity from which they aimed to escape. Eli’s legal brief contains the premise that America differs from Europe in the methods that it uses to resolve group or ethnic conflict. But his proposal shows how similar the European and American methods might actually be: Therefore, Mr. Tzuref, will you accept the following conditions? If you can, we will see fit not to carry out legal action against the Yeshivah for failure to comply with township Zoning ordinances No. 18 and No. 23. 30

Just as the persecution of Jews was “carried out with success,” so Eli indicates that legal action – which his own rhetoric is trying ostensibly to circumvent – is within the power of the Woodenton Jews to “carry out.” The shared rhetoric makes the case against Eli. Notably, legal action itself becomes identified with the persecution of Jews. Accordingly, lawyers and legal parlance become the means through which the demonic past can return. Invoked by Woodenton Jews as if they were part of a natural order of things, zoning ordinances are shown by Roth to be elements of a legal discourse that masks the threat of force with the veneer of civility. Moreover, Eli Peck’s legal discourse creates a bond among Woodenton’s Jews: “But this is a matter of zoning, isn’t it?,” queries Ted Heller. “Isn’t that what we discovered? You don’t abide by the ordinance, you go.”31 Law and its ordinances indeed make things clear, demarcating limits and boundaries. Yet Ted primarily makes clear the violence that underlies the legal code: “you don’t abide . . . you go.” Not conforming to the rules leads to nothing less than banishment from the community. There is no in-between.

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Ted’s appeal to the legal code also reveals another level on which language and law collaborate. As Eli had echoed the persecutors of Europe’s Jews, so Ted echoes Eli. “It’s a matter of zoning,” Eli had informed Tzuref at their first conference, parroting legal expressions that had become formulaic in American 1950s suburbia. Hence, the language of law becomes its own form of legal action, decreeing what is the case rather than arbitrating a solution. Eli’s wife, who most often expresses herself in psychoanalytic jargon, articulates how popular will and law collude: “Eli, I didn’t bring up moving [the yeshivah]. Everybody did. That’s what everybody wants. Why make everybody unhappy. It’s even a law, Eli.”32 Law confirms what everybody desires. And the terms of law are what everybody, including Eli’s wife, appeals to. In this case, Eli’s censure of his wife’s attempt to commandeer legal parlance points to the disturbing ubiquity of legal discourse in the language everybody speaks: “Don’t tell me,” Eli complains to his wife, “what’s the law.” Eli’s admonition demonstrates just how far legal discourse has seeped into Woodenton’s community and into English. Yet, English is both the language of law and the language of art, the language that speaks against survivors even as it strives to become one that can speak on their behalf. In the next few years, the relation between English and the law will undergo a transformation, the association with the law being one way English will try to forge a compelling neutrality. At this stage, however, it serves the unbending will of the law. Only as babble can English free itself from the arrogance of justice.

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chapter 5

From Law to Outlaw Borrowed English in Edward Wallant’s The Pawnbroker

Edward Wallant’s The Pawnbroker follows on the heels of Philip Roth’s story. 1 Written in the late 1950s, Wallant’s novel like Roth’s story is shaped by the flight from the inner city to the suburbs. But if Roth cordons off both the Jews and his story from the city, Wallant maintains a focus on the city even, or especially, while taking stock of the zones of suburban culture. Indeed, Wallant’s protagonist, Sol Nazerman, links the multiple layers of suburban residence and urban business, shuttling between one and the other. In essence, however, he is a Jew who has remained in the city that other Jews have fled. Pawnbroking, already by the early 1960s an institution on the way out in the inner cities of the Northeast, serves as a last bastion, the emblem of an ambiguous (even stigmatized) Jewish presence in a place no longer home. 2 Published in 1961, in the shadow of demographic and economic upheaval, The Pawnbroker also appeared precisely as the attention of the world was seized by the Eichmann trial held in Jerusalem from April to December of that year. Adolf Eichmann was one of the SS figures that coordinated the destruction process. He was captured in 1960 and brought to trial in spring 1961. His trial thus served as the occasion for a vast audience to learn more about the events that comprised the Holocaust, about the persecutors who carried out the carnage, and about the victims who suffered at their hands. 3 I will comment in the chapter that follows on the trial, as delineated in Hannah Arendt’s trial report, and the language issues that it raised, arbitrated, and bequeathed. But it is important to note in this context that Wallant’s novel comes at the Holocaust from the opposite end of the spectrum; its focus is not on the persecutor but on the victim. 4 In this sense, The Pawnbroker continues the emphasis on what came before, while at the same time revolutionizing it. Homeward Borne and “Eli, the Fanatic” dramatized the effort to keep the Holocaust at arm’s length, the first by



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attempting to absorb the single survivor into the roomy accommodations that pastoral America seemed to offer, the second by creating zones that would remain free of survivors and of the losses that they evoked. In both cases, the point of view of Americans serves as the standard; survivors serve as foils for America’s reluctantly coming to terms with the destruction of European Jewry. In the first case, the ostensible motivation is philanthropic; in the second, legal. In the first, the fantasy is that everyone speaks English, in the second, that no one does. In The Pawnbroker, a survivor becomes the benchmark. From the opening words – “His feet crunched on the hard-packed sand” – the novel revolves around the actions of Sol Nazerman, a Polish Jew, who alone of his immediate family survived the war. He comes to New York by way of Paris, lives with his sister’s family in the suburbs, visits a fellow survivor in the Bronx, and runs a pawnshop in Harlem. The novel unfolds over three weeks in August 1958, a period leading up to the fifteenth anniversary of his family’s murder. As the anniversary approaches, intolerable memories of what he witnessed intensify. Wallant chronicles the increasing difficulty the protagonist faces in warding off such memories even as his efforts to do so become more desperate. 5 As we will see, the English that Nazerman speaks – neither halting nor mute – is linked directly to the struggle he undergoes. Akin to Roth’s refugees, Wallant’s central figure speaks without an accent: “When it gets quiet, late tomorrow afternoon, maybe we’ll go over a few things,” Sol tells his assistant in a breezy idiom reminiscent of Tzuref ’s. 6 Yet because the story of the Holocaust is told through the survivor, Wallant’s strategy of withholding an accent implies more than Roth’s. There are, first of all, accented speakers against whom one measures the protagonist. Sol’s counterpart, Tessie, survivor and wife of his friend, speaks with Yinglish: “So I took in one little movie, so I bought one little house dress I shouldn’t walk around with holes showing. It’s a crime?”7 Her father, Mendel, about whom more will be said, speaks a fractured English, an idiom meant to match the splintered life he suffers in the New World. These are Nazerman’s true contemporaries, Jewish refugees who, like himself, lived through and suffered losses in the Holocaust. In contrast to Nazerman, however, their speech still bears the memory of Europe. Yet Wallant extends such cadences even to those remotely connected to the Old World. Nazerman’s sister, Bertha, who arrived in the United States years before the war, speaks an English decidedly more inflected than that of the protagonist: “And you, the big picture drawer, my artiste,” she bitterly

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teases her son in the choppy cadence of an émigré. Sol came after the war, and yet his English bears almost no trace of such a legacy. To be sure, Wallant risks credibility in order to suggest the pawnbroker’s cosmopolitan background, a verbal facility appropriate to a professor versed in languages for whom English comes easy and is spoken with precision. And yet the willingness to strain mimetic credibility, as we will see, goes beyond the crafting of academic credentials. 8 Instead of indicating that a speaker is a foreigner, an accent in The Pawnbroker is a sign of being at home. Nazerman’s sister contemplates how well her husband passes: Selig, she exults, had “a delightfully Midwestern accent, so American.” If the pawnbroker lacks an accent, his brother-in-law cultivates one. But accent here is not a sign of coming from elsewhere, a mark of a stranger. 9 It is rather the proof of integration, of being at one with the majority culture. Reversing the usual expectations, Wallant makes an accent the sign of having reached an imperceptible level of acculturation, of speech testifying self-consciously to overcoming foreignness. This cultivation of accent for Selig complements precisely Nazerman’s eradication of an accent: in the first case, accent confirms acculturation; in the second, its absence emphasizes estrangement. Surrounding his protagonist with figures who cultivate or maintain some version of an inflected English, Wallant gives accents most blatantly to the black characters who frequent the pawnshop: “You a hard man, Mistuh Nazerman, no two ways about it,” comments one of Nazerman’s regulars. “Well, God pity you . . . he d’ony judge after all.”10 Influenced by a tradition of urban realism, Wallant clearly uses dialect to indicate the poverty and lack of education that were the fate of residents of Harlem in the 1950s. 11 Yet the English of these figures, too, plays a role beyond the mimetic. Against the resonance of black English, Nazerman’s phrasing sounds that much more calculated and precise: “I am obligated to list all the items taken for pawn,” Nazerman informs a customer trying to unload stolen goods. Just as Nazerman attributes keeping track of merchandise to a unseen but demanding ledger of rules, so a similar set of obligations shapes his carefully modulated English. Helping to draw sharper contours around Nazerman’s English, black dialect plays an additional role. These characters serve as a choir, their comments illuminating what can and cannot be said about what Nazerman has gone through. 12 Indeed, the words that form the thoughts of the first (black) man in the novel to encounter Nazerman try to encapsulate the uncertain depth of Nazerman’s pain through the compressed idiom of

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black dialect: “That man suffer!” Notably, the novel returns to these words at its conclusion, this time letting them be spoken rather than thought: “No, man, that man suffer.”13 Brooding on these words throughout, the novel takes them as the most resolute attempt to come to terms with the plight of the Jewish survivor. Indeed, the phrase’s evolution from thought to speech parallels Nazerman own evolution from repression to expression, from private suffering to public mourning. And yet it is as if the English of the black characters, emerging out of their own suffering, comes up short when faced with his. 14 Accents thus serve as shorthand memory, identifying the community to whom one belongs and embodying the memory of privation. For Nazerman, accordingly, the eradication of an accent signals the eradication of memory. This tallies with the kind of survivor that Wallant fashions. All of Nazerman’s energies are spent attempting to suppress memories of the past. Indeed, the form and plot of Wallant’s novel pivot around the unwanted recall of these memories and the protagonist’s attempt to keep them at a tolerable distance, to keep them deeply buried. Walking to the pawnshop, he allowed himself a moment’s recall of his troubled sleep. Not that he could remember what he had dreamed, but he knew the dreams were bad . . . lately they were occurring more frequently . . . “Agh,” he said aloud, and shrugged, to throw dirt over the introspection. 15

Increasingly besieged as the anniversary of his family’s death draws closer, Nazerman struggles against the calendar, making light of the memories that threaten to overwhelm him. To speak without an accent is thus of a piece with Nazerman’s obliteration of the past. His English is a tongue without memory; it locates him neither in place nor culture nor community. For Nazerman English, strangely shorn of accent and inflection, turns into a traumatic language symptomatic of atrocity and its aftereffects. This is clearly a different stage that what we found in “Eli, the Fanatic.” In Roth’s story, English, the language of law, recapitulated the abuses to which the victim had been previously subjected. Ostensibly reflecting the law, the terms invoked by lawyer and laymen alike actually perverted it. Only when it yielded to its Yiddish shadow – to the babble that Eli learned to invoke – did English speak on behalf of the victim. For his part, Wallant moves English in an opposite direction. In order to represent the survivor’s predicament, English surrenders to no other tongue. Wallant rather lets it do what it couldn’t possibly: speak flawlessly, precisely, idiomatically,

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and without inflection. In this way, impeccable English ironically serves as a language of trauma. For if trauma refers to the condition by which an intolerable past can be recollected only indirectly, Nazerman’s English labors to filter out all trace of his former European life. Speaking as no native ever did, Nazerman converses in a deftly fluent English that leaves no room for the past to enter. Wallant further conveys the significance of this denatured English by pairing Nazerman with Murillio, the organized crime boss who uses the pawnshop as a front for illicit moneymaking. Allies in crime, Nazerman and Murillio are both European émigrés who have established themselves anew in America and who share a contempt for the Europe that they left behind. Pointedly, what intrigues Nazerman about Murillio is his voice, invariably characterized as “cold, monotonous,” “recorded,” or “phonographic.” Ultimately lacking human quality, “[Murillio’s] voice,” we are told, “seemed to have nothing to do with his face.”16 Murillio himself seeks an authentic voice. An aficionado of opera, he listens with fascination to “the marvelous voice” of the “ancient [phonograph] record.” Yet the beauty that such a voice evinces is also the emblem of emptiness: “for him, beauty ran to the edge of a sheer cliff; beyond that edge was a peculiar emptiness, which sometimes echoed with dim and lovely voices.”17 This emptiness reaches a climax when Murillio, joins in with a favorite aria: “ ‘Cielo e mar,’ he sang softly with the dead man.”18 Murillio’s voice, severed from a past and a present, sings both operatically and as if dead, a fitting conjunction of disembodied qualities. Moreover, Murillio’s fascination with operatic voice matches Nazerman’s fascination with Murillio’s, as if the beauty of operatic singing could somehow resurrect the life he had lost. But the beauty of the operatic voice – a beauty built on transcendence of the natural voice – is at bottom the other side of Murillio’s phonographic voice, a voice which complements Nazerman’s unnatural English. For Murillio’s is constructed entirely out of artifice, an artifice emptied, as it were, of the past. A voice of the present severed from a past, Nazerman’s English, too, has nothing to do with his face. 19

Speaking and Reading If Nazerman speaks his adopted tongue without an accent, he never reads in English. Reading, which a plays a key role in how Wallant represents trauma, always takes place in a foreign tongue. Wallant no doubt emphasizes Nazerman’s polyglot reading to enhance the intellectual persona

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behind the pawnbroker facade. Reading in a foreign language – not foreign to Nazerman, as the coy narrator of “Eli, the Fanatic” might say – also suggests the degree to which he continues to be shaped by European culture even as he expresses his contempt for it. Yet reading only in continental languages divides the world into two realms: past versus present, culture versus life, private versus public, reading versus speech. This radical diglossia defines the kind of divided world that this survivor inhabits. Nazerman’s favored texts consist of classics of nineteenth-century European culture. He reads in Russian, German, and French, and the books include Stendahl’s memoirs, a novel by Tolstoy, and stories by Chekhov. The languages are tied on the one hand to his Eastern European life and, on the other, to his vocation of professor at a Polish university. True to form, in the only instance where he reads an English-language book (Herbert Spencer’s Genesis of Science), Nazerman makes it clear that he did not read it in the original: “I read it in the German when I was in Paris, while I was waiting for a visa.”20 Even en route to America, Nazerman can only read in the languages of continental Europe. Reading in foreign languages points in two directions. First, it represents fantasies of wholeness arising out of a nineteenth-century Europe that tells of life before the convulsions of the Holocaust. By means of such reading, Nazerman can once again enter an era innocent in comparison to his own. Yet reading in the original language suggests a deeper level of personal retrieval, a process whereby Nazerman can read these books as he once did, recalling the experience of reading that he once had. The experience of re-reading Anna Karenina, for instance, leaves him “relaxing in the familiar words he had read several times since his youth.”21 The act of reading itself becomes the symbol of a pre-Holocaust Europe; what Nazerman does in the privacy of his room is to re-read, to impersonate as closely as possible the reader that he was before his losses. But the process is double-edged. Although his reading retrieves a preHolocaust Europe, it also leads to the dreams that rehearse its destruction. This reading activates a symbolic language of which the dreams that invariably follow are the continuation. So the reading both transports Nazerman to a time before the Holocaust and acts as a bridge to its events, to Nazerman’s subconscious recollection of them, and to the reader’s confrontation with them. Reading in European tongues, Nazerman must leave behind English in order to reach a point where memories of his former life can surface. If conversing in English effaces memory, continental languages serve to retrieve it.

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Rejecting English in favor of European tongues, Nazerman almost always reads in private. Indeed, he never reads books in the pawnshop as if that realm cannot tolerate what his reading evokes. Most often, he reads before going to sleep, in his room in his family’s suburban house. Sol’s reading thus serves as a transition between waking and sleeping, a corridor between one kind of mental activity and another. This is most clearly the case in terms of dreams – dreams that Nazerman’s reading elicits. Every time Sol reads, he dreams (though not every dream is preceded by reading). And it is through these dreams, printed in italics and appearing at intervals in the course of the novel, that Wallant narrates Nazerman’s Holocaust experiences. Nazerman’s reading – and especially reading in an original language – initiates a process of retrieval that culminates in dreams of atrocities and loss. Reading and dreams are thus linked by their connection to privacy. Giving some measure of comfort in an otherwise grim existence, reading also brings to fruition Nazerman’s quest for privacy. Indeed, the quest for privacy is vital from the outset. Nazerman agrees to become a pawnbroker and to serve as a front for an organized-crime operation in order to make enough money to acquire privacy – “the one commodity,” we are told,“that he still values.”22 Having lost home, family, and profession, Nazerman holds onto this single value – a value realized most emphatically when he reads in the solitude of his room. Significantly, Nazerman’s private reading is modeled on that of his father: His father sat against a stone in his inappropriate black suit and Yalmalka [sic], lost in his study of a book. . . . His father looked up and smiled absently, a little embarrassed at his idyllic setting, a white-faced, withdrawn man whose natural habitat was the easily regulated climate of the printed page. 23

When Nazerman himself takes refuge in non-English-language books, he mirrors his father’s withdrawal, a taking leave of the natural world in favor of a different habitat. This portrait of his father as the white-faced reader takes place within a dream, the movement from reading to dream being this time reversed. Reading is here conceived as its own kind of insular activity, the printed page creating a world that makes its own claims upon the reader. For Nazerman’s father, the study of traditional Jewish texts could transport him to this alternative world; for Nazerman himself, it is immersion in the language in which he once read that can accomplish it. Emulating with secular texts what his father did with sacred ones, Nazerman’s languages are imbued with the power to summon memory.

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The other consequential father in the novel, Mendel, Tessie’s father, serves as the character upon which the camps have left the clearest imprint, which is shown by his poor physical condition, his immobility, and his language. Mendel speaks the only sustained Yinglish in the novel, a language accented, broken, and porous. But like the boy in Homeward Borne, his broken English is occasioned not simply by the confrontation of a refugee with an unmastered foreign tongue. Such fractured language rather serves, in Boder’s phrase, as “evidence of trauma” that was endured. Mendel’s speech is broken because his body is broken. The broken speech issuing from a broken body differs from the child’s in Chatterton’s novel, for Wallant doesn’t imply that Mendel speaks as he does because he was immersed in mélange of foreign tongues and deprived of his own. His tortured English [85], (8) represents not a fragmented culture but a ravaged body. Indeed, the first reference to his speech shows the essential mixing of languages: the old man “called out a complicated Yiddish-Polish curse.” Lines: 150 to 1 The significance of this mixing – of having one language intrude upon and even be confused with another – is brought out by juxtaposing it with a ——— * 51.82845pt discussion about mixing per se: ——— The old man shut off the radio with a groan. “Listen to those murderers Normal Page screaming the Deutsch,” he snarled forlornly. * PgEnds: PageBr “That is Spanish, Pa, not German,” she told him in a dull voice. “They are all Deutsch,” he roared, then, in a sly, vicious tone, “You are not mixing the fleischica dishes with the milchik? “No, Pa, everything is kosher,” she said wearily. 24

Mendel first of all confuses Spanish with German, the hold of the past meaning that any language not his own is the language of the persecutors. In response to Tessie’s attempt to distinguish between what was then and what is now, Mendel asserts that such distinctions are meaningless: “They are all Deutsch,” an assertion that leaves the reader unsure whether he is referring to language, people, or both. But the force of Mendel’s claim is sharpened by splicing it together with a discussion about the laws of kashrut, of keeping meat and milk products and utensils separate. Wallant layers an insistence on maintaining ritual distinction onto inability to distinguish between languages – his own and those of others.

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Oration and Commemoration It is, however, through the fusion of reading and speaking that Wallant stages the confrontation of American culture with the Holocaust. The first character who enters the store pawns a keepsake that he won by reciting Poe’s “The Raven” in an “Oratorical Contest.” Emblematic of the legacy of nineteenth-century-American culture, the trophy, a “bust of shiny yellow metal on a black lacquered base,” was designated the “Daniel Webster Award.”25 Webster, lawyer, politician, quintessential orator of nineteenthcentury America, and Edgar Allen Poe, poet, storyteller, and essayist from the same period, thus combine to mark the initial pawnbroking transaction. The oratory memento extends The Pawnbroker’s focus on speaking. Reference to Poe’s poem, for its part, activates a second set of relevant associations. A fixture in high-school English classes of the period, “The Raven,” “emblematical,” as Poe himself wrote, “of Mournful and neverending Remembrance,” is immediately relevant to the survivor’s predicament. For Nazerman, too, assuredly confronts memories that are neverending. 26 The clear resonance between the two mournful predicaments does not end there. Faced with interminable remembrance, the protagonist of “The Raven”tries to escape from it:“vainly,”he confesses,“I had sought to borrow / From my books surcease of sorrow.” If, as Poe says, the poem is about “never-ending Remembrance,” – the obsession with a dead lover – Poe frames the action as an attempt to end such an obsession: “to borrow . . . surcease of sorrow.” Anxious though he may be to bring such memories to an end, the protagonist reports (“vainly I had sought”) that the project fails. “The Raven” thus forms The Pawnbroker’s prototype for the quest to end interminable mourning by reading great works of Western culture. In rhyming “borrow” and “sorrow,” Poe also suggests the tie-in of pawning and mourning that Wallant develops at length. Books and hence culture become the means by which grief can be ended; “borrowing” is the action through which culture attempts to put tormenting emotion at a comfortable distance. If Wallant replays the attempt to test culture in the wake of unbearable grief, he also, by featuring the pawnshop, literalizes the idiom of borrowing in a way that intensifies, and eventually transforms, the grief. Destined to be the victim of a sorrow beyond comfort, Poe’s grieving student faces greater obstacles:

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Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore – While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping. 27

Who for Wallant is the tapping raven? It is, first of all, Nazerman. In response to the customer’s claim that the statue is made of gold, the Pawnbroker responds: “Plate,” and confirms his professional assessment by “tapping Daniel Webster’s shiny skull.”28 The tapping of the raven is transformed into a means of establishing substance, of gauging how appearance covers over a less valuable interior. The gesture characterizes Nazerman’s stance in relation to culture, particularly that representative of Europe: culture is the veneer covering over wreckage. Indeed, in Nazerman’s irreverent assessment, the treasures of Europe redound not with age, as his sister’s circle would have it, but with a “stink.”29 The tapping raven thus becomes the measure not only of what an individual mourns but also of what a culture has lost. The raven of course not only taps but also speaks, and one of the central conceits of the poem, as Poe indicated in“The Philosophy of Composition,” his extended gloss laying out the process of writing “The Raven,” is that the refrain should be spoken by “a non-reasoning creature capable of speech.” The voice that utters “Nevermore,” in other words, had to issue from a non-human (i.e., “non-reasoning”) source. “I did not fail to perceive,” Poe comments, “that this difficulty arose solely from the pre-assumption that the word was to be so continuously or monotonously spoken by a human being.”30 Poe thus links the key word in the poem to the problem of human speech. What kind of voice, Poe asks, can speak inhumanly? It is a question that Wallant has assuredly asked when considering his own protagonist. Trying to solve a different problem in an earlier era, Poe casts a bird (originally a parrot, eventually the more melancholy raven) as the speaker of the one-word refrain. Yet this reduced, “non-reasoning” speech has its own power. Broken, impoverished, repetitive speech thus defines the nature of oratory – a speaking wherein nothing is held back and where every word carries immeasurable weight. This inhuman, monotonous speaking leads in two further directions: to madness and to race. The raven gains its name from its call (imitative of harsh sounds, rattle, crackle, “so named for its loud cry”) and bears within its name the speech of the mad: to “rave” means to speak wildly or incoherently, as a delirious or demented person does. The raven’s nonreasoning speech recalls then speech that is anti-rational, uncontrolled

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because uncontrollable. Wallant releases the madness latent in the raven’s inhuman speech when Schneider, the orator-writer who pawns the trophy, “pressed his starved face against the [pawnshop] bars like a maddened bird.” Although the hungry artist’s speech never lapses into incoherence, it does verge on the wild, moved there by his indignation that his pawned voice should bring such a small sum in return. The broken speech of a black bird also – and certainly for Wallant – invokes the specter of race, the blacks who are the predominant Harlem pawnshop customers aligned here with the tapping raven. Decades before postmodern criticism turned to Poe’s poem with an eye toward issues of race, Wallant intuited that “The Raven” was powerfully bound up with master-slave relations. One of Poe’s works most resistant to readings invoking race, the poem has only recently been considered in this light. As Betsy Erikka has argued, “The Raven” “invokes a racist legacy which sees even the best achievements of blacks as merely imitative and derivative of white culture. At issue is not only the prospect of black domination, but also . . . the question of black intelligence.” In this reading, the black bird’s reduced repetitive speech signifies the alleged inadequate intelligence of blacks. 31 And yet in Wallant’s novel the black customers who perform this tapping mission endeavor to penetrate the pawnbroker’s isolation and bring him to fellow feeling for humanity at large. For Wallant, linking Poe’s ungainly bird with a black choir has not dehumanizing but rather humanizing properties. Black dialect thus fuses with the raven’s broken speech to challenge the position of privacy that Nazerman has claimed as his own. “Busy writing a great, great play,” the customer Leopold Schneider, the only writer in a novel full of artists and musicians, stands in for Wallant. 32 Importantly, in the novel’s first pawnshop transaction, the writer gives up the oratory award he won for reciting “The Raven,” for speaking better (more movingly? more compellingly?) than any. In a kind of Faustian bargain, the writer pawns his voice in order to write. 33 Voice here implies a blind adherence to tradition, a recitation, as it were, of what has come before in lieu of what is new and innovative. Alluding to pivotal figures at a critical juncture of nineteenth-century-American letters, Wallant was trying to show how the problems he faced were interwoven with those of American history and yet also were new. In a certain sense, he was replaying the deal made by his protagonist, exchanging a native and natural voice for one artificial and foreign.

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By the end of the transaction, Schneider fully takes on the raven’s associations. He leaves “the store with the awkward tread of a huge, ungainly bird,”34 “ungainly” being one of the epithets that Poe uses for his raven (“much I marveled this ungainly fowl”). With it, Poe conveys the sense of ominous threat. While the raven never leaves, Schneider does, at least for a time, but the “oratory award” remains behind as his surrogate. Emblem of the failed effort to suppress memory of loss – to borrow surcease of sorrow – the statue eventually proves too much for Nazerman to bear, and he moves it out of sight; indeed, he “shoved it into a low, dark shelf where the light never reached.”35 Nazerman’s gesture, a calculated mixture of deliberation and force, shows just how loaded with significance the trophy is. Just as he must increase his vigilance over the past as the anniversary of his family’s death approaches, so he must take the award out of “the light,” onto a “dark shelf ” mirroring his own darkened – because it is intolerable – past. But the award doesn’t stay shelved for long: “[Nazerman] looked up from the phone to see [his assistant] Ortiz studying the engraved plaque under Daniel Webster’s bust.”36 Bringing what was intended to be hidden from light back into it, Ortiz serves as a gadfly – or, in terms of Poe’s poem, a raven, attempting to enter and inquire into Nazerman’s repressed past. Bust of Webster in hand, Ortiz also indulges in his own oration, musing on the difference between the life and suffering of Jews and blacks: Niggers suffer like animals. They ain’t caught on. Oh yeah, they suffer. But they do it big, they shake up the worl’ with they sufferin’. 37

The contrast turns on what to “do” with suffering, with its meaning, effects, and influence. People can “suffer like animals” – without a means to articulate the cost of suffering, without the artifacts of culture to bear witness to its significance. Or they can suffer “big,” can make the fact of suffering have consequences not simply for their own group but beyond it as well. Framing his case in dialect, Ortiz makes Webster speak, as it were, in a different key. Nazerman himself teases out the implied connection: You tell them, Ortiz, go spread the word. You have it all figured out, a regular professor is what you are. 38

Sarcastic though his comments may be, Nazerman grudgingly acknowledges through them that Ortiz’s oration attempts to set forth a program that can endow black suffering with a voice. The exchange concludes when Ortiz, made aware that the workday has ended, “put Daniel Webster down regretfully.” The symbol of Webster’s oratory thus animates the discussion,

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moving Ortiz to expound on what blacks can learn from Jews regarding commemoration – how to “shake up the worl’ .” Writer Leopold Schneider reappears late in the novel, on the anniversary of the death of Nazerman’s family, again the pawnshop’s first customer of the day. Initiating the series of transactions on the first and last days, Schneider’s reentry keeps oration at the forefront of the novel’s concerns: “Do you remember me, Schneider? The oratory award?” “Yes, I remember,” Sol answered, taking his hands cautiously away from the counter. “You still have my award, you haven’t sold it?” “I have turned down some fine offers for it.” “Well, I’ll be in for it in about a week. I have something pending.”39

Identifying himself by means of the pawned award, the playwright is anxious that the trophy hasn’t been sold out from under him. Yet the dialogue makes clear that it is the kind of commodity no one wants. The epitome of sentimental rather than monetary value, Daniel Webster is a pawned object that arouses no desire. It is not the writing of poems or plays that won the prize; it is rather reciting the poem for an “oratorical contest.” It is through speaking that the prize is won. This emphasis on the speaking voice has behind it the celebrated oratory of Daniel Webster. Indeed, Webster’s renown as a master of oratory lasted well into the twentieth century, a renown acknowledged and reinforced again in the decades preceding The Pawnbroker in history and legend alike. At times, one blended into the other: “Webster,” according to Samuel Morison and Henry Steele Commager,“was the most commanding figure in the Senate, a swarthy Olympian with a crag-like face, and eyes that seemed to glow like dull coals under the precipice of brows. It has been said that no man was ever so great as Daniel Webster looked. . . . He carried to perfection the dramatic, rotund style of oratory that America learned from the elder Pitt.”40 For its part, Stephen Vincent Benet’s drama, The Devil and Daniel Webster, makes Webster’s rotund oratory potent enough to triumph over “Scratch,” Vincent Benet’s down-home term for the devil. 41 Forceful in the Senate and in overcoming legendary opponents, Webster’s most lasting contribution is particularly apposite to Wallant’s concerns. As historian Kenneth Shewmaker remarks, Webster did no less than establish “the tradition of commemorative oratory in the United States.”42

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Adept at polemic and argument, Webster’s most considerable achievement was using his consummate skill to commemorate what were deemed to be consequential historical events. His special legacy was how to bring the powers of voice to recall and give meaning to occasions defined by loss and grief. In a certain sense, his interest, too, was in “mournful and never-ending remembrance.” His goal, as his put it in his Plymouth Oration of 1820, was to “transmit the great inheritance unimpaired,” an intent powerfully realized in his Bunker Hill monument address, spoken in 1826 on the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolutionary War battle: You are now where you stood fifty years ago, this very hour, with your brothers and your neighbors, shoulder to shoulder, in the strife for your country. Behold, how altered! . . . The ground strowed with the dead and the dying; the impetuous charge; the steady and successful repulse; the loud call to resistance; a thousand bosoms freely and fearlessly bared in an instant to whatever of terror there may be in war and death; – all these you have witnessed, but you witness them no more. All is peace.

Alluding to carnage that was, Webster works through it by stressing that the past is past. Webster’s role as the figure who fine-tunes oration to commemoration culminates in his eulogy for John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom died on July 4, 1826: This is an unaccustomed spectacle. For the first time, fellow-citizens, badges of mourning shroud the columns and overhang the arches of this hall. . . . It is right that it should be thus. The tears which flow, and the honors that are paid, when the founders of the republic die, give hope that the republic itself may be immortal.

If the death of legendary figures threatens to rupture the nation’s continuity, Webster conceives of mourning as the sign of the nation proceeding “unimpaired.” Indeed, “tears” seemingly demonstrate an enduring care for the ideals for which the men stood. Yet Webster turns to a refrain that also drives home the fact of loss: Adams and Jefferson are no more; and we are assembled . . . to bear our part in these manifestations of respect and gratitude which pervade the whole land. Adams and Jefferson are no more. (emphasis added)

In a style reminiscent of “The Raven,” the refrain of “no more” – antecedent to Poe’s “Nevermore” – comes to counter false hope. Webster apparently

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viewed his task as bringing sobriety to a nation wishing to be founded not by men but gods. An initial order of business was to insist that the nation confront death straight on. If the bust of Webster implicates the Holocaust obliquely, it also connects to it directly by means of the calendar. Although the calendar dominates The Pawnbroker’s narrative – the climax takes place on August 28 in chapter 28, a mirroring of the date in novelistic structure that makes clear the parallel between the two – it is only through the “oratorical award” that we learn the year in which the action unfolds. “ ‘It is an award for oratory,’ said the wild-haired young man, ‘I won it in a city-wide oratorical contest nine years ago.’ ” The bust’s inscription reads “1949,” placing the action of the novel in August 1958. The two weeks over which the events of the novel unfold move toward the fifteenth anniversary of his family’s death. From here, then, it is possible to infer the date on which Nazerman’s family was murdered: August 28, 1943. In actuality, Wallant’s dating takes some liberties with the chronology of Polish Jewry’s destruction, the greater part of which was carried out approximately a year before this. But on a symbolic level the date places Nazerman’s personal tragedy at a point representative of European Jewry’s overall demise. What is of the essence, however, is how we come to learn of the date. The commemoration of America’s legendary orator in the award given in his honor thus becomes the vehicle to date the murderous events that define Nazerman’s loss. So subtle is the allusion to the date that one wonders how intended was Wallant’s reference to it. But whatever the degree of deliberation, the way the oratory award serves as a magnet is crucial in gathering together the associations pertinent to commemorating the almost never-ending grief that is the novel’s focus. The pivotal role of American oratory deepens the cultural implications of the novel’s preoccupation with speech in general and English in particular. The confluence of Webster and Poe provides an opening, an alternative tradition of oratory in which broken speech is fitted to commemorate the disasters of history. Making use of America’s cultural legacy, this legacy (in Wallant’s reading of Poe) nonetheless itself tells a story of the failure of culture. In the terms The Pawnbroker sets forth, if reading serves as an emblem for culture, it also leads to dreams of unbearable horror. It is thus through the idiom of America that Wallant seeks a voice to address the Holocaust. The sterilized English of Nazerman points to one kind of outer limit; the broken speech of his choir leads in another direction, one that will play a pivotal role in the decades that follow.

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Nazerman’s amnesiac English derives from Wallant, the native English speaker, imagining what it is to be translingual, to speak in a foreign English that provides a refuge from memory. This strategy has at least near analogies. When an actor wishes to play a drunkard, says Konstantin Stanislavski, he plays a drunkard trying to act as if he were not drunk. Closer to the orbit of language, Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart relates that when he performs the role of Shylock, he does not (as most do) inflect his English with a foreign accent. The outsider, as Stewart refers to Shylock, will endeavor to speak a more proper English than an Englishman. Nothing could provide a better example of the costs of correct speech, as Hannah Arendt elaborates them in the following chapter, than Nazerman’s flight from memory in language. His predicament testifies that a mother tongue cannot be abandoned without losing what is essential. Arendt herself, closer in many respects to Wallant’s hero than to Wallant himself, will try to fashion an English that neither disguises origins nor speaks only to America.

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chapter 6

Law’s Languages Hannah Arendt’s Mother and Other Tongues

In the late 1950s, English had to first divest itself of its associations with the law in order to speak on behalf of the victims. Thus the not-so-fanatic Eli sheds his legal English at the same time that he sheds his constricting garments. But in Philip Roth’s story, English never recovers from providing a legal screen with which to persecute the “dps.” Hence, it cannot become the victim’s tongue; if anything, its nonsensical shadow, babble, can. With The Pawnbroker, the victim comes to speak English but is burdened with an idiom cruelly divested of associations. His is an unaccented English drained of memory and estranged from culture, a neutered, but not yet neutral, tongue. It fell to Hannah Arendt, German Jewish political thinker, to endeavor to make English into a universal language of the Holocaust. In Arendt’s report on Adolf Eichmann’s trial, English becomes reunited with the law, an alliance that brought both new possibilities and an ambiguous legacy. At the same time, Arendt also articulated the importance of accent, a prescient gesture that points to the direction English would take in the decades that followed. The Eichmann trial, which took place from April through December of 1961, and Arendt’s report on it, which was published some two years later, have generally been viewed as watershed events in setting forth the terms in which the Holocaust has been addressed. Nazis had been put on trial before, most famously in Nuremberg soon after the end of the war. But numbers of important Nazis were absent from Nuremberg; Eichmann was one of them. Although apprehended after the end of the war, he had managed to escape and, like many of his notorious colleagues, to make his way to South America. Indeed, it was in Argentina in 1960 that Israeli agents found and arrested him. Preparations for the trial took approximately a year; the



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proceedings, which were held in Jerusalem, lasted eight months; an appeal was eventually rejected, and Eichmann was executed in 1962. Arendt’s report on the trial, first published in the New Yorker in 1963, was one of hundreds of publications that appeared in response to Eichmann’s apprehension and trial. 1 Of all these, however, it was (and has been) Arendt’s that, embroiled in controversy, has dominated the discussion. A political philosopher by training and profession, Arendt had already written a lengthy and influential treatise on the nature of totalitarianism, a study that included a substantial analysis of Nazi Germany. 2 She was, furthermore, herself a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, having first immigrated to France in the 1930s and then, in 1941, to the United States. 3 Having observed the events from the safe haven of America, Arendt felt that Eichmann’s trial would allow her a closer, more intimate confrontation with the evil perpetrated by the Nazis. Her motivations for reporting on the trial were thus both personal and professional. Soon after the New Yorker articles appeared, Arendt incorporated them into a book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. 4 Arendt’s analysis provided an overview of the destruction of European Jewry while simultaneously assessing the scope and nature of Eichmann’s role in the destruction. Yet the report infuriated many of its readers. Two aspects of Arendt’s analysis were deemed especially egregious. First, she charged the Jewish victims (or their leadership) with wholesale complicity in their own destruction. Second, by characterizing Eichmann’s actions as small-minded, she seemed to imply that his crime was less horrible. On top of being accused of missing the mark in her analysis of the victims and perpetrators, Arendt was also castigated for the ostensibly flippant tone in which she wrote about events of the most tragic seriousness. 5 Critics have drawn attention to the key role that language plays in Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann’s crime. Indeed, Arendt’s coining the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe the specific character of Eichmann’s crime relates fundamentally to issues of language. Shoshana Felman has recently elaborated what she takes to be the crucial nature of this connection: Eichmann’s moral failure derives from a “superimposition of a borrowed (Nazi) language . . . on this absence of subjective motive.”6 It was a combination of totalitarian language and, in Arendt’s phrasing, banal initiative that defined this form of evil. Language was thus at the heart of Arendt’s diagnosis of the nature of Eichmann’s transgression: “Eichmann’s continued impersonation during the trial (his autistic ventriloquism) of technocratic

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Nazi language,” Felman continues, “is what incriminates him above all in Arendt’s eyes.”7 I will later take up the implications of this particular characterization of Eichmann’s evil. But if language is crucial for understanding Eichmann, it is also, I want to argue, crucial for understanding Arendt’s influential report about him. Indeed, the prominence Arendt gives Eichmann’s “impersonation” serves as a cue for my analysis of Eichmann in Jerusalem. For it is clear that Arendt views not just Eichmann but the orchestration of his trial through the prism of languages. I thus want to link Arendt’s comments on Eichmann’s language to her acerbic comments on the role of other languages, particularly German, in the trial. Moreover, making language the prism emerges, I want to suggest, out of the complex role of languages – particularly, but not only, German and English – in Arendt’s own life and career: the continued meaning of her mother tongue on the one hand and the distance and infelicity of English on the other. This interplay of languages in Arendt’s career and commentary leads ultimately to more general considerations of the role of Eichmann in Jerusalem in establishing English as a language of the Holocaust. For while Arendt in her report forges English into a universal language for addressing the Holocaust, English is to a certain degree also the mark of her undoing.

Simultaneous Transmission: The Trial and Its Tongues In her original New Yorker article, the opening page refers only once to Eichmann by name. 8 In the book, Arendt deleted even that single reference. Instead, Arendt begins by viewing the trial through the prism of languages. Indeed, the report opens by referring to the languages that are spoken and the translations that accompany them: Directly below the judges are the translators, whose services are needed for direct exchanges between the defendant or his counsel and the court; otherwise, the German-speaking accused party, like almost everyone else in the audience, follows the Hebrew proceedings through the simultaneous radio transmission, which is excellent in French, bearable in English, and sheer comedy, frequently incomprehensible, in German. 9

Taking place in Jerusalem, the official language of the trial is Hebrew. But since Eichmann and his lawyer cannot understand Hebrew, German translation is necessary to allow them to participate in the trial (Arendt will, as we will come to see, question the basis on which Hebrew was chosen

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as the official language). Translation into German within the courtroom suffices for the exchanges between the principals. But the trial was also a global media event. Hence the proceedings require a battery of languages to make them accessible to the world at large. Setting the stage of Eichmann’s trial according to its multiple languages is crucial because the proceedings of the trial, according to Arendt, are hostage to the language in which they are reported. Whereas one language may be faithful to the extreme, another can apparently distort the trial’s nature, rendering it “incomprehensible.” The stakes are considerable. Depending on the specific language, the trial report can be understood, or not. The reliability, tone, and transparency of translation are symptomatic of the trial itself. Just as the translations range across a spectrum of competence, so do the trial’s participants. Arendt’s analysis not only relates the case against Eichmann but also evaluates the competence of those centrally involved in prosecuting the case. Her sarcastic assessment of the prosecutor’s blundering, for example, is as much a part of the report as is her assessment of Eichmann’s crimes. 10 And just as the tone of the translations ranges from one extreme to the another, so does the disposition of the protagonists in the court – from the judges sober demeanor to Eichmann’s disturbingly comic one. This multiplicity, then, makes clear that there is no single trial, as it were, to report. What the world will know of the trial depends on the language through which it is filtered. In a sense, Arendt tried to listen to and report on all of them simultaneously. It is telling, moreover, that the languages of transmission are Arendt’s main tongues, suggesting that she herself, acquainted with the scales of accuracy and comprehension, can make her way through each. But this is only half the story. The other half is that the official language of the trial, Hebrew, is one that is in more ways than one foreign to Arendt. 11 Even though she sits in the courtroom in Jerusalem, she still like those throughout the world depends on the simultaneous transmission to follow the full proceedings. This dependence on the version of the trial that the world outside the courtroom hears emphasizes that she, too, remains an outsider, a reporter coming from abroad. Yet she is also in the courtroom and thereby has direct access to the German-language response of the defense. Her being neither quite inside nor outside will move her to characterize the official language as less reliable than the unofficial ones as if the Hebrew spoken in the courtroom has little to do with, or even works against, the pursuit of justice. Thus in the early days of the trial she can write to her friend, the philosopher Karl Jaspers, about “Die Komodie mit

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dem Hebraischen, wo alles deutsch kann und deutsch denkt” (the comedy with Hebrew, where everyone knows German and thinks in German). 12 Arendt implies that Hebrew is only used for ceremonial purposes. Since everyone knows German – an exaggerated claim, to be sure – the trial could be more expeditiously conducted in the language that everyone, including the defendant and Arendt herself, understood. The unofficial languages are thus truer, or less given to sham, than the official one. So in Arendt’s estimation, her unofficial narrative of the trial documented in Eichmann in Jerusalem will be truer than the official one presented in the court.

Everyone Knows German Arendt characterizes the official language, Hebrew, as taking part in a comedy, because it plays a role in making the trial into theater. In her view, if one looks beneath the surface, one finds that “everyone knows German and thinks in German.” For Arendt, German sets the standard, serving as the main unofficial language. Yet in the simultaneous transmission – the version of the trial that is broadcast to the German-speaking world – German, of all the languages, clearly suffers most. Indeed, German is so poorly rendered that it transforms the trial from a sober attempt at judicial reckoning to “sheer comedy.” For opposite reasons, both Hebrew and German earn the epithet “comedy.” The prism of language, then, can invert the tone of the trial and import comedy where one would least expect it. That German is the language so badly compromised has several implications. First, Arendt accounts for the violation of German in political terms: It is among the minor mysteries of the new State of Israel that, with its high percentage of German-born people, it was unable to find an adequate translator into the only language the accused and his counsel could understand. For the old prejudice against German Jews, once very pronounced in Israel, is no longer strong enough to account for it. Remains as explication the even older and still very powerful “Vitamin P,” as the Israelis call protection in government circles and the bureaucracy [sic]. 13

The intrusion of the political into the trial therefore begins with the violation of German, making it no longer a reliable source. Arendt also associates this contamination of German by political forces with other key issues. The ill treatment of German takes place because of the absence of

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German as a mother tongue – the translator was apparently not one of the “high percentage of German-born people.” Arendt thus intimates that the absence of a mother tongue can make something incomprehensible, a position that as I will later suggest has broader implications for her manner of configuring the trial’s languages. Conversely, the need for an adequate translation into German arises because of the monolingual limitations of Eichmann and his lawyer (“the only language the accused and his counsel could understand”). Nonnative German, on the one hand, and monolingual dependence, on the other, converge to create “sheer comedy” borne out of political intrigue. The specific term Arendt uses to refer to the bad German is also striking: “incomprehensible.” The German language report is so poor that it falls below the threshold of an even basic understanding. But “incomprehensible” has another set of associations for Arendt in dealing with the Holocaust. According to Mary Dietz, Arendt believed the Holocaust to be an “incomprehensible crime” and that its nature as incomprehensible was at the forefront of Arendt’s inquiry. “What does it mean to comprehend what is historically incomprehensible? Spoken or unspoken, this question lies at the center of Arendt’s thinking about the Holocaust and the fate of European Jewry in the twentieth century.”14 Given Dietz’s assessment, based largely on Arendt’s writings from the 1950s, the connection of “incomprehensible” with the faulty German translation is arresting. For the opaqueness of the German comes to mirror the opaqueness of the event itself. Political factors thus contrive to make the report of the trial in German unreliable. But Arendt also views German as playing a diametrically opposite role, ensuring legal sobriety. This can take place, first of all, because the judges (who, in contrast to the translator, were all German-born) do speak German. They were thus not dependent on the translation from German (as spoken by the defense) to Hebrew (the trial’s official language). Tellingly, Arendt imputes considerable moral weight to the fact that the judges let German play a role in the trial: [The judges] are so obviously three good and honest men that one is not surprised that none of them yields to the greatest temptation to playact in this setting – that of pretending that they, all three born and educated in Germany, must wait for the Hebrew translation. 15

They demonstrate their honesty and goodness by showing that they understand German, the public display of which thus ensures their integrity.

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Their refusal to pretend that translation is necessary overcomes the “greatest temptation to playact.”For Arendt, this refusal to posture – to pretend or playact – carries immense implications. For her analysis of the trial pivots on the conflict between those who stand for justice, mainly represented by the judges, and those who endorse a show trial, represented by the chief prosecutor and the prime minister. Hence, this acknowledgment of German places the judges on the side of justice rather than that of pretense and theater. Arendt emphasizes this even more in the case of Moshe Landau, the head of the court. That he “uses his German mother tongue”16 as if it were the chosen language of the trial demonstrates his “independence” and his attempt to counter the show trial that, according to Arendt, the state of Israel wishes to promote. In the Jerusalem trial, then, it is German that can keep extralegal considerations at bay. German thus operates on at least two, at times contradictory, levels. On the one hand, broadcasting to the world a version of the trial proceedings that is “sheer comedy,” the German language transmission is associated with an intrusion of political factors that risk distorting the trial. On the other hand, being clearly aligned with the resolute independence of the judges, German symbolizes the commitment of justice to seek a verdict without submitting to political pressure. From the beginning, German is both the symbol of the political and the symbol of justice, the two forces that to Arendt’s mind compete to determine the course and outcome of the trial. 17 Yet German also has another, more integral role in the trial: it is the language of Eichmann. What this means is that even though Arendt initially casts German in a neutral position (as one of the languages reporting on the trial) or in a ethically privileged position (as the language by which the judges can best conduct many aspects of the trial and thus show themselves as free from political suasion), German is most central to the trial because it is the language spoken by the notorious defendant. It is, moreover, the language that he employed to carry out the crimes. 18 Arendt’s preoccupation with the role of languages in orchestrating the trial thus had to come to grips with the specific role of German as the language of the perpetrator. Arendt met this challenge head on, arguing that it was precisely Eichmann’s relation to the German language that made it possible for him to carry out the Holocaust. Arendt formulates the problem first as a “fight”: Eichmann carries on a “heroic fight with the German language, which invariably defeats him.”19

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What Arendt terms heroic is actually meant to be antiheroic, since Eichmann loses his fight in the sense of using words and phrases inappropriately. 20 Eichmann’s incompetence points Arendt in two directions: first, she wants to argue that his mistakes are “funny,” “ludicrous.” Arendt is aware that the topic of which she writes is not funny in some trivial sense and that it takes a certain unusual perspective to see it in this light, that one can see that “the horrible can be not only ludicrous but outright funny.”21 But the comic frame, set in motion by Eichmann’s bungling of German, offers a proper lens to view the kind of criminal he is. Arendt has, we recall, spoken previously of the association of German and comedy at the trial: the transmission of the trial in German to the outside world was conveyed so poorly that Arendt referred to it as “sheer comedy.” Here again, Eichmann’s ineptitude in German leads Arendt to invoke the comic frame. The two cases share the fact that they report on tragic events (what Arendt refers to as “the horrible”) with a language and register that cannot do justice to them. Yet it is striking that Arendt uses the rubric of comedy to bring together the two mishandlings of German. 22 At first glance, the two cases seem far more different than similar. In the case of the transmission to the world, a representative of the Israeli court reports on the proceedings as they unfold, using the language of the perpetrator and of the judges. In the case of Eichmann, the comedy occurs when he attempts to sincerely represent his own actions but instead, according to Arendt, unwittingly uses language that does not match the horrible events of which he speaks. This sense that the official version of the trial evokes the comic gains power when we recall that Arendt had referred to the comedy in Hebrew, meaning the comedy that was enacted by way of making Hebrew the official language of the court. This elevation of Hebrew to premier status took place in spite of the fact that, as Arendt asserts, “everybody knows and thinks in German.” Hence, the trial could have proceeded more effectively had German been the language of the courtroom, a gesture that would have also placed the prosecution and the defendant on a similar linguistic footing. Indeed, Arendt’s animus against Hebrew may have partially issued from the separation of prosecution and defendant that the centrality of Hebrew caused and, at least symbolically, the separation of those who were Jewish and those who were not. In the case of Hebrew, however, Arendt’s invoking the comic frame has not so much to do with incompetence as it does with appearance and

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reality, sham and substance, theater and courtroom. 23 That Hebrew was given a position that it did not, to Arendt’s mind, really deserve, cast it in the role of an arrogant intruder, its pompous usurpation of the stage of a piece with Arendt’s skeptical assessment of the trial as orchestrated by the state. The comedy that Eichmann enacts thus takes place within a series of comic episodes, all of which are implicated in Arendt’s assessment of the proper role language and languages should play in the trial. Arendt’s insistence on a comic tone shares features with a comic response to the Holocaust as formulated by Terrence Des Pres: in such an approach, “pity and terror are held at a distance, and this is not, finally, a bad thing . . . by setting things at a distance it permits us a tougher, more active response. We are not wholly, as in tragedy’s serious style, compelled to a standstill by the matter we behold.”24 Although Des Pres takes for his examples exclusively literary works (by Borowski, Epstein, and Spiegelman) that focus on the victim, the aspects of distance and toughness especially dovetail with Arendt’s iconoclastic reporting of a notorious persecutor’s trial. If so, Arendt’s designation of levels of linguistic comedy carry mixed signals, faulting German and Hebrew for distorting the events yet turning to the comic as a means of obtaining distance and a tougher – that is, less partisan – response. As we will see, the distance obtained finds its apt linguistic correlative with the English in which Arendt actually writes her trial report.

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The (German) Language Remains If Eichmann’s defeat at the hands of German, as it were, accounts for his particular brand of evil, German nevertheless, in Arendt’s view, escapes from the encounter intact. Indeed, the German language is one of the few entities that maintains such integrity. In an interview given shortly after the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt emphasizes that German, her mother tongue, continues to provide her with a link – perhaps the only link – to pre-war Germany. “When you come to Europe,” asks interviewer Günther Gaus,“what, in your impression, remains and what is irretrievably lost?” Arendt’s response insists on the singular importance of language: “The Europe of the pre-Hitler period? I do not long for that, I can tell you . What remains? The language remains.”25 The language that remains is German, and it is the thread of language – the continued vitality of German – that connects pre-war and postwar Europe. Indeed, the notion of remaining, of holding steady despite all changes, has a double aspect.

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First, the language itself neither suffered from nor was implicated in the crimes that the Nazis perpetrated. “It wasn’t,” as Arendt puts it forcibly, “the German language that went crazy.”26 Individuals and even a nation might have gone crazy, might have violated the norms of civilization. But the German language was not complicit. Such a view runs counter to that expressed by George Steiner a few years previously, where Steiner tied the history of the German language inextricably to the specific attributes of the German nationalism responsible for the Holocaust. According to Steiner, moreover, the officialese that the Nazis nurtured damaged the language to a degree that it continued to be scarred in the postwar period. 27 For Arendt, however, the language managed to escape, providing the last refuge that Europe had to offer. 28 [103], (10) Displaced from the Germany that had once been her home and compelled to live in places – primarily Paris and New York – dominated by other languages, Arendt, even as she embraced the tongue of her host country, Lines: 170 to 1 took particular care to maintain her facility in German: “The German ——— language is the essential thing that has remained and,” as Arendt pointedly 12.8pt PgV 29 adds, “that I have always consciously preserved.” If German, not having ——— gone crazy, remained a vital linguistic medium in postwar Europe, so it also Normal Page served Arendt as such. Indeed, her preservation of German meant main* PgEnds: Eject taining a relation to the mother tongue that, in Arendt’s estimation, not everyone so scrupulously tended: “People can forget their mother tongue. [103], (10) That’s true – I’ve seen it,” she testifies, giving a sense that she, in a different way than Eichmann, had to carry on her own fight not with, but on behalf of, the German language. According to Arendt, this act of conscious preservation has particularly high stakes: “There are people who speak the new language better than I do. I still speak with a very heavy accent, and I often speak unidiomatically. They can all do these things correctly. But they do them in a language in which one cliché chases another because the productivity that one has in one’s own language is cut off when one forgets that language.”30 What is at stake is nothing less than the moral quality of thought and expression. This Arendt signals by invoking the notion of cliché, the same notion that characterized Eichmann’s (and Germany’s) pathology and abetted the lethal, if banal, transgressions that he (and they) committed. Forgetting one’s language was another way that the reification to which the term “cliché” points could take hold. Faithfully preserving German, on the other hand, despite the unpolished veneer of accent and the occasional

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malapropism that were the side effects of such loyalty, kept Arendt lucid. “I have always,” Arendt declared to Gaus, “consciously refused to lose my mother tongue.”31 This refusing to lose or to let go was more than simply maintaining the ability to speak or read a native language. It was rather making sure that German continued to inform what she wrote and said, even when, paradoxically, she was conversing in a foreign tongue. 32 The stake that Arendt had in German is thus clear and also accounts for her highlighting the judges’ determination to use German, their mother tongue. Indeed, their decision to acknowledge German as a legitimate language of the court conveys that the “language remains,” that, despite everything, German can continue to be employed to establish truth. Hence, Arendt’s appreciation for the judges’ recourse to German comes because [104], (11 their position so closely mirrors her own. It is perhaps for this reason that Arendt, speaking appreciatively of Judge Landau’s German interventions during the trial, notes that it was his “mother tongue.” Landau, in other Lines: 177 words, treated the language with the care that Arendt continued to feel toward it. This sentiment went against what might have been expected. As ——— 10.4284 refugees from Germany, the judges were also compelled to speak the lan——— guage of their new home. Moreover, the criminal they faced represented Normal Pa the Germany they had been forced to leave. They might be expected to distance themselves from the German language to demonstrate their dis- * PgEnds: Pa tance from the perpetrators. Nevertheless, they persisted in using German when needed and, just as significant for Arendt, they refused to distance [104], (11 themselves from it, to confer a second-class position on the language. For them, too, the language remained. The judges’ acknowledgment of their mother tongue as a civilizing force was especially important in light of the role German, according to Arendt, had played in Eichmann’s crime. But the German against which Eichmann carried out his heroic struggle was not the German of the honest judges or of Arendt. Indeed, their use of German to further the cause of justice shows how far Eichmann was from being a representative speaker of German. To be sure, Germany shared his propensity for cliché, and in this way he represented the average German as well as the fanatic Nazi. But he was alienated from the German language, an entity that, for Arendt, was different and separate from the nation. Indeed, from a certain perspective, he did not speak German at all but “officialese,” a language made up exclusively of clichés. 33 It was exactly this officialese that the mother tongue of Arendt – and, presumably, of the judges – opposed.

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You Write in English Now? Celebrating German and chastising Hebrew, Arendt nevertheless wrote about the trial in yet a third language, English. Arendt had little facility in English when she immigrated to the United States in 1941. But soon after her arrival, she arranged to learn English by studying it intensively, spending several months away from her home, husband, and New York to expedite the process. 34 Later that year she wrote her first letter in English, a proposal to Theodore Gastner to write an essay for a scholarly journal edited by Arendt’s friend, Salo Baron. By the mid-1940s, Arendt was writing essays regularly in English, and at the end of the decade published in English a major treatise, The Origins of Totalitarianism. By the time she wrote her report on the Eichmann trial in the early 1960s, she had made it the primary language in which she wrote. Despite being a seasoned commentator in English, Arendt nevertheless remained tentative about expressing herself in her adopted tongue. In the interview with Günther Gaus from this period, Arendt, in response to Gaus’s query, reflects on her relation to English. Having mentioned that Arendt writes in English, Gaus pursues its implications: “I wanted to ask you that. You write in English now?” Arendt confirms this but also qualifies what such writing means: “I write in English, but I have never lost a feeling of distance from it.”35 Having used English as her main tool of critical analysis for several decades, Arendt nonetheless emphasizes the sense in which her mastery of the language is incomplete. To make clear that the distance she is referring to is not trivial, she goes on to measure what English means in contrast to her mother tongue: “There is a tremendous distance between your mother tongue and another language.”Arendt elaborates her relation to English as a general precept in order to suggest that, no matter the degree of accomplishment, the adopted tongue will never have the same intimacy for the speaker as the native one. Voicing this common appreciation for the distinctiveness of the mother tongue, Arendt seems not so much to be apologizing for what she is unable to do in English as to deepen the perplexity implied in Gaus’s initial question – a question, we recall, put in German in an interview slated to appear on German television. Between the lines of this question, one hears Gaus probing the reason why Arendt would forego her mother tongue in deference to an adopted one, indeed not to her second, French, but a third language? In response, Arendt returns to the issue (or strategy?) of distance and how that distance affects her writing: “I do things in German that I

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would not permit myself to do in English. That is, sometimes I do them in English too, because I have become bold, but in general I have maintained a certain distance.”36 If German as mother tongue allows Arendt complete freedom of expression, English as adopted one places certain constraints; it compels Arendt to limit that freedom. There are times where she uses English as she does German – where she momentarily forgets the “tremendous distance” that defines the separation between adopted and mother tongue. There are times where the two do take on a kind of identity. At these moments, English goes beyond the limits that Arendt has set for it. If distance was the norm and the defining feature of her relation to English, Arendt also, moved by what she called boldness, chose on occasion to treat English as she did her mother tongue. But such confusion of roles was rare. This mixture of tentativeness and boldness shaped aspects of Arendt’s writing and thinking and impelled her, at times, to turn for help to native English speakers. Among these, Mary McCarthy looms as pivotal. Arendt and McCarthy, popular American author of fiction, memoir, and essay, met in the 1940s and cultivated an intimate friendship for the remainder of their lives. During these years, they regularly read and critiqued each other’s work. Importantly, McCarthy, whose mother tongue was English, edited and, in Carol Brightman’s phrase, “Englished” some of Arendt’s writing. 37 Strikingly, McCarthy’s intimacy with and respect for Arendt did not prevent her from taking issue with Arendt’s English. From the outset, McCarthy thought it her prerogative to point out Arendt’s errors, a task McCarthy performed at times with inflated rhetoric. In the first letter, mainly dedicated to praising Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, McCarthy draws attention to Arendt’s grammatical lapses: “there are a few barbarisms, such as the use of ‘ignore’ to mean ‘be ignorant of ’ that are of no consequence but might be corrected in another edition.”38 McCarthy evidently thought that there was no dissonance in referring to grammatical errors as “barbarisms” when commenting on a book devoted to totalitarianism. McCarthy most likely invoked such strident terms to display for Arendt her command of English and to demonstrate her own intellectual credentials. McCarthy’s reservations regarding Arendt’s inexact English eventually became more significant. In what has become an influential challenge to Arendt’s formulation of the notion of evil, McCarthy criticized Arendt’s use in a lecture, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” of the word “thoughtlessness” to describe the state of mind that accompanies and gives rise to acts of evil. Although the letter in which McCarthy’s comments appear was

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written in 1971, it addresses issues directly linked to Arendt’s formulation of the notion of the banality of evil and are therefore worth quoting at length: I have one objection to your vocabulary. “Thoughtlessness.” It doesn’t mean what you want it to mean in English, not any more; the sense you are trying to impose on it is given in the big OED as “Now Rare.” And it seems to me a mistake to force a key word in an essay to mean what it doesn’t normally, even when the reader understands what you are trying to say with it. Not to mention the cases when the reader will fail to understand and read it as heedlessness, neglect, forgetfulness, etc. 39

What McCarthy calls attention to here is no longer a matter of grammar. 40 At issue now is at the conceptual center of the argument. Arendt uses a word that, according to McCarthy, cannot work to clarify the argument Arendt wishes to make regarding the danger inherent in the inability to think. Surprisingly, the question is not at bottom one of understanding. “Even when the reader understands,” McCarthy remonstrates, the word still does not belong in the essay. She issues this judgment because Arendt, in McCarthy’s powerful phrase, “force[s]” “thoughtlessness” “to mean what it doesn’t normally” as if Arendt had resorted to an act of linguistic aggression to carry home a point about the moral failures that led to much more costly acts of aggression. This inexact use of a key word is likely one of those instances that Arendt had referred to as a “becoming bold,” a willingness to use English in ways that she would usually only reserve for her mother tongue. Indeed, one wonders whether Arendt, in a gesture similar to that of her teacher Heidegger, was deliberately drawing on the meaning of a word that came from an earlier period, believing that its being “now rare” in current usage would not hinder understanding but rather facilitate it. But McCarthy was not sympathetic to such linguistic boldness, protesting later in life against what “Hannah was trying to do to [the English] language – a kind of violation that it wouldn’t take.”41 The degree of violation that either author or editor felt English could take is not entirely clear. When “Thinking and Moral Considerations” was published in 1971, Arendt, apparently responding to McCarthy’s censure, had removed “thoughtlessness” and replaced it with “a curious, quite authentic inability to think.”42 But Arendt’s boldness would not let the issue rest. For when Arendt integrated the material from her lecture into her final opus, The Life of the Mind, “thoughtlessness” reappeared. Moreover, although McCarthy had so resolutely taken issue with Arendt, she chose when editing (and Englishing) The Life of the Mind to let “thoughtlessness” stand. 43

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Drawing on McCarthy’s strictures, Seyla Benhabib is one of the few critics who has addressed the implications of Arendt’s violation of English in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Indeed, Benhabib’s analysis implies that forcing English “to mean what it doesn’t normally” may have had a significant role in alienating readers of Arendt’s report. Benhabib’s broader discussion locates the contention around issues of narrative and, more specifically, how Arendt failed to find the kind of narrative and narrative voice appropriate to the subject of the Holocaust. But Arendt’s failure, Benhabib claims, was only a more dramatic instance of what occurred generally in this period: “Hannah Arendt was punished by the Jewish community precisely because she, like so many others who were also Holocaust survivors, had not found the right public language, the right dictum through which to narrate past sorrow, suffering and loss.”44 In this account, Arendt is a victim of her time. There was in the early 1960s no forum for survivors to tell their story without encountering resistance from the audience. Benhabib suggests moreover that the resistance came more from the Jewish than nonJewish community, a contention only partially borne out by contemporary reactions to Eichmann in Jerusalem. In seeking a narrative voice, Arendt was groping to find both the right “dictum” and the appropriate subject position. (That Arendt, according to Benhabib, had found it before in earlier writings makes explanation more difficult as to why she this time felt so much at a loss.) In any case, Arendt’s boldness with English contributes to this abandonment of an appropriate narrative voice. Specifically, Benhabib turns to McCarthy’s censure of Arendt for trying to make English do what it was not meant to. Benhabib takes seriously both Arendt’s transgression and McCarthy’s strictures: “Arendt forced the English language into a procrustean bed to convey her own complex, and perhaps even ultimately confused, reflections on the issue of personal responsibility under dictatorships.”45 Benhabib’s gloss on McCarthy suggests that the violation may have been more a symptom than confusion, a gesture that reflects the disturbing issues that Arendt was trying to make sense of. That Arendt may have forced her adopted language to perform in ways that were beyond its capacity and that resulted in its distortion has an eerie echo of a victim-perpetrator relationship, of one side compelling the other to engage in activities that cannot help but debase. Benhabib also views these violations in the larger context of Arendt’s project. With these concepts Arendt was attempting both to revise her own thoughts about evil that she had set forth in The Origins of Totalitarianism

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and to counter conventional notions of thinking about evil in the Western tradition of philosophy. Given Arendt’s effort to revise and innovate, the concepts thus carried a special burden. But the terms Arendt used confused rather than clarified her position. Indeed, the terms were, according to Benhabib, “greatly misleading” – her own terminology here recalling that of Hersey’s fictional translators who, we recall, were concerned lest their translation from Yiddish to English would “mislead.” Although in the case of Hersey the concern centers on importing cultural biases and in the case of Arendt on conceptual clarity or confusion, the problems voiced by both focus on the way that rendering crucial issues of the Holocaust into English could represent the Holocaust in a manner that falsifies. The nuanced violations of which Arendt’s English was said to be culpable may even have shaped the famous exchange between Arendt and Gershom Scholem. The two had been friends for many years, the friendship persisting despite heated disagreement on a substantial number of crucial issues. 46 But Eichmann in Jerusalem brought these disagreements to a head. Repelled by both the style and content of Arendt’s analysis, Scholem felt it was incumbent upon him to set the record straight. Arendt replied in turn. The exchange was published not long after. 47 It did not, however, clear the air and Scholem ended the friendship. One of the problems that, according to Scholem, tainted Arendt’s report was the tone that she “employe[d] so often in the course of [her] book.” Strikingly, Scholem, writing in his native German, calls upon English to specify Arendt’s transgression : “Fur den Stil der Leichtherzigkeit, ich meine das englishche flippancy, den Sie nur allzu oft in Ihrem Buche dafur aufbringen, habe ich keine Sympathie” (For the tone of lightheartedness, well expressed by the English flippancy, which you employ so often in the course of your book, I have no sympathy). Scholem intuits that it takes an English expression – the only one that he uses in his response – to capture the nature of Arendt’s inappropriate approach to the subject. It is as if the particular tone that she takes toward matters profound, set forth in her English, can only be characterized by an English word. Scholem’s concern with the gap that divides tone and subject matter – a concern that moves him to rupture his German prose and import an English word – mirrors Arendt’s own preoccupation with the comic dimensions of the trial, which in each case pointed out how a misalignment of language and subject matter was consequential.

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A Certain Distance: Writing in English Whatever boldness Arendt attempted to interject into her use of English, she contrasted, as we recall, the liberties that she permitted herself to take with German over against the restraint imposed upon her by her distance from English . Yet it may have been this distance that made English the appropriate language in which to pen her report on the Eichmann trial. To be sure, Arendt, living in the United States, had by this time chosen English as the language in which she predominantly wrote. It would in that sense have been more of a surprise – and perhaps more consequential – had she turned to German or French (the languages that she knew well but didn’t generally write in) to review and analyze the trial’s proceedings. As we have seen, however, the issue of languages was at the forefront of her concern from the beginning of her arrival in Jerusalem (attested by her correspondence to Jaspers) and from the opening pages of the report itself. Neither the nature of Eichmann’s crime nor even the struggle over how to conduct the trial occupied Arendt as much as the languages through which the proceedings were transmitted, translated, defended, and judged. Indeed, the drastically different versions of the trial that were reported to the world were among her initial observations. The immense variability of this reportage was thus in her awareness as she drafted her own report. Writing in English made Arendt’s book what it is in several ways. To begin with, Arendt implicitly placed herself in line with two historians, Gerald Reitlinger and Raul Hilberg, who themselves had written major historical works in English on the Holocaust. Clearly,Arendt drew on a wide a range of primary and secondary sources in the languages to which she had access. It is nevertheless these two to whom she turned most frequently to document or (more clearly the case with Hilberg) to interpret the facts of the case. 48 Eichmann in Jerusalem also attempts to argue the case from the legal point of view and to insist, moreover, that the courtroom should be guided by legal rather than national, ethnic, or political concerns. Arendt’s belief that the court itself, in spite of the judges’ resistance, had been subjected to a show trial moved her to highlight what the trial had left out and to write the report in a tone that would provide a clear alternative to the official version as represented by Gideon Hausner. As one critic puts it, Arendt’s effort aimed to counter Hausner’s narrative based on traditional patterns of Jewish history with a narrative based on universal concerns. 49 English helped her subvert these claims. Standing outside the languages of either

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the prosecution or the defense, English offered a position of neutrality, an appeal to universal sensibility beyond parochial interests (including, it might be said, her own loyalty to German) that attempted to lay claim to the court. 50 “Law,” as Shoshana Felman has argued, “distances the Holocaust.” It achieves this distance by demarcating “a suffering that seemed both unending and unbearable.”51 Maintaining what she referred to as a “certain distance” from the language in which she wrote, Arendt would thus seem to have found in English the perfect vehicle by which to reinforce law’s propensity to place distance between trauma and its aftermath. She had in fact designated it as the language of interdiction, the one in which she would not permit herself to do what she could in her native tongue. The very fact that it was not her mother tongue conferred on it a specific set of limits. Definition, restraint, proscription were essential facets of Arendt’s relation to English. The traits of law thus inhered in the English that Arendt wrote, reinforcing her efforts to lobby for a sober legal assessment of Eichmann’s case. But the English in which she wrote was not fully in sync with her goal. Refusing to honor the limits that she had set for herself, Arendt coined phrases and terms that puzzled and, at times, even enraged her audience. She thus compromised the distance that she had sought to maintain. Striving to render English into a sober legal language that would compel all communities to take account of the implications of the Holocaust, Arendt at crucial places violated conventions of English. The result was that she often alienated those readers to whom she was closest. At bottom, her struggle with English was likely the other side of her refusal to let go of an accent. Insistent that her spoken English would remain that of a foreigner, her writing also remained thus. This dual legacy points to a new emphasis within English writing on the Holocaust. Yet I first turn to the film adaptation of Wallant’s The Pawnbroker. Released after of Arendt’s report and while the controversy over it still raged, the changes the film wrought upon the novel best show the new challenges faced by English in the wake of Eichmann in Jerusalem.

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chapter 7

Say “Good Boy” Legitimizing English in Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker

In its fusion of multilingual strategies with avant-garde film technique, the changes it renders on the novel, and the issues it raises in its own right, Sidney’s Lumet’s film adaptation of The Pawnbroker (1965) advances the discussion of English in relation to the Holocaust. Not only does the film integrate accent as an important dimension, but it also incorporates rival languages, making English vie for legitimacy. Moreover, several aspects of the film, including its approach to victim and persecutor, attest that it came in the wake of Arendt’s report. Finally, director Lumet’s career was launched in the Yiddish theater, a linguistic point of departure that arguably enabled him to test in ways different than Wallant’s the capacity of English to deal with the Holocaust. As Wallant’s protagonist approaches his place of business, it is the special pawnshop sign that brings home to Nazerman the cruel twist of fate he has suffered: But when he got to the store, he could not resist a grimace at the sight of the three gilded balls hanging over the doorway. It was no more than a joke in rather poor taste that had led to this. Still, he could never evade the foolish idea, each morning when he first looked at the ugly symbol of his calling, that the sign was the result of some particularly diabolic vandalism perpetrated during the night by an unknown tormentor. 1

In the film adaptation of The Pawnbroker, the three balls of the pawnshop sign, the “ugly symbol” of the profession, continues to hover above the Harlem shop. But the storefront also displays something not in the novel: descriptions of merchandise appear in both English and Spanish, conveying the bilingual nature of the Spanish Harlem of the 1960s. In contrast to the novel, the film overtly draws on these multiple languages, leaving English to compete for a legitimate place in representing the present and remembering



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the past. Not only do Jerusalem streets display multilingual signs bearing mixed messages. And as in the case of the sign giving directions to Yad Vashem, vandals play a role in giving the sign its burdened connotations. Like most adaptations, the film version of The Pawnbroker, which was begun in 1961 and released in 1965, modifies some elements of the novel while leaving others intact. 2 The focus on a survivor surely remains, as does the pawnshop that serves as a front for organized crime. Yet the film revises the role of English in relation to the Holocaust in three telling ways. The first posits an explicit relation between legitimacy and English. The second problematizes the relation between English and the representation of memory. And the third, responding to the claims of mimesis by conferring an accent on the protagonist, alters the conception of traumatic English. The issue of legitimacy arises in connection with Jesus Ortiz, the pawnbroker’s assistant. Described as a “Negro” in the novel, he is transformed in the film into a Puerto Rican, a transformation that activates issues of language as well as ethnicity. Indeed, these issues are present from the outset. Jesus’s first appearance in the film shows him outlawing Spanish in favor of English: mrs. ortiz: Ahe esta tu Jefe, Jesus (There’s your boss, Jesus). jesus: No Spanish, mama, no Spanish, English. 3

Demanding that his mother forsake her native Spanish and speak the tongue of the future, Jesus associates English with legitimacy, with going straight. No more, Mama! No more stealin’, no more numbers – no more peddlin’ – no more nothin’. Strictly lee-git. ok? 4

Just as he gives up illicit ways of making money and aims at licit and respectable business, so English will assist him on that path, a path that ostensibly demands aggressive acculturation. 5 That Ortiz would have English at his command, let alone demand it of his mother, was not to be taken for granted in this period. “The shift to a new language,” wrote Daniel Moynihan and Nathan Glazer in their influential 1963 study, “has been peculiarly difficult for the Puerto Ricans. We can only speculate about the reasons why Jews and even Italians, coming into the city at roughly the same ages, with much less formal knowledge of English, should have made a rather better linguistic adjustment.”6 Although both Glazer and Lumet yoke linguistic facility to social legitimacy, Glazer emphasizes the disability of Puerto Rican youth while Lumet, especially

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by way of Ortiz, stresses the multilingual resourcefulness of that youth. Indeed, Ortiz is the only figure (Puerto Rican, Jewish, Italian, or otherwise) in the film who is shown negotiating multiple languages. His declaration on behalf of English thus has behind it the apparent failure of a community to master what others already have acquired. English initially, then, has the upper hand. But if Jesus decrees against speaking Spanish, the film counters by presenting scenes of unsubtitled Spanish dialogue. Not to include subtitles was no casual decision on the part of the filmmakers. Indeed, the shooting script is emphatically clear in its instructions, issued in capital letters: “NOTE: THIS SCENE IS TO PLAY IN ITS ORIGINAL LANGUAGE (SPANISH). DO NOT TITLE OR DUB.” The film thus issues a decree to match Jesus’s own, placing English out of the picture much the way that Jesus attempted to do with Spanish. Hence English is no longer the sole standard of legitimacy; it must give way to other languages, a tactic that compels the English-speaking audience to recognize the limitations inherent in the mastery of English. The Spanish dialogue scene itself turns around the issues of language. Shown taking a bath, Jesus converses with his mother in Spanish. Beginning as casual talk, the dialogue evolves into a language lesson, in which Jesus teaches his mother how to say in English “good boy.” In contrast to the opening scene, Jesus now no longer simply decrees that his mother his mother speak English. Instead of rejecting the minority’s language in favor of the official one, Jesus works for change from within, speaking Spanish while teaching his mother English. By resisting subtitles, the film both legitimates the Spanish that they speak and holds at bay the English that threatens to be the measure of everything worthwhile. Indeed, the English phrase that Jesus uses to conduct the language lesson – “I am a good boy” – refers more to the ideal than the actual, the good boy that he hopes to become rather than the unreliable boy he is – and will be. Moreover, his mother initially confuses the phrase “good boy” with “good-bye”: jesus: Say “good boy.” mrs. ortiz (spanish): Oh, it’s the same when you say “good-bye”? jesus (spanish): No, it’s another thing. 7

Despite Jesus’s common-sense declaration (“No, it’s another thing”), we are invited to hear the play between the phrases as intimating the tragedy that will ensue when Jesus attempts to live up to his ideal and protect Nazerman from a gunman; the final good-bye will come when Jesus endeavors to be the good boy. 8 The language lesson thus serves as a lesson in reading

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English, not only (or mainly) in distinguishing words that sound alike but in discovering the interplay between them. What would have remained simply another thing if viewed solely within English parlance takes on other connotations when perceived from the estranging distance of a foreign speaker. The film version thus makes language into an explicit arena of struggle. The consequences for English are twofold. On the one hand, it serves as a tool for obtaining legitimacy and for leaving behind the illicit activity that, because of the danger associated with it, threatens to cut off life almost before it begins. If it is the son who wishes that his mother conform to the English of the majority culture, it is the mother who urges the son to take the straight path. Both share an aspiration to middle-class security, and English is apparently one of the means by which such a station can be reached. On the other hand, the film also, by allowing Spanish to be spoken without the mediation of subtitles or dubbing, delegitimizes English as the taken-for-granted tongue of the film and of the country that produced it. The film’s nonnative speakers of English, moreover, are the ones who illuminate the latent connections within their adopted tongue, juxtaposing phrases (“good-bye” and “good boy,” for instance) that would have escaped detection by a native speaker. English seen through foreign eyes thus corresponds to the dominant element of the film’s visual style. For the juxtaposition of seemingly unlike elements in order to reveal more fundamental connections parallels the technique of montage – Lumet’s use of which, according to Annette Insdorf, defines the special filmic character of The Pawnbroker. 9 The analogy can also work the other way. From this angle, montage – the radical technique of editing that attempts to provide a correlative for the protagonist’s terrible struggle with traumatic memory – corresponds to English as seen through foreign eyes. It is hence English made foreign that serves as the structuring principle for Lumet’s conception of trauma. Having challenged the taken-for-granted position of English, the film deploys other languages with even greater cunning. More precisely, Lumet takes over the novel’s strategy of using foreign languages as the media of memory. But he alters it in two ways. First, he shifts the scenes of memory from dreams to hallucinations; it is no longer the private realm of the bedroom and sleep that prompts the otherwise repressed memory. In the film, events in Nazerman’s present life trigger relevant associations of the past. This shift means that reading no longer plays the role that it did in the

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novel. Lumet eliminates reading as a habit and theme by means of which Nazerman in the novel continued to absorb the culture of Europe and to retrieve the self he once was. Freed from the book, traumatic memory now enters unmediated by culture. Hence, the film sharpens the division between present and past, between Nazerman the pawnbroker and Nazerman the professor. The disappearance of reading from the film version also correlates with the shift in media. Whereas by way of repeated scenes of reading Wallant drew attention to novelistic issues that he himself faced, Lumet, moving from literature to film, could afford to excise this selfreferential literary dimension. Displaced from scenes of private reading, languages nevertheless reenter the film in a bolder fashion. Appearing without dubbing or subtitles, the scenes of Holocaust memory appear almost exclusively in tongues other than English, or without language at all. Moreover, until the final moments of the film, English remains a language only for the present. Lumet’s conception of memory pivots on the technique of the flash cut or flashback. The technique gained notoriety in the 1950s in association with the French New Wave, and in particular with Alain Resnais’s 1959 production, Hiroshima mon amour. 10 Although many reviewers had no doubt that The Pawnbroker borrowed its use of flashbacks from the French avant-garde, Lumet himself rejected such an association, instead positing an American lineage deriving from director John Ford. 11 Whatever the technique’s origin, the scenes of memory – the flash cuts that may or may not be borrowed from the French avant-garde – are radically inarticulate. 12 The opening scene establishes this pattern: filmed in slow motion, the scene shows a family picnic – children, wife and husband, grandparents – taking place in a pastoral setting. Graceful at play, content with rest, busy with menial tasks, those in the scene are nonetheless strangely bereft of dialogue. Indeed, this strange sense of soundlessness – an echo, as it were, from the period of silent films 13 – is brought home when the woman calls and waves to the man: we paradoxically see the call but hear nothing. This voicelessness, moreover, becomes symbolic of the scene’s relation to the rest of the film. 14 It is the next scene – a second family gathering in the backyard of a suburban home – that introduces the flash cuts of memory, the technique most reminiscent of European art cinema. Prompted by a remark about an upcoming anniversary, Nazerman briefly recalls the woman, his wife, from the first picnic scene. Significantly, the recollected fragment is that of the soundless call of the woman. Indeed, the soundless call becomes

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emblematic of the flash cut technique: appearing on the screen barely long enough for the eye to register, the fleeting image is incapable – simply because it is too brief – of producing articulate sound. Once the film brings the viewer into the city itself, the trope of inarticulate memory goes in two directions: toward the animal and toward the foreign. Leaving the pawnshop, Nazerman hears the barking of a dog, which triggers the memory of a barking German shepherd that, with a guard in pursuit, chases after a concentration camp prisoner. The barking continues, soon accompanied by German commands – without subtitles – and eventually the dog pins the prisoner on a fence. It is striking that the operation of a “trigger” – based on the principle that something from the present can recall something analogous from the past – is introduced [117], (6) here by sound and, moreover, by an aggressively nonverbal sound. 15 The strategy suggests that the present and past are connected by that which is inarticulate. Left without subtitles, the German commands also conLines: 145 to 1 vey more sound than sense, implying a malevolence intensified by being ——— incomprehensible. Further, the barking and the commands mutually in12.8pt PgV terpenetrate, the German commands infusing the barking with a kind of ——— predatory intelligence and the barking in turn contaminating the German Normal Page with the merely animalistic. 16 Thus, although in this scene memory begins * PgEnds: Eject to speak – it is no longer uncannily soundless – it does so without being conventionally articulate or comprehensible. [117], (6) Up to this point, these flashes of inarticulate memory have surfaced in the suburbs or on the city streets. The next scene returns to the soundlessness of the opening but integrates the eruption of memory into the arena of the pawnshop. Tellingly, an object of pawn – a fake diamond engagement ring – acts as the trigger. The specific flash cut here, showing a German guard taking rings from hands outstretched on barbed wire, creates a kind of tableau of plunder; emptied of sound and word, memory exists as a monument, a ritualized violation of European Jewry that says nothing, however, about its relation to the one who remembers. Indeed, the plundering of the rings is the single extended memory sequence in which Nazerman himself does not appear. The sequence thus suggests a memory so general, so undistinguished by personal violation, that it can be detached from the agent of memory. Anonymous and detached, it likewise remains soundless and, as such, inarticulate. In contrast, the memory sequence that follows, showing Nazerman’s wife serving as a prostitute in a Nazi concentration camp brothel, focuses on a scene of

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extreme personal violation. 17 The sequence is set in motion when Mabel Wheatley, the black prostitute girlfriend of Ortiz, pays an after-hours visit to the pawnbroker, hoping to make extra money by offering him a “private session.”To further spark his interest, the prostitute undresses, and the sight of her naked body eventually triggers the memory of Nazerman’s wife’s ordeal of prostitution. The violation is, moreover, made more terrible by the fact that Nazerman himself, by requesting information about his wife and her whereabouts, has induced the Nazi guard to take him to witness her humiliation at the hands of the SS. Yet the scene never gives voice to Nazerman’s inquiries. As with the preceding memories, this one, too, is left inarticulate, the soundless gestures of most of the actors alternating with the Nazi guard’s single insistent question in German (without subtitles): “Wilst du was sehen?” [Do you want to look at something?]. Here again, left without subtitles or translation, the German remains incomprehensible and thus barbaric, the tongue of the persecutors that accompanies opaquely the tortures they inflict. The film further nuances the effects of the incomprehension. Once naked, Mabel repeatedly commands Nazerman to “Look . . . Look . . . That’s it. . . . Look,” believing that looking will increase the likelihood that he will accede to a deal. To be sure, on one level the command to look only serves to drive Nazerman deeper into the past. But on another level, Mabel’s command to look nearly approximates the German “Wilst du was sehen?” Here the opacity nearly gives way, almost permitting memory to speak in the English of the present. It is nevertheless the nearness of translation that reminds the audience that memory continues to operate exclusively in a foreign language (or a language foreign to the film), further underscoring the opacity of German as a figure of memory. 18 Indeed, in the final flash cut, memory will claim English and emerge as articulate. 19 But before that can happen, The Pawnbroker will take up, and ultimately reject, a different mode of representing memory. The different mode of memory comes by way of Nazerman’s visit to Marilyn Birchfield, the social worker who has tried with little success to strike up a friendship or romance with the pawnbroker. The scene is original to the film, and it is here that Nazerman for the first, and only, time openly alludes to memories of prewar Europe – “We had . . . we had . . . a river in Germany” – and attempts, if tentatively, to recount what happened during the war. But what started as a narration of memory quickly becomes inhibited:

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It’s just that there have been memories that I had, well, I thought that I had pushed them far away from me and they keep rushing in, and then they’re words, words that I thought I had kept myself from hearing . . . and now they flood my mind . . . 20

On the edge of disclosure, memory is disabled not by lack but by surfeit, by too much too fast. 21 Indeed, the sequence moves from memory to words to flood. Strikingly, it is through the metaphor of water that memory is overwhelmed, as if what was told – “We had a river in Germany” – takes over, disabling articulation through speed (“rushing in”) and excess (“flood my mind”). And yet, paradoxically, English here can begin to speak about memory even while memory itself is, as it were, kept at bay. The scene also plays off a previous encounter. In an earlier meeting of Nazerman and Birchfield, she confides to him her memory of loss, an attempt to make her situation analogous to his own: There was nothing wrong until one day I discovered that I’d acquired a most excruciating malady . . . loneliness . . . and one day there was a young man . . . we fell in love . . . we got married – he died – like that. His heart just stopped. And I found out that loneliness is the normal state of affairs . . . for most people. 22

On the balcony of her apartment, it is his turn to tell of loss, to make a gesture that mirrors hers. But he not so much tells as withholds, informing her not what happened but what didn’t: “What happened? I did not die.” Constrained by its own idiom, Nazerman’s awkward attempt to relate the memories of the war and his commentary on memory itself allows English, nevertheless, to emerge as a language of memory in the flashback to the deportation by trains that follows his scene with Birchfield. Leaving the apartment, Nazerman boards a subway and proceeds to walk silently as he looks for a seat, during which time the camera grotesquely pans the accompanying passengers. The crowded subway car soon triggers flash cuts to the crowded boxcar in which Nazerman and family were deported. And here, finally, memory becomes articulate: Nazerman and his wife call to one another – in English – trying to save the life of their son. To be sure, there are other reasons why English is here conscripted into this role. Mimetically, it would be appropriate to use German since those in the freight car are, we assume, like Nazerman, German Jews (the film, we recall, changed Nazerman from a Polish to a German Jew). But German has already been associated with animality and barbarism and thus would be

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difficult to hear as a language of the victim. So the film instead inverts the terms that it has used up till now: the present, the subway car that triggers the memory, is soundless; the flashback itself brazenly borrows the English of the present to represent the past. The inversion suggests that, with the terrible death of his son – the incident that most profoundly marks the train scene – the past has taken over, supplanted, even erased, the present. Eventually, the losses of the present succeed those of the past, with the death of the assistant, Ortiz, following hard upon that of the son. The logic of inarticulate memory nevertheless accounts for the silent scream that is, at the film’s conclusion, Nazerman’s reaction to the assistant’s death. Generally viewed as an unprecedented gesture, the specific form of this scream, rather, proceeds directly from the strategies of memory, utterance, and silence pursued throughout the film. For just as the English from the present has in the train scene taken over the past, so the soundlessness from the past – from the realm of memory – here takes over the present, forming the idiom of grief. Nazerman’s silent cry, moreover, alludes to the soundless call of his wife, enfolding his loss of her into his present grief – it is, after all, the anniversary of her death, the reference to which set in motion the initial flash cut of the film. This layering of a man’s cry over a woman’s enters in another way: “The voiceless cry over the body of the boy at the end,” writes Stanley Kaufmann, “is presumably modeled on the celebrated similar moment of Helene Weigel in the Berliner Ensemble’s Mother Courage.”23 This choir image of male and female voices, seeing the male not weakened but strengthened by feminization, goes in a direction counter to previous interpretations of The Pawnbroker that have assumed feminization implies weakness. 24 If Kaufmann is correct, German, formerly bearing only associations of the barbaric, reenters the film in a new elegiac guise. At this moment, then, the film’s idioms of past and present fully merge; the death of Nazerman’s assistant bears witness to the perils of teaching, even as memory – his own, his wife’s, Europe’s, the film’s – speaks through his voiceless cry. 25 English cannot match the horrible silent scream that serves as a final comment. But it has gained a great deal. Excluded initially from the memory scenes of Holocaust Europe, English finally edges its way in. The specific way that it does – from within a train as victims are deported to the camps – is significant in several ways. In Wallant’s novel, the scene of deportation came first among the memories; the memories that follow unfold according to the chronology of events. In Lumet’s version, the deportation comes nearly last, placed so as to lead into the death of the pawnbroker’s assistant

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shortly after. The film thus replaces chronological logic with a thematic one, favoring metaphor over metonymy. In the novel, the loss of the son is the first blow; other numbing losses succeed that initial one until Nazerman, as a member of the Sonderkommando, is compelled to confront his wife’s remains. In the film, the death of the son in the train precedes the death of the symbolic son in the pawnshop. The traumatic logic by which the present recapitulates the past is made immediate through the effects of montage. And yet even with this entry into the events of the Holocaust, English still remains outside the epicenter, never as it were reaching the camp. This culminating scene thus replays in miniature the equivocal position of English that we have witnessed throughout. Finding expression en route to a final destination, English here is both inside and outside the Holocaust. Even when the victim invokes English to lament what has been lost, the scene leaves traces of its estrangement. For this reason, in the closing scene dramatizing the death of Nazerman’s assistant, English yields to silence, a less ambiguous medium for the expression of anguish.

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0.0pt PgVa After Arendt Ambiguous though it may be, the English spoken by the film’s protagonist is no longer the neutered version found in Wallant’s novel. In Lumet’s film, his accented English rather shows him for the foreigner he is. Arendt had already made an eloquent case for the custodial role an accent plays. For her, speaking English poorly can be a sign of a stronger connection to the place of origins and to the creative wellsprings of thought. Mastery, in contrast, points to sterility, a susceptibility to cliché which, for Arendt, is the antithesis of vibrant thinking. In her own way, she was marked by (and articulated the value of) a linguistic tattoo. Whereas for Primo Levi the linguistic tattoo referred to the coarse language he had learned in Auschwitz and refused to refine thereafter, for Arendt it designates the mother tongue that, even when not spoken, continues to inflect the English she speaks. There is no indication that Lumet was familiar with Arendt’s advocacy on behalf of a heavy accent. But Arendt was herself giving voice to the counterpart to Wallant’s experimentation with an English shorn of accent. In the novel, we recall, Nazerman spoke an English pruned of origin and association. He was “a man with no allegiances,” especially to his past life, and the English he spoke was in accord with his effort to eradicate his past. Wallant, in other words, forged out of a neutral English a traumatic

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language that bore witness to the consuming task of repression. Nazerman’s English, antimimetic to the extreme, reflected in its artifice the depth at which those memories lay. The only means for them to surface was by way of dreams, sequestered in the realm of sleep from contact with everyday life. Envisioning memory at an insurmountable distance during waking life, the novel’s presiding metaphor for the voice was inorganic, as if a machine manufactured it. Bearing the same memories, Lumet’s filmic protagonist, nevertheless speaks with an accent. The accented voice lets his origins show through. Moreover, rather than eradicating reference to the past, his voice brings the past to bear on the present. Instead of reflecting the repression of intolerable memory, Nazerman’s accented voice thus works against the notion of wholesale repression. Here, too, accent, as Arendt so vigorously asserted, becomes the marker of the proximity of the past to the present. This strategy accords with the film’s substitution of hallucination for dream as the chief vehicle of recollected trauma, wherein the memories of deportation and the camps surface not at night but during the day, are not confined to sleep but erupt into the events of everyday life. Having a Harlem brawl trigger the memory of his friend being mauled to death by camp dogs, Nazerman is so overwhelmed by the recollection that he almost runs down a pedestrian. “What’s wrong with you, you moron,” admonishes the stunned pedestrian, unaware that the eruption of the past horror into the present has momentarily blinded Nazerman to everything in his path. 26 The afflictions of memory here lie virtually at the ready. On the surface rather than beneath it, the losses are if anything too easily recollected. They demand no dream work, but are set in motion by the random perception of like gesture or event. The shift again finds parallel expression in the change rendered on the crime boss, Nazerman’s alter ego. Indeed, no other character in the film adaptation undergoes such a radical alteration. For Wallant, the crime figure who pulls the strings is the Sicilian immigrant, Murillio. Like Nazerman he, too, is an outsider, a European who has little connection to the people of color whose lives he manipulates to make his fortune. And like the pawnbroker, Murillio also surrounds himself with relics of European culture (his apartment, for instance, is bedecked with a cherished collection of secondclass European paintings). In the novel, then, the chain of exploitation, from the syndicate chief to the pawnbroker to the mainly black population of Harlem, replicates that of European colonialism. For Lumet, however, the agent of oppression comes not from without but from within, not from

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a white European but from a black American with the surname Rodriguez – from one, in other words, who himself comes out of Harlem. In terms of the film adaptation, the change from the white European to the black local is remarkable, for no other character undergoes a change of name or a radical alteration of ethnicity. This shift revises the victim’s relation to his own victimization. In the film version, blacks are made complicit in their own exploitation and persecution. Moreover, Rodriguez is the most brutal figure in the film, outshining others, including Nazerman, in the fear he inspires and the power he wields. Finally, Rodriguez not only heads the operation but supplies the ideology that carries it forward. The substitution of Rodriguez for Murillio can thus be viewed as coming in the wake of Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she argued, most famously and controversially, that the complicity of European Jewry during the war played a crucial role in their own destruction. 27 Seen from this vantage point, the film’s representation of the victim appears to incorporate Arendt’s claim, making the victim an important cog, if not in his own destruction then in his own persecution. But, if I am correct in situating the shift of villain from exotic to local (from Sicily to Harlem, from Europe to America), I would also argue that, by universalizing Arendt’s thesis – that is, by making the victim/victimizer dynamic apply not only to Jews but to blacks – Lumet also qualifies Arendt’s claim. For the film implies that groups of victims generally have members who are willing to collaborate with the persecutor and even go them a step better. Whereas Arendt (and, perhaps even more explicitly, the noted historian Raul Hilberg 28) accounts for the alleged complicity of European Jewry by positing a particular Jewish mentality or propensity for such behavior, the film suggests that whatever the Jews did, they did as any victim would have done – and does. 29 The film’s modifications also affect the villain’s voice. Whereas in the novel Murillio’s recorded, disembodied voice mirrored Nazerman’s disconnected one, Rodriguez speaks in the passionately belligerent tones of a heavy, the kind of role with which actor Brock Peters had already become associated. 30 Indeed, Rodriguez’s voice, like that of Nazerman’s in the film, reflects the locale from which he comes. In this way, Lumet substitutes a mimetic approach for Wallant’s rigorously antimimetic one and makes the English of both victim and persecutor attest to place of origin. Having in the novel reached the extreme of neutrality – of a tongue cleansed of associations – the English of the film reclaims the accent as a guiding principle. In Cynthia Ozick’s hands, it will become even more than that.

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chapter 8

Cracking Her Teeth Broken English in Cynthia Ozick’s Fiction and Essays

Thirty some years after directing The Pawnbroker, Sidney Lumet directed Cynthia Ozick’s The Blue Light, a stage adaptation of Ozick’s stories, “The Shawl” and “Rosa.”1 The distance between film and play was not far. In both cases, the protagonists were Jews who had lost children in the Holocaust and who, having immigrated to America, were ambivalent at best about the life they were compelled to live out. They differed radically however in their view of the Europe they had left behind. Whereas Nazerman rejected Europe as the standard bearer of culture, Rosa fetishizes it. Like Arendt, Ozick’s heroine believes that European culture, bearing the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome, continues to transmit the most formidable teachings expressed in the most sublime idiom. 2



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Rosa’s Mother Tongue Predating the stage version by a decade, Ozick’s two stories on which the play is based are better known. “Rosa” was first published in the New Yorker magazine in 1983; “The Shawl” had previously appeared in the same magazine some three years earlier. 3 The stories were eventually published together in book form, titled The Shawl, in 1989. 4 Strikingly, in the book there is, as far as I can determine, a single change from the original magazine texts: Ozick added as an epigraph the final two lines of Paul Celan’s renowned poem, “Todesfugue.”5 One of the most interpreted of literary responses to the Holocaust, Celan’s poem elliptically represents persecutors and victims in a symbolic concentration camp setting. The addition of lines from such a well-known literary work clearly mobilizes a whole set of associations. For my purposes, however, the epigraph engages the story in two specific, and related, ways. First, when Ozick quotes from the poem, she includes only the original

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German, a strategy that filters the stories featuring Jewish victims and survivors through the language of the persecutors. Additionally, in a text meant for English-language readers, the omission of the English translation of the epigraph seems pointed. It is made even more so by the fact that, as the acknowledgments of The Shawl show, the lines are culled from Michael Hamburger’s bi-lingual, German-English edition, The Selected Poems of Paul Celan. 6 Clearly referring to an edition with an English translation but quoting only the original, the author wanted solely the German to appear. Though the English is omitted, then, it continues to shadow the German, almost in the same way that in the story, “Rosa,” it shadows Polish and Yiddish. Second, the decision to include the German original is also important because Celan is renowned for attempting to write about the Holocaust in the language of the persecutors, a choice he made even though he was capable of writing in other tongues. Celan explained his choice to write in German as choosing to write in his mother tongue, the only tongue, he said, in which a poet can “express one’s truth.”7 Echoing Celan, Rosa makes a similar, and similarly equivocal, claim well on in the story: “ ‘I read only Polish,’ she told him. ‘I don’t like to read in English. For literature you need a mother tongue.’ ”8 While Celan invokes mother tongue in relation to writing and Rosa in relation to reading, they share the bias that, in spite of the questionable associations that inform the mother tongue, they continue to see it as the medium which is necessary to negotiate culture. By affixing Celan’s well-known lines, Ozick already begins the story filtered through a multilingual lens, a lens that ironizes “mother tongue”: Celan’s German, Rosa’s Polish and, we might presume, Ozick’s English. But even though both Celan and Ozick’s character Rosa favor a mother tongue, the two stand at opposite ends of the spectrum in their relation to it. For Celan, the choice is noble and crucial, an act of resistance, of entering into the maelstrom of the Holocaust in order to confront it more authentically. So although Celan characterizes his choice of language as a private affair, something he is compelled to do because as a poet there is no other choice but to write in a mother tongue, his choice of German is nonetheless interpreted as a paradigmatic strategy of the victim. 9 John Felstiner’s interpretation of Celan’s choice of German, for example, mixes both fatalistic and strategic elements: “With his world obliterated, he held fast to the world that was both his and the murderers – literally all he had left. Insofar as it was language that had been damaged, his verse might repair that damage.”10 Felstiner implies an act of resistance in that

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by “holding fast” Celan refuses to allow the “murderers” to set the terms; Celan would not abandon what “he had left” simply because the murderers also claimed German as their own. This refusal to abandon what belonged to him resonates with Arendt’s holding fast to German. Yet whereas Arendt justified her continued embrace of German by asserting that the language neither went crazy nor suffered from its manipulation by the Nazis, Celan’s project takes as a given German as a deformed legacy of the Nazi years. His verse might thus repair what had been damaged. Celan’s turn to the mother tongue is thus pictured as the response of one who, despite the losses that he suffered, chose to act out of a spirit of generosity, or, in a more skeptical assessment, held fast to German not so much to repair the language as to use it as a medium to confront the pathologies of the German culture of which it was a part. 11 This spirit of generosity or of cultural critique stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from that of Ozick’s character. Rosa, too, claims that the mother tongue has exclusive rights and privileges, especially in relation to literature. “For literature,” says Rosa, echoing Celan’s famous injunction, “you need a mother tongue.” Such a declaration here, however, is neither noble nor incisive but obsessive and pathetic. In Ozick’s rendition, holding fast to Polish as the chosen medium of literature dramatizes the folly of assimilation, of believing that immersion in the vernacular language could ratify one’s identity as a Pole. If the celebration of Polish by a Jew before the war was tinged with betrayal, then continued celebration after the war is one of the marks of insanity. Such postwar immersion doesn’t have to be framed as pathological. Zygmunt Bauman describes two postwar Polish-Jewish writers, Adolf Rudnicki and Julian Stryjkowski, whose allegiance to Polish (and writing in Poland) is meant to place a Celan-like claim upon their readers: “Stryjkowski writes of the dead for the sake of the living. The memory of the nation that disappeared [i.e., the Jews of Poland] must live in the memory of the nation that survived.”12 It is by means of the Polish language that Baumen sees Stryjkowski carrying out this task: “Let the self-same Polish language, which lured the dead with its splendor and yet proved a cage to many, become their permanent and secure shelter now that they are no more. Let them enter through this language the enchanted land they once lived in without being a part of.”13 Strikingly, Baumen’s description of this haunting of Poland through its language suggests that pre-war Poland Jewry was already fated to disappear – those who were lured were “the dead.” But the process he characterizes is akin (if not identical) to that of Celan.

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These writers specifically intend for the language of a nation that sought, actually or symbolically, to banish its Jews to testify to their continued presence. Hence, they fashion the vernacular language into a Jewish one. The inversion of Polish becomes yet more pointed: the language that often played a vital role in Jewish acculturation – and, at least in some cases, to rejection of their own culture – becomes a vehicle for sustaining it even, as Bauman puts it, when “they are no more.” Yet Ozick comes at the issue of Polish after the Holocaust from a different angle. If these two writers have forged Polish into a language that responds to the tragedy of Polish Jewry, Ozick wants to show the folly implied by such a choice. Holding fast to Polish in the wake of the Holocaust is not so much a response as an evasion.

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Polish and Poland Emmanuel Ringelblum’s reflections in May of 1942 point to both sides of the Polish language issue. The predominance of Polish in the ghetto serves as the occasion for considering the Jews and the Polish language: “The Jews love to speak Polish. There is very little Yiddish heard in the streets.” Ringelblum’s observation regarding the love and use of Polish by Warsaw’s Jews goes against what one would have expected. Insulated in the ghetto and no longer obliged to conduct affairs with non-Jewish Poles, these Jews might have embraced Yiddish to an even larger degree than previously. But according to Ringelblum and other observers, they did not. Ringelblum offers two contrasting explanations. The first figures Polish as the Jew’s language of resistance: “you [Nazis] have thrown us into a Jewish Ghetto, but we’ll show you that it really is a Polish street. To spite you, we’ll hold on to the very thing you are trying to separate us from – the Polish language and the culture it represents.”14 If the ghetto distinguishes between Jew and Pole, indicating that Jews are not members of the Polish nation, then by speaking Polish rather than Yiddish Jews show that indeed they belong to the Polish nation. But Ringelblum himself sees the phenomenon not as resistance but as assimilation, not as a declaration but as a sign of further capitulation:“what we see in the Ghetto today is only a continuation of the powerful linguistic assimilation that was marked even before the war and has become more noticeable in the Ghetto.”15 The ghetto in other words did not stimulate any special resolve on the part of the Jews or provoke them to speak Polish to resist the special measures that the Nazis introduced against them. The

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love of Polish is simply the outcome of assimilation of Jews into the Polish landscape, with the corollary that Jews were rejecting Yiddish and Jewish culture even as they assimilated Polish. Living in the ghetto makes clear a trend that was already in motion: “So long as Warsaw was mixed,” writes Ringelblum, voicing now his own view of the matter, “with Jews and Poles living side by side, one did not notice [the large number of Jews who spoke Polish] so acutely; but now that the streets are completely Jewish, the extent of this calamity forces itself upon one’s attention.” As if the Jews didn’t have enough to worry about, Ringelblum suggests that speaking Polish is the sign of yet another “calamity.” Both interpretations construe speaking Polish as Jews demonstrating their adherence to Polish nationality and culture. But one interpretation presumes a decided response to crisis, the other an indifference to it. Ringelblum was exceptional in noting both positions, even if he was clear about the one to which he subscribed. 16 Most commentators on the Polish issue came down on one side or the other. Shmuel Stupinski believed that speaking Polish could decrease contact with the Nazis: “It all began with pretending not to understand German, people preferred it this way, it was more convenient. So Jews started to speak Polish so they could answer when spoken to by a German ‘nie rozumiem’ ([we] don’t understand). This way one wanted to isolate himself from the enemy.”17 Speaking Polish is again a strategy taken up to resist the enemy, in this case by making believe that one knew nothing of the enemy’s language. Such ignorance would make it less likely the enemy would make unwanted demands of a Jew. In this formulation, speaking a foreign language might allow one to pass as a non-German speaker, something that perhaps a Yiddish speaker might not be able to do. Others refused to see speaking Polish as anything but Polonization, a capitulation to a culture foreign to the Jews. Hillel Zeitlin was unsparing in his criticism of Warsaw’s Jews: “Within the ghetto walls a Jewish culture of our own, a Jewish life, could emerge, but Jews are a contrary people. They speak Polish with such ardor. Polish has become the holy language of the ghetto, the holy tongue of the ghetto Jews.”18 Like many, Zeitlin viewed the sequestering of the Jews as an opportunity to cultivate a “Jewish life,” a life governed by Jewish institutions, calendar, and languages. Yet the Jews did not seize the opportunity. Indeed, incarceration in the ghetto increased identification with the non-Jewish world, an identification particularly apparent in the “ardor” for the Polish language: “This is something simply paradoxical. They packed [us in] so they could forcibly isolate us from other peoples, cultures, and languages. Yet we insist

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on speaking a foreign language and spit on our own language, on our own cultural and spiritual values.”19 Whereas one group conjectured that speaking the foreign language of Polish was an act of resistance, Zeitlin, like Ringelblum, sees it as outright rejection of a Jewish tongue. While most historians assume that Polish Jewry continued in the interwar period to speak predominantly Yiddish, they also claim that most Jews in interwar Poland knew some Polish. Yet it is difficult to find out the extent and the implications of such knowledge. Michael Steinlauf puts it in the following way: “it is possible to say that by the interwar period the vast majority of Jews knew some Polish, many were fluent in Polish and well acquainted with Polish literature, and numerous Jewish writers and artists were hardly indifferent to Polish culture.” However, cultivation of Polish could easily, Steinlauf also implies, result in stigmatization: for a writer “to begin to write literature in Polish often marked his departure from Jewish society and his identification as a ‘Polish writer of Jewish origin.’ ”20 The lines were both fluid and rigid. Jews knew and could know Polish. But it was only on the way out of Jewish society that one decided on Polish as the language of choice. “Rosa” focuses on what Chone Shmeruk refers to as the “thin stratum”: in Poland before the Second World War, there was “a thin stratum of Polish intelligentsia of Jewish descent, including renowned Polish writers, who were totally assimilated into Polish culture and identified themselves as Poles.”21 In terms of cultural history, Shmeruk believes that this “thin stratum” is “in fact, of very minor interest, and only as an extreme.” In contrast to Shmeruk’s assessment of the negligible interest of this group for a cultural profile of interwar Polish Jewry, Ozick’s novella focuses on a member of this marginal group, implying that the extreme serves as representative. Ozick was clearly drawn to contemplate the position of the “assimilated Polish-speaking Jew.” She wrote “Rosa” in the same year that she reviewed the first translation of Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles from Polish into English. Schulz was a Polish Jewish writer and artist who was murdered by the Nazis in 1942. 22 His career brutally cut short, he had however published a number of collections of phantasmagoric stories. In her review Ozick characterized Schulz in a manner that resonated with her own fictional character: Schulz was an “assimilated Polish-speaking Jew, not so much a Jew as a conscious Pole.” In the Schultz’s case, however, his being a “conscious Pole” does not sever his connection with a certain tradition of Jewish writing. For Ozick, Schulz was one of a few key Slavic Jews who

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were preoccupied with the underside of modernity: nihilism. She would go on to explore Schulz’s legacy in her novel, The Messiah of Stockholm. The figure of Rosa can be construed as Schulz’s alter ego particularly in terms of her fervent devotion to Polish letters. Unlike the portrait painted of the ghetto, where inhabitants turned to Polish far more than they had before, Rosa makes no shift; her passion for Polish is in no way opportunistic. Indeed, her absurd constancy provides one significant dimension of the story. The other dimension is her accent.

Accents Matter

Even though the unaccented English spoken by Nazerman in Wallant’s [130], (7) novel is an essential dimension of his character, Nazerman in the film is outfitted with an accent. And the accent he gains (and the cauterized English he loses) comes despite (or because of) the fact that the film Nazerman Lines: 78 t is molded into a more assimilated German Jew than his Polish counterpart in the novel. ——— 0.0pt Pg Clearly, literary and filmic accents have their rhetorical as well as mimetic ——— purposes. This insight is one of the virtues of Kathryn Hellerstein’s study Normal Pa of Yiddish voices in American Jewish writing. Charting the course of Yiddishized English from Abraham Cahan in the early twentieth century to * PgEnds: Pa Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth in mid-century, Hellerstein celebrates Ozick as an author who has integrated Yinglish into her [130], (7) writing without bowdlerizing it. Whereas “for Philip Roth and Malamud, Yiddish figures as a spectral presence of the constraining, delimited, stultified past,” for Ozick, Yiddish has a living presence since she “allows a greater range of Yiddish to echo in her prose.”23 It is ironic, then, that the dominant voice in these Holocaust stories is not Yiddish but Polish as if the voice that speaks in the aftermath of these events cannot quite echo what came before. With Ozick’s stories, accents come to be the measure of the destruction of European Jewry. English is thereby transformed again in the process, not into heartfelt babble or a denatured tongue but into a tongue foreign to itself. This process will reach its denouement in Spiegelman’s Maus, where the survivor alone earns an accent by which to relate in broken English the story of his Holocaust. But when Ozick represents English as a “poison,” as something on which one “cracks teeth,” it will achieve a brokenness (as well as a capacity to break) that is well on its way to becoming a language fit to recount the Holocaust. 24

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Why Accents (Do Not) Matter Arendt argued that accent indicates that a speaker is in touch with vital sources of thought and language. Conversely, the erasure of accent, to speak like a native (or perfectly) suggests that one is out of touch, is cut off from such sources and is prone to the devastating effect of cliché. 25 What for Arendt remained an implicit critique of passing is for Ozick an explicit meditation on the cultural implications of accents – and their detractors. Whereas for Arendt the attempt to eradicate accent came from the speaker, for Ozick outside forces work to remove the telltale accent and to eliminate an alleged threat to the well-being of the nation as a whole. But Ozick shows how misguided such attempts are. Ozick’s essay, “The Question of Our Speech,” illustrating two twentiethcentury attempts to establish a standard for spoken American English, dramatizes the assault on accent. 26 One episode pits Henry James against Ozick’s immigrant mother. 27 In an address that bore the name, “The Question of Our Speech,” James shared his concern about the problem that English faced given the masses of immigrants who would roughly handle the English that they had only begun to learn. English in such crude hands would become a vehicle of promiscuity. If James configured these threats by groups of people – “a hundred million” – Ozick counters them by scaling down the threatening specter into the figure of her mother as a child immigrant, “a linguistic armageddon.” According to James, the threat to English – and to the values that it promotes – comes from accented English. The threat looms especially great because of the special orphaned predicament of the English language. In James’s view, English on American soil is itself a forsaken immigrant. No other language, moreover, shares its foundling status. Alone and adrift, it faces a singular test. This foundling status of English clearly moves James to worry, in almost parental fashion, for the fate of English. Tellingly, only at the point in his essay when he comments on the orphaned status of English, does James refer to it by the epithet “mother tongue,” as if to complement the childlike nature of the language with the parental metaphor. Cultural policeman, social hygienist, self-assigned chaperone rolled into one, James sees the masses of new, nonnative speakers of English compromising its already sorely tested virtue. 28 Yet Ozick argues that the attempt to police the values of society by regulating speech is misguided. Preference for one form of speech is a convention subject to time and place; what is deemed correct by one generation

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is attacked by a succeeding one. The second episode related in the essay, in which a young Ozick is compelled to undergo speech training to remove an undesirable Bronx accent, brings home the folly of policing the accents of children. To focus on accent as a measure of culture is misdirected; Ozick argues that accents serve as no index of a community’s relation to culture and language. Moreover, elimination of an accent leaves the speaker, as Ozick refers to herself, as owning “a sort of robot’s speech.”29 Mechanized in a way reminiscent of Nazerman’s, robotic speech evokes “no obvious native country.” Implied in “native country” is both the neighborhood in which Ozick grew up and also the foreign lands that continued to leave traces in the speech of immigrants. Indeed, the clinicians (Ozick, recalling their zealousness, dubs them “missionaries”) saw her speech as “tainted with foreignness, and it was the remnants of that foreignness they meant to wipe away.”30 Believing that speech was the measure of civilization and that “remnants of foreignness” threatened its claim to civility, the clinicians did away with them. Unsparing in showing the arbitrary criteria by which accents are maligned, Ozick doesn’t address, however, the fact that the episode of speech training occurred in 1941 (born in 1928, Ozick relates that she was thirteenyears-old when her speech was doctored). The pathologists were in effect cutting off the last bonds of linguistic kinship with Europe during the initial phrase of the Final Solution. What might be viewed as imperialist under any circumstances thus takes on more disturbing tones when seen in its historical context. Moreover, in 1941 the United States was still officially neutral and was continuing to debate its obligation to enter into what was considered to be a European conflict. In other words, its own uncertain connection to Europe, articulated most strongly in the isolationist sentiments voiced by Charles Lindbergh and others, was mirrored in the efforts to eliminate the foreign remnants ostensibly marring the vocal patterns of America’s children. 31

From the Idiom of Silence to the Idiom of Languages The complex significance of accents is played out forcefully in the two Ozick stories that most directly represent the Holocaust. In“The Shawl,”the protagonist, having shepherded both child and niece through the privations of a death march and concentration camp, is compelled to watch helplessly as a Nazi guard murders her daughter. The second story, “Rosa,” returns to the protagonist some thirty-five years afterward, as she tries to eke out

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a survivor’s life in Miami. If, as we will see, “Rosa” comments directly on the poetics of accents, it in turn is linked inextricably to its companion story. Seen in this light, the two stories proceed from muteness to linguistic chauvinism. In “The Shawl” language exists without a formal identity. The characters speak little, and what they do say isn’t labeled as one tongue or another. Just as in “The Shawl” there are no countries, cities, or nationalities referred to, so there are no languages specified. This reticence is directly connected to the story’s amorphous setting and its fairy tale narrative strategy of lacking coordinates of time and space. The reader knows that the characters are made to endure a death march, and are incarcerated in a concentration camp. But the story doesn’t indicate when or where these events take place. Nor do we know the language in which the characters exchange the few words that they do. Finally, speaking at all has a lethal dimension: it is when Magda, the child who has become mute, regains a voice and howls that she is discovered and killed. Her mother must in turn become mute in order not to scream in response and bring upon herself the same fate as her daughter’s. The story’s focus on a young child’s emerging speech intensifies the sense of language operating before its entry into a multilingual world. The story, then, sets forth Ozick’s version of the discourse of death, not in this case so much a universe defined by linguistic fragments as one unknowing of multiple languages, a reduced linguistic universe that, set as it were before Babel, rests teetering on the edge of muteness. The second story changes this strategy. Here Rosa’s postwar New World setting is brimming with multilingualism; languages, accents, scripts constantly shape the events of the story. Language, moreover, is a bone of contention. Some languages ostensibly are valued more than others. Whatever language one speaks, writes, or reads is charged with positive or negative connotations. If, according to David Roskies, in Jewish Eastern Europe, no language was neutral, so is contention of languages also the order of the day in Ozick’s Jewish Miami. Indeed, nothing defines Rosa so clearly as her antipathy toward Yiddish and English on the one hand and her championing of Polish on the other. Within the terms of the story, the elevation of Polish can only come at the expense of Yiddish and English. This hierarchy of languages, finally, emerges from the relation between the two stories. The muteness in the first story prompts the chauvinism in the second as if Rosa’s exclusive loyalty to a mother tongue were an attempt to compensate for what could not be said – within the story as well as by the protagonist – in the first. Hence, a legacy of the Holocaust is the

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diminishment of linguistic resources and resourcefulness, the clinging to a mother tongue even when such loyalty seems patently misguided.

The Shawl and Accent Rosa and her doting companion Persky first meet and strike up a conversation when Persky comments on Rosa’s accent: “Excuse me, I notice you speak with an accent.” Rosa accounts for it by noting that she “was born somewhere else, not here.”32 From that moment forward, accent attests to origin and circumstance. Never at home in postwar America, Rosa has no trouble laying claim to the accent that marks her as foreign; for others, however, accent is a stigma that they attempt to eliminate. This is the case with Rosa’s father, who spoke Polish “so that every syllable struck its target.” To speak without an accent was mark of belonging to the majority culture, of leaving behind the distinctive Jewishness that set one apart. Yet Ozick’s cautions in “The Question of Our Speech” regarding “robotic” speech cue the reader to the fact that the elimination of accent leaves one without a sense of place. Rosa’s judgment is hence as skewed as the missionary clinicians who wished to uproot Ozick’s local speech. Yet the meaning of accents moves in a second, antithetical direction. Accents in this case denote not imperfection but witness, a refusal, a la Arendt, to eliminate the foreign remnant. Importantly, accents here refer not to Polish but English. In response to Rosa’s disclosure that she is “from an educated family,” her companion Persky observes nevertheless that her “English ain’t better than what any other refugee talks.”33 Rosa hopes to call on class distinctions to distinguish herself from Persky and reclaim lost prestige, but broken English blurs these distinctions and indicates a person’s essential status as a “refugee.” According to Rosa, broken English is not a sign of incompetence – of being not “better than” – but rather a symbol of oppression against which she has taken revenge: “Why should I learn English? I didn’t ask for it, I got nothing to do with it.”34 Rosa construes English as the language that should not be learned. Hence, the English that a refugee talks remains broken out of protest, a pointed rejection of what fate has thrust upon her. What Persky understands as a matter of circumstance, Rosa reinterprets as a matter of choice. And, strikingly, accents that bear witness resist the attempt to uproot them. Rosa’s alter ego, her niece, Stella, has claimed English as her own, a strategy that Rosa understands to go against the grain of witness, to act “as if not there.”35 Able in dress, behavior, and even language to eradicate the

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evidence of being “there,” Stella’s accent, like the Yiddish rhythms of the non-Jewish Jews of Roth’s Woodenton, will not similarly yield: “No one could guess what hell she had crawled out of until she opened her mouth and up coiled the smoke of accent.”36 In contrast to what could be made to appear American, Stella’s accent marks her as being from “somewhere else.” But the connotations of accent shift decidedly here. Evidence previously that one was born somewhere else, the mark of a refugee, an accent now specifically testifies to having gone through a concentration camp, a hell. Indeed, the imagery couldn’t be plainer: accent is as much a synecdoche of the concentration camp as is (or was) the smoke from the chimney of the crematoria. In Rosa’s fantasy, accent reveals the survivor with the exactitude of an Auschwitz tattoo – reference to which, tellingly, is nearly absent from Ozick’s stories. Indeed, Ozick’s shocking image recalls Primo Levi’s unrefined German spoken in such a way that the idioms of the camp would continue to resound disturbingly. Whereas Levi cultivated the effect, however, the accent that Ozick (and Rosa) imagine betraying Stella eludes her determined attempt to suppress it. And if Levi equated his preservation of Auschwitz-inflected German with the memorializing dimension of his tattoo (“my pronunciation is coarse; but I deliberately have not tried to make it more genteel; for the same reason, I have never had the tattoo removed from my left arm”), Ozick removes the image of the tattoo from her stories and replaces it with an ineradicable accent. The crucial word enacts this shift: “crawl” as the action by which Rosa describes Stella’s emergence from the camp infantilizes her, and it also bears within it (“craw” or “throat”) an allusion to the mouth that gives voice to the “smoke of accent.” Both connotations, moreover, suggest a flexed upward movement: as Stella crawled out of hell, so does the accent coil up out of her throat. Finally, the etymologies of “crawl” (scratch) and “craw” (throat) suggest the divergent connotations between tattoo and accent, the first referring to inscription and the second to utterance. Accent thus emerges as the inadvertent testimony, that which lingers even when all other traces have disappeared. That English receives endorsement as a broken, accented language places it at one end of the spectrum of Diaspora languages. At the other end of the spectrum is Polish, the language of mastery and eloquence, the mother tongue. Unlike Polish, English acquires authority not through mastery. Its power lies rather in its being despised and rejected. Importantly, it shares this scorned position in the story with Yiddish. Yiddish fares badly because of Rosa’s parents’ snobbish enlightenment:

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“How her mother despised those sounds,” “her father, like her mother, mocked at Yiddish.” And these sentiments shaped their daughter’s fantasies: conjuring early twentieth-century Warsaw, Rosa “imagined what bitter ancient alley, dense with stalls, cheap clothes strung on outdoor racks, signs in jargoned Yiddish.”37 Both Yiddish and English, languages of signs and newspapers rather than literature and high culture, stand for unwanted worlds, Yiddish, for its part, associated with some “ancient alley,” English with the “frivolous.” and “light-minded” new world. 38 Linked to Yiddish, English is nevertheless taken to task by Ozick both in terms of high and low culture. The parody is particularly sharp when it comes to scholarly writing on the Holocaust, where Ozick dramatizes its clumsy attempts to fashion a vocabulary (“survivor”) and to draw on social scientific categories, in this case that of the scholar of social pathology James Tree: For some months, teams of medical paraphrasers have been conducting interviews with survivors, to contrast current medical paraphrase with conditions found more than three decades ago, at the opening of the camps. 39

In such guise, the presumed neutrality of English – the use of technical and professional jargon – comes across as brutally irreverent and is made more so because the findings the research sets forth – that the Holocaust has left a legacy that deforms the “current conditions” of victims’ lives – dovetail with Rosa’s own convictions. The gap between researcher and victim is hence not in what but in how it is said. In dramatizing Rosa’s outrage at the misrepresentation of her experience, Ozick chronicles the split between academic research and victims’ experience that shaped the 1970s and that galvanized the move to redress this split through the turn to testimonies of the victims. Having shown the inadequacy with which English writes of the past, Ozick must find a different way to layer her own English writing with authority and significance. The project of overcoming the limits imposed by English had long been pursued by Ozick. For a time, she envisioned that Jewish writers could revolutionize the English in which they wrote, shaping it into a new Jewish tongue. Here, too, English was paired with Yiddish; indeed, the English of Ozick’s conjuring, suffused with Jewish sensibility, vision, and vocabulary, was deemed the “new Yiddish.” Like Yiddish, this English could become the “necessary instrument” of Jewish life in the Diaspora. 40

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“Rosa” may, in part, attempt to realize this vision. But the story uses a different strategy to layer English writing with authority and significance. Ozick achieves this first of all by breaking the language, creating an English “poisoned” by contact with the Holocaust. She then turns to an archEnglish source – Shakespearean tragedy – to find a vocabulary for suffering. It is principally by means of English intertexts – not, as has been previously advanced, Latin or Italian, German or Yiddish – that the stories find their reconciliation with English. 41 The turn to Shakespeare is not as strange as one might imagine. Ultimately, King Lear tells of a parent who grieves to death over a child who has been murdered, thereby serving as a prototype for Ozick’s rendering of a grief-stricken parent disabled by loss. Ozick mines Lear to reckon with the proposition of increasing torment. Appositely, in an English letter to niece Stella, Rosa echoes famous Shakespearean lines on a transformed knowledge of suffering: “ ‘Golden and beautiful Stella,’ she wrote to her niece. ‘Where I put myself is in hell. Once I thought the worst was the worst, after that nothing could be the worst. But now I see, even after the worst there’s still more.’ ”42 In King Lear, Gloucester’s son Edgar gives voice to these sentiments when he first encounters his blinded father: “O gods! Who is’t can say ‘I am at the worst’? / I am worse than e’er I was. . . . And worse I may be yet. The worst is not / So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’ ”43 In both cases, the loss of almost everything precious leads one to believe that suffering has reached a limit. But the sufferer regrettably learns that what was thought a limit is not. That Edgar’s lines find their way to Rosa’s pen is in several ways a surprise. First, that Rosa’s Miami hotel room could be worse than what has come before conveys at the beginning of the story the intensity of Rosa’s painful predicament. Second, even Rosa, whose English is described as crude, writes lines from Shakespeare. By having Shakespeare’s English shadow Rosa’s, Ozick displays an English in which allusion enters effortlessly. Other allusions to Lear appear in the story. Describing Stella’s past “as no one could tell what hell she had crawled out of ” calls to mind Lear referring to his own future as he“unburdened crawl[s] toward death.”More significant is how Lear’s plaintive cry becomes that of the child Magda: “Every day Magda was silent, and so she did not die. Rosa saw today that Magda was going to die. . . . Magda, in the sunlight, swaying on her pencil legs, was howling.”44 Such a cry of grief has been attached to Lear since he walked onto stage carrying the murdered Cordelia in his arms and registering the depth of his (and the world’s) loss with “Howl, howl, howl,

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howl! . . . She’s gone forever. / I know when one is dead and when one lives. / She’s dead as earth.”45 Ozick transports the force of Lear’s fourfold howl to the site of a concentration camp and reassigns it as well, letting it be sounded not by a grieving parent but by the victim herself. If Lear’s howl comes in the aftermath of Cordelia’s senseless murder, so Magda’s is heard in anticipation of it. Uttered by the victim before the final blow, the child’s howl, already laden with Lear’s woe, becomes the marker of inevitable death. What the coiled smoke of accent does to elegize loss, the howl serves to denominate the moment thereof. Shakespeare’s tragic idiom thus sharpens the English that in signs, newspapers, and scholarly treatises slides mercilessly toward the shallow and frivolous. As if the galvanizing force of allusion to Lear were not enough, Ozick layers onto the prototype of grieving parent the mad desperation of Othello. It is hard to miss the parallel. The story’s central episode finds Rosa obsessively searching the streets of Miami Beach to retrieve a pair of missing underpants. As it turns out, the underpants were never lost or taken. But by showing Rosa in the grip of an obsession associated with sexual violation, Ozick suggests that the violations suffered during the war continue to leave their mark on the most private facets of Rosa’s postwar life. The link to Othello is made clear because Rosa’s conviction that her underpants have been stolen commences with a handkerchief: “On the floor there was something white, a white cloth. Handkerchief. He picked it up and stuffed it in his pants pocket.”46 Escorted to a cafeteria lunch by her newfound companion Persky, Rosa notes what seems an innocuous gesture. Only later, when she cannot find the missing garment, does she presume the object Persky handled to be her underwear. As Desdomona’s purloined handkerchief becomes the means by which Iago convinces Othello that he has been sexually betrayed, so the handkerchief here persuades Rosa that Persky, ostensibly the perfect gentleman, is actually a sexual pervert taking advantage of Rosa’s good will. But both Othello and Rosa make more out of the handkerchief than is warranted, attributing violation and duplicity to those who are full of good intentions. Borrowing on Shakespeare’s handkerchief, Ozick shows how monstrous projections of sexual perversity, which in Othello’s case are cultivated by the wicked Iago, have their basis for Rosa in the wartime violations that she was compelled to endure. Parody constantly threatens to diminish Rosa’s tragedy; allusion to the wayward passions of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes removes the parodic poison from Ozick’s English, even if not from Rosa’s own.

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chapter 9

The Language of Dollars English as Intruder in Yaffa Eliach’s Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust

In many respects, Yaffa Eliach’s Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust resurrects David Boder’s partially realized project. Conducting interviews with survivors in a variety of languages, Eliach like Boder viewed the project under the rubric of literature. Moreover, the motivation to interview survivors was driven, again as Boder, by the determination to give the victims their own voice. But the stakes were if anything higher. Following Boder by some thirty years, Eliach was attempting to challenge what had become by the 1970s the dominant paradigm of addressing the Holocaust: the use of German-language documentation written by the persecutors. In contrast, the victim’s testimony counted for little. Eliach hoped that giving the victims a voice would revise that paradigm. And yet she, again like Boder, felt compelled to publish the stories that issued from the interviews exclusively in English. When it came to the English of her text, however, Eliach chose a different approach from that of Boder’s. Whereas Boder was committed to keeping the English idiomatic (“as near to the text of the original narratives as the most elementary rules of grammar would permit”), Eliach chose an alternative strategy of representation. Drawing on a variety of languages, Eliach and her students at Brooklyn College interviewed Jewish survivors of the Holocaust from approximately 1974 to 1981; Eliach then translated, edited and rewrote the material of the interviews into a “unified form” in eighty-nine tales. She arranged the tales in four sections, the first three narrating events that took place during the Holocaust, the final section, its aftermath. Most are set in Poland, Russia, Germany, and Austria with a smaller number in the last section taking place in postwar America. Although Eliach’s project progresses from a multilingual universe to a monolingual one, it makes explicit its foundational ties to multilingual traditions even while enshrining an English-only narrative. And, while

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seeming to yield to the trend of writing in English about the Holocaust, Hasidic Tales stages scenes of linguistic exchange that interrogate the status of English and incorporate its unstable position into the representation of the Holocaust.

More Than Nine Languages In the foreword to Hasidic Tales, Eliach makes multilingualism a key programmatic feature: “The original interviews were conducted in more than nine languages and numerous dialects.”1 While Eliach never fully explicates the significance of the multilingual basis, the multiplicity of languages appears to empower the tales, positing a kind of primal linguistic verisimilitude to counteract the dislocated venue (America) and language (English) in which the tales have ultimately been rendered. In other words, given that America lies at such a geographic and cultural distance from the setting of the Holocaust and given that English was a language neither of victim nor persecutor, the plethora of languages, Eliach implies, may restore some sense of place and hence may facilitate a connection to the people who endured the atrocities. Whatever distance has been traversed from that time and place, and in spite of the American veneer, Eliach wants to emphasize that her English reworking of the tales has not compromised the voices of those who relate them. Indeed, Leon Wieseltier, noting the special contributions that Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust makes to the literature of the Holocaust, speaks of restoring the vital context of Eastern European life: “Eliach has recovered the destruction of the Hasidim of Poland as it was for those who were being destroyed, and she has done so because she knows who they actually were. She knows their philosophical and social and religious particulars, and how they appeared in adversity.”2 The “more than nine languages” goes hand and hand with this project of recovery. Moreover, Eliach’s reference in her foreword to the plethora of languages probably makes more of the languages than the archive of interviews actually warrants; though many languages were involved, most of the interviews were conducted in Yiddish and English. 3 That the actual number of interviews in languages other than English may have been quite small makes Eliach’s attention to the issue of languages that much more telling. 4 According to Michael Berenbaum, this attention to the original languages shapes Eliach’s strategy of representation: In Hasidic Tales, Berenbaum suggests, “each tale is beautifully written and has narrative vitality.

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Yiddish and many other foreign tongues are captured and transmitted in a literate English that carries a trace of the original language but does not read like an awkward translation.”5 In noting the creative interplay between English and the original languages, Berenbaum is here clearly praising Eliach’s balancing act, her ability to fuse Old World with New World, to devise an English that can “carry a trace” without being itself made less “literate” – presumably less beautiful, less aesthetically pleasing, less readable. The stakes of Berenbaum’s praise for Eliach’s synthesis are heightened when we note that he uses decidedly colonialist terms to characterize her achievement: the original languages “are captured” in English; if they weren’t quite so domesticated, the foreign tongues could impair her English, undermining the aesthetic effect. Berenbaum (and, perhaps by implication, Eliach) is not alone, of course, in fearing what can happen to English if a foreign language (particularly Yiddish) leaves too much of an imprint. Kathryn Hellerstein, for instance, in the course of chronicling the “Yiddish voices in American literature,” has chastised such notables as Bernard Malamud and, as noted before, Phillip Roth for what she regards as the unseemly manner in which they Yiddishize their English. 6 Closer to the Hasidic orbit, Arthur Green has emphasized how he was at pains to steer clear of accent when rendering into English the homilies of a great Hasidic leader, R. Menachem Nahum of Chernobyl. In Green’s English rendition, “the hasidic master speaks without a Yiddish accent. He is thus liberated to address his English-reading audience with the message that truly concerns him, that of religious enthusiasm and the spirit of revival. . . . [T]oo rigid an attempt to preserve the original voice of the Yiddish/Hebrew source would lead to a borscht-circuit parody, utterly belying the authors’ great seriousness of tone.”7 Accenting here is understood to vulgarize, to contaminate the English, wrenching it inexorably from its appropriate rhetorical register. Indeed, Green’s purifying strategy describes Eliach’s as well: even with her desire to celebrate the multilingual universe out of which the tales emerge, in rewriting the tales she too opts for an English without an accent, that which would testify most conspicuously that the speaker hails from elsewhere. 8 Eliach also connects multilingualism with genre and gender, two of the most important dimensions of her project, and dates the connection back to the beginning of the Hasidic movement in the late eighteenth century: Since most of the [early Hasidic] tales were written in Yiddish, which was the vernacular, as opposed to Hebrew, the language of scholarship, they

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attracted many women to Hasidism and made Hasidic tales “best sellers” of their time. 9

For those unfamiliar with the history of Hasidism (and the historiography thereof), Eliach’s emphasis on the connection of Hasidism and women seems far-fetched. Hasidism today is rarely viewed as the champion of women’s participation in central facets of religious or social life. As part of the ultra-orthodox wing of Jewish religious observance, it rather appears to keep women in the background with all of the main religious functions, at least in the public sphere, devolving upon men. But Eliach’s view of the special draw that Hasidism had for women follows a well-established line of scholarship on the Hasidic movement that found its most important expression in the work of S. A. Horodezky, a twentieth-century Israeli scholar, who claimed that Hasidism revolutionized the role of women in Judaism. According to Horodezky, Hasidism elevated women’s spiritual experience, made writings (particularly in Yiddish) available to women, and provided opportunities for women to serve as spiritual leaders of Hasidic communities. 10 These claims, including the one concerning the pivotal role of Yiddish writing, have been pointedly challenged, although the main rebuttal came some years after Eliach published her collection. 11 But even in the wake of criticism that voiced skepticism about the central role of Yiddish, other scholars have continued to assert the connection between publication in Yiddish and the audience of women. 12 For her part, Eliach clearly overstates the case: Hasidic tales were generally published both in Yiddish and in Hebrew, occasionally in bilingual editions, more often under separate covers. 13 So the opposition between Hebrew and Yiddish that Eliach invokes – “most of the tales were written in Yiddish, which was the vernacular, as opposed to Hebrew, the language of scholarship” – is not strictly accurate. And the exact audience of Hasidic literature (or literature about Hasidim) in Yiddish has been (and continues to be) the subject of controversy. 14 But for our purposes, what is crucial is that Eliach views multilingualism at the center of the history – the collecting and editing of Hasidic tales – that she carries forward. Assuredly, Eliach’s provocative observation regarding the historical role of women in Hasidism bears specifically on the nature and evolution of her own collection. Eliach claims – and the stories bear this out – that this particular collection of Hasidic tales is special because “not only Hasidic men but Hasidic women, too, are often protagonists” and “play a major role here, not merely because they are the daughters, sisters, or wives of

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Hasidic personalities but because of their own faith, convictions, and moral courage.”15 Hence, Eliach’s book intensifies what she takes to be the Hasidic movement’s foregrounding of women, a prominence that was catalyzed by the importance of the vernacular Yiddish. But the pivotal role that women assume is not simply a shift of focus on Eliach’s part (though it is likely that too). Women assume these roles in the tales because, in the terms set forth in Hasidic Tales, the Holocaust precipitated a set of unique conditions wherein the usual hierarchies were under siege, the common institutions of authority rendered powerless or paralyzed. Indeed, in the collection women often replace rebbes as the source of decision and wisdom. In “The Vision of the Red Stars,” for instance, the tale begins by having Rebbetzin Bronia Koczicki, on the advice of the Radomsker Rebbe, prepare to join her husband in Warsaw, even though to go to Warsaw in 1941 went against her own sense of what was best. At this point in the story, traditional hierarchies are still firmly in place, indeed remain unchallenged. For “who was she, she thought to herself, to question a [rebbe’s] advice?” But soon questions do arise. After telling how she dreamed a horrible dream, the tale ends by describing how Bronia reversed her decision, refusing to go to Warsaw and concludes by quoting her words: “At times one must follow one’s own dreams.”16 Subsequent tales show that Bronia’s refusal to go to Warsaw was an important step in her surviving the war; her husband, trapped in Warsaw, did not. Hence, the intuitive wisdom of a personal dream comes to supplant the learned authority of a rebbe. By 1941, the tale suggests, the usual coordinates can no longer be followed; that shift is signaled by the elevation of women’s experience over the words of male authority. 17 To be sure, multilingual issues are not always conspicuous in these episodes, though, as we will come to see, they are forcefully present in many. But already linked by Eliach in her foreword to the prominent role of women in the Hasidic movement, the issue of languages shadows the female protagonists of the tales even when the issue itself remains on the margins. The unusual role of women in Hasidism generally and in Hasidic Tales specifically bears on Eliach’s own role in the process of obtaining the tales, for Eliach associates the “breakthrough” that enabled the project to come into being with her own role as a woman:“After the students [who were Hasidim] established my ‘credentials’ I faced no difficulties within the Hasidic community. For a woman, that was an important breakthrough which opened many doors.”18 The breakthrough might well have occurred be-

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cause, though a religious Jew, Eliach herself is not a Hasid and thus is not a member of the communities from whom she hoped to obtain her material. Nonetheless, it is a breakthrough chiefly because she, a woman, managed to interview Hasidic men – something that most women would not be permitted to do, given the practice of many ultra-orthodox men of not conversing with women who are not family members. 19 Her own breakthrough then mirrors the breakthrough of the women who are protagonists in the Hasidic tales. In both cases, women who regularly follow certain rules that orchestrate dependent behavior instead act independently, even iconoclastically. In one case the Hasidic women during the time of the Holocaust become the subject of chronicles; in the other case – Eliach’s – she herself serves as the chronicler. 20

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The Interview as Urtext It took a breaking through, then, to circumvent conventional barriers that would have impeded the collection of material. Only by means of these interviews could Eliach chronicle the fate of Eastern European Jewry through the medium of the Hasidic tale. The collection is clearly a synthesis between interview and tale, a synthesis that rests on a creative interplay between a plurality of continental languages on the one hand and English on the other. Indeed, the interview distinguishes Eliach’s book from most other collections of Hasidic tales, collections that have usually compiled the material from pre-existing oral or written sources. 21 Here, interviews serve as a basis for the tales, supplying the larger urtext out of which the tale emerges and from which it derives its authority. One important assessment of Hasidic Tales has entirely missed its composite nature, preferring to treat the collection exclusively as “legend.”22 But for a variety of reasons, the interviews are anything but. Eliach and her students conducted the interviews from 1974 to 1981, years that marked the onset of a serious role for survivor interviews in Holocaust research. 23 Indeed, Eliach’s interviews, among the earliest of their kind, served a definite polemical task. In the early 1970s, research on the war years was dominated by historians whose inquiry was exclusively based on Nazi documentation. Eliach established her Center for Holocaust Studies, Documentation and Research in order to undertake the kind of work that would counter the prevailing paradigm. According to Bonnie Gurewitsch, archivist of the center, “Documentation available . . . did not reflect the experiences of either survivors or liberators, but rather the German perspective of the


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executioner. It was clear that there was a need to seek out eyewitnesses who could testify to the experiences of the victims, as well as of the liberators and other bystanders.”24 The interviews were meant to challenge the monolithic position that historians gave to Nazi documents, offering instead the voice and experience of the victim. 25 This task was hardly simple. As Daniel Goldhagen has claimed, the skepticism with which historians of the Holocaust treated the testimony of victims was – or perhaps still is – considerably greater than historians generally bring to witness accounts of other events of collective trauma. 26 In the face of such skepticism, it was important to emphasize through every means the intimate link between victim and event. Hence, as the interview attempted to wrest a place for the voice of the victim, we can understand Eliach’s insistence on the importance of the languages and dialects of those victims, languages that were part and parcel of the events of the Holocaust. Eliach’s efforts helped to set in motion a focus on the interview in Holocaust research that culminated in the 1980s and 1990s with projects devoted to systematically interviewing Holocaust victims. Seen in this light, the Fortunoff Video Archive Project at Yale University and Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, leaders in this domain, pick up from where Eliach left off. 27 And yet, as pointed out in the beginning of this chapter, it is more appropriate to look back to David Boder’s 1946 Topical Autobiographies to find a similar spirit. Boder and Eliach have at their core the quest for fidelity through language. And yet in both, paradoxically, there remains a gap between the languages of testimony and the English that narrates that testimony. This gap has several implications. First, the English in which the stories are told remains accountable to the primary languages; Boder and Eliach keep before their reader – through stylistic “traces,” through insistent reference to primary sources and their importance – the awareness that English serves to translate not only language but experience. And second, the gap between languages of testimony and English narration generates a special kind of linguistic elegy: whatever traces there may be in the literate English that Eliach pens, these traces also intimate what has been erased; they convey, in Hana Wirth-Nesher’s telling phrase, the “felt presence of an absent source language,”28 languages that indubitably fuel the tales but that also exist solely as echoes. In this way, the echoes of these languages register linguistic losses and memorialize the brutal elimination of an audience for whom the primary languages would have been enough. This gap, then, defines the multilingual condition of Hasidic Tales of

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the Holocaust. As we will see, Eliach, for her part, conscripts a formidable range of strategies in the tales in order to draw attention to as well as to circumvent it.

Perfect German: Languages in Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust While multiple languages circulate mainly in the urtext of Hasidic Tales, the issue of languages also infiltrates the tales themselves in surprising and ironic ways. In the first three sections of Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, languages not only enable survival but also place one in peril. Paradoxically, facility in German either made it possible to pass or allowed for intimate connections with the enemy that proved essential in saving life. Assuredly, for readers of Holocaust literature this paradox is well known, receiving its most moving expression, perhaps, in Primo Levi’s essay, “Communicating.” There, as we recall, he details how surviving in Auschwitz was crucially dependent on one’s knowledge of German; those who lacked such knowledge or who spoke a language unrelated to German fared poorly because they simply could not understand what was asked of them. 29 Eliach’s tales drive home this point and also add to it. In one set of stories – “Honor Thy Mother” and “God is Everywhere . . . But . . .” – the “special Berlin ring” of Bronia Koczicki’s German is a crucial factor in survival. 30 In one instance, while Bronia masquerades as a non-Jew, German soldiers are so impressed with her conversation that, even though they pride themselves on their ability to “sniff out” Jews, they never suspect her but instead compare Rebbetzin Bronia and her young son to of all things “a beautiful madonna and child.”31 In another instance, this time recognized as a Jew, Bronia’s “perfect German” is able to bring admiration from members of the Gestapo and to help procure their collaboration in saving her nieces. 32 Strikingly, even when she is known for the Jew she is, her German convinces Nazis that Jews are not what anti-Semites claim they are. In disguise and out of it, Jews are able to use German for their own purposes, making the lines of demarcation between German and Jew that much more difficult to trace. German again plays this salvific role in the tale where it figures most prominently, “For the Sake of Friendship.” Forced into hiding, Rabbi Israel Spira – a great Polish Hasidic leader, often referred to as the Bluzhover Rebbe, who is a central figure in Eliach’s collection – happens to overhear a conversation in German, remembers the beauty of the German language,

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and recalls his own facility and the friendship with a German that it garnered him in the prewar days. Compelled to visit the nearby Gestapo office, the rabbi comes face-to-face with the same friend of prewar days who, recognizing the rabbi, does everything in his power to help him survive. In terms of the fate of the victim, the rabbi’s “perfect command of the German language” thus forged the friendship that now enables survival; in terms of Eliach’s narrative strategy, the chance hearing of a German conversation sets in motion the recollection that links past and present, providing the reader with a sense of ironic continuity wherein the German spoken casually in the prewar period comes during the war to mean the difference between life and death. For German to play such a role also suggests its durability in the midst of the Holocaust, a virtue commentators have often questioned. We recall that George Steiner, among others, has asserted that the Nazis debased German during the time of the war to a degree that rendered permanent damage. To be sure, Eliach is not unaware of this side of the equation. Indeed, the Bluzhover Rebbe reflects on how strange it is to hear a German spoken “without orders, without commands” as if that kind of imperial German is all that may be left. 33 But in the polyglot world of The Tales, the offense that the Nazis committed against German does not corrupt the German language per se. This complex representation of German as salvific also implies the rewards of acculturation, the benefits of Jews being able to speak with fluency the languages of the non-Jewish world. Such a facility is usually, of course, associated with Jews who championed Enlightenment principles, seeing integration or assimilation into non-Jewish society as the preferred goal. Clearly, such assimilation was not the aim of the Hasidic Jews who figure centrally in Eliach’s tales. It is thus all the more powerful that these Jews, too, benefit from such linguistic facility, suggesting that in terms of languages the usual oppositions – between enlightenment and tradition, between secular and religious – are not in effect. It suggests, moreover, that salvation, when it comes, sometimes comes by the apparatus of acculturation, commandeering the very tools that seem to run counter to the Hasidic spirit. 34

The Language of Dollars: English and the Holocaust In the first three sections of Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, then, non-English languages work ironically to further the possibilities of salvation or imperil them. Fittingly, it is only in section 4 of the volume – the section devoted

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to the postwar period – that English comes to be an active character in the process of representation. Indeed, the first tale in section 4, “The Plague of Blood,” takes up issues of identity, otherness, and language through the prism of immigration and the shifting position of English. Arriving in New York in 1946, the Bluzhover Rebbe is met by an American Jewish soldier, who pointed out with great pride the Statue of Liberty, which welcomes the immigrants to shores of freedom. He told the rabbi: “On its pedestal is an inscription written by a Jewish-American poet, Emma Lazarus: ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’ ” The gi translated the words into Yiddish for the rabbi’s benefit. 35

By framing the tale in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, Eliach sets the arrival of Holocaust survivors in the context of classic scenes of welcome to America. Yet, making explicit the irony of the scene, Eliach notes how the rebbe reinterprets the poem to bring out the distinctive tragedy of the Holocaust. Survivors are tired, poor, and yearning for freedom. But the few survivors who now come are no longer “masses.”36 “We are remnants, a trickle of broken individuals who search for a few moments of peace in this world, who hope to find a few relatives on these shores. For we survived, ‘One of a city, and two of a family,’ ” concludes the rebbe, quoting the book of Jeremiah and thus linking the fate of the survivors of the Holocaust to the fate of the survivors of the destruction of the first temple almost twentyfive hundred years before. 37 The rebbe uses the words of the ancient text to undercut the modern one, invoking the voice of prophetic lamentation to challenge that of liberal optimism. 38 This scene is particularly striking in terms of language. For Eliach makes sure to emphasize that the American soldier who serves as the rebbe’s guide translated Lazarus’s “words into Yiddish for the rabbi’s benefit.” The immigrant himself, Eliach shows us, cannot read the words that are meant to describe his plight and that serve as his welcome to America. The immigrant, in other words, faces an opacity, an English motto that, at least for many like the rebbe, is simply a foreign language. In this immigrant encounter between Holocaust victim and American icon, the English that is designed to appeal to foreigners is itself rendered foreign, in need of translation. In the context of current developments in multilingual America, Mary Louise Pratt has proposed,“expunging the term foreign to refer to [American] languages other than English.”39 The notion evoked by Eliach of making English itself foreign constitutes a yet more radical revision of

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America’s languages, not so much reclaiming other languages as estranging English. And yet it is when Lazarus’s words are made foreign that they can be interpreted properly. By means of the intertextual commentary of the rebbe – through Yiddish translation, set against the Hebrew text of the prophet – Lazarus’s English words are reread, thereby proclaiming the distance that lies between the “masses” envisioned some years earlier and the “isolated individual” who now arrives in the wake of the Holocaust. 40 The surprising opacity of the statue’s iconic poem hence generates a fitting response to the legacy of the Shoah. In a later postwar tale, “To Marry a Baker,” English is made, not foreign, but rather intimate with Holocaust-era Europe. The heroine of “To Marry a Baker” is a survivor, Tula Friedman, who has a talent for languages and also for telling stories. Seated with Eliach at a bar mitzvah party in Brooklyn, Tula is moved to tell how, while in Auschwitz, her ear was damaged: “She recalled the event blow by blow, in German, Yiddish, Hebrew, and English, telling it in the appropriate language with direct quotations, describing various episodes related to that beating and its aftermath.”41 Strikingly, Tula’s mode of recounting events of the Holocaust is resolutely mimetic, and it is the multiplicity of languages at Tula’s disposal that enables this uncompromising fidelity to the reality of Auschwitz. 42 Even more astonishing is that English is given a role equal to that of the languages central to the Holocaust (German, Yiddish, Hebrew). On some level, this goes against the mimetic grain: few in Auschwitz knew English; it rather remained on the periphery of events. But here, in this listing, English claims a spot for itself as a language of the Holocaust. There is also a self-reflexive dimension at work in this tale: Tula’s linguistic and narrative prowess clearly resembles Eliach’s own. And yet her tale inverts Eliach’s representational strategies. Able to invoke any language she chooses, Tula does what Eliach can’t do in America: she presents the tales in the multiple languages in which they were originally experienced. Nevertheless, the fact that English can assume a place among the most formidable of the languages of the Holocaust strengthens Eliach’s own compensatory project, making it appear natural for these tales set in Europe to be written in English. Tula’s extraordinary multilingual performance serves as a prelude to the defining event of the tale. As bread is delivered to the tables, Tula reminisces how in the camp she would “dream a lot about bread;” even dream of marrying a baker “so there would always be an abundance of bread.” Other

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survivors at the table confirm the value and obsession with bread, even though they choose not to eat from the bread in the basket before them on the table. Yet as the waiter attempts to take the apparently unwanted bread, he is asked to leave it: “There is nothing more reassuring in this world,” says yet another survivor, “than having a basket of freshly baked bread on the table in front of you.”43 Bread here serves as a sign of a normal world; superfluous but necessary, its fixed presence at the table testifies to the abundance that America provides compared to the deprivation from which the survivors have come. Indeed, Tula’s dream of marrying a baker is never literally realized but is symbolically enacted in her “marriage” to America, to the “baker” that provides abundance and normalcy. English enters the story in a similar manner, a language whose very presence provides reassurance of America’s power, its inclusion in the list of Tula’s eminent languages paradoxically signaling the distance that lies between present day America and Europe of a generation past. If “The Plague of Blood,” set in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, on the liminal border between America and Europe, shows English to be foreign and only able to register the force of the Holocaust through the filter of Yiddish and Hebrew and “To Marry a Baker,” set firmly on the soil of America, claims for English unconstrained powers to represent these events, the final tale I will consider, “God Does Not Live Here Anymore,” set outside America and on the terrain of the Holocaust, represents English as having both extraordinary powers and definite constraints. It is also the only tale in which English is explicitly viewed as a problem. Eliach’s title of the story focuses on displacement, and accordingly, the tale conveys a sense of quest for the proper place(s) and language(s) with which to address the Holocaust. Set in Cracow, Poland, in 1979, in the context of an official visit by President Carter’s commission on the Holocaust, the events of the tale unfold on the evening of Tisha B’Av, the time designated in the Jewish calendar for commemorating by rites of collective mourning the destruction of the Temple. But, in postwar Cracow, mourning becomes electrifying. A member of the American contingent, Miles Lerman, speaking in English, interrupts the traditional service and proposes instead to put God on trial for the damage rendered in the Holocaust. 44 The scene is linguistically surreal: a former Polish Jewish partisan who now lives in America returns to Poland and instead of speaking Polish or Yiddish, the tongues of postwar Cracow, or Hebrew, the language of prayer, pleads his case against God in English.

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Assuredly, Lerman invokes English here to permit the members of the president’s commission, made up of a number of native-born Americans, to understand what he says and to follow the proceedings of the case against God. But that the Americans appropriate the synagogue to carry out their own agenda reinforces the invasive associations around the unlikely use of English. That Lerman’s English protest, moreover, arises within the context of an official United States delegation’s visit gives the prosecution of the case an American seal, as if judgment can be exacted only under the jurisdiction of American authority. Eliach’s narrative delicately negotiates the subversive events and the association with English. She lets Lerman set forth the argument, as he replaces the Echah /”How” with which the Book of Lamentations begins with his own human (and English) “How”: “how could you [God] stay here [in Cracow, in Poland, in Europe, in the synagogue?] when next door are Auschwitz and Plaszow?” (emphasis added) 45 If the questions are to the point, Eliach shows that the English in which he voices them is distinctly “foreign”, distinctly out of place, even opaque: “The holy ark remained sealed like the faces of the old people, remnants of Cracow’s Jews, listening to the foreign language that they did not understand.”46 That the native audience cannot understand what is being said in their own milieu hints at the linguistic absurdity of Lehrman’s endeavor. Moreover, Eliach’s simile, likening the holy ark containing the Torah to the uncomprehending faces, intensifies the skepticism around English, implying that English does not partake of holiness but rather belongs to the realm of the profane. At the end of the tale, the profane and intrusive nature of English becomes clear as Eliach quotes one of the Cracovian Jews asking her, “What did your American friend say in the language of dollars?”47 English now becomes explicitly characterized as inappropriate, a language of the street and market rather than of the synagogue and religious court. 48 The opacity of English comes out of a misapplication, a confusion of registers. Out of place and misapplied, English cannot, according to the terms of the tale, address properly the terms of God’s displacement. For Eliach gives the Cracovian the final word, responding to Lerman’s accusations: God did not stay in one place and the people go to another; God is with the people, displaced from the synagogue that they once shared. Burdened with associations of the profane, the market, and the absurd, English appears at best intrusive, at worse fallacious. Trying to usurp the stage in an arena central to Jewish life (the Rema synagogue) and to the legacy of the Holocaust (Cracow and Auschwitz), English is put in its place,

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reassigned to the margins. To bring the terrible events of the Holocaust to America and render them in English may be one thing, but to try to take English, even (or especially) under the auspices of the American president, to the site of the Holocaust itself, is quite another. In Eliach’s tale, then, the question of God’s place is displaced onto the question of English. Moreover, this tale, perhaps more than any other in the collection, leads us to wonder about Eliach’s English as well, to feel the irony of Eliach’s mobilizing English to encompass the many languages in which these tales were told. And yet there is a way that the nature of this tale vindicates, at least to some degree, the use of English to address the Holocaust: the very rapscallion nature of English may well enable it to defy traditional modes; of all the languages at his disposal, in other words, Lerman may have chosen English as the language most apt to pose questions that go against the grain. Its very intrusiveness, its coming from the outside – geographically, culturally, religiously – may have energized Lehrman’s defiant questions, having them, at least to some ears, dwarf any answers that can be supplied.

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Hasidic Tales is not, as we have seen, the only work that problematizes the relation of English to the Holocaust by emphasizing multilingual strategies. But no other work, as far as I am aware, demands that English assume so many contrasting positions in relation to this event – positions of weakness and strength, of opacity and transparency, of dependence on other languages and assertions of independence from them. These three tales play out a variety of options whereby English is estranged, wrenched out of, or freed from its taken-for-granted roles. Notably, the tales accomplish this by progressively taking English through a journey into and out of America, from immigrant to resident to ambassador. On the face of it, this dynamic makes English increasingly into a language authorized to engage the Holocaust. But at each point English is made to do something more, or less, than it was expected to; and this inflation or deflation thematizes the anomalous role of English in relation to the Holocaust. Finally, in terms of American literary history, Hasidic Tales is remarkable as a uniformly English-language text that displays so incisively the multilingual context that makes possible such tales. For Hasidic Tales simultaneously conforms to monolingual pressures and contests them, eliminates a play of languages only to filter them back in. On one level, then, Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust both allows for, and in some ways invites, the fantasy of an America fully at home with English – an English, moreover, that is spoken by everyone (or almost everyone), everywhere, and that is prepared

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to address any experience imaginable, including the Holocaust. On a second level, however, Hasidic Tales exposes the compromised postures that English assumes in its quest to master every experience and dramatizes its uncertain – that is, shifting, decentered, opaque, misaligned – status. English is dubbed the “language of dollars” at the end of a process. Roth’s babble inaugurates it; Eliach’s intruder brings it to a close. If according to David Crystal, in the 1950s world English was a “dim, shadowy possibility,” the journey of English from the late 1950s through the 1980s witnesses its emergence from the shadows. Yet as English gains strength, it also is brought face-to-face with its limits. Indeed, other languages – most often Yiddish, sometimes German, occasionally a welter of other“languages and dialects”– constantly challenge the [153], (15) position of English. Further, English itself, the dominant language, voices this challenge, either through satire or by being transformed into something like another tongue. Moreover, even when English is spoken without an Lines: 226 to 2 accent, it sounds unnatural. Yet only in the next era does English, coming full circle from the pawnbroker’s anesthetized idiom, become a tongue ——— foreign to itself and thereby earn the right to recount the Holocaust’s most * 243.20006p ——— forbidding details. This is what Spiegelman’s Maus so deviously undertakes Normal Page to do. * PgEnds: PageBr

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chapter 10

The Language of Survival English as Metaphor in Art Spiegelman’s Maus

Thus far, English has had both more and less to do with the Holocaust than [157], (3) most of us previously imagined. There has been more because English had from early on a substantial role in representing the events. Even when the story was told in one of the languages proximate to the events, other factors Lines: 16 to 54 made publishing in English necessary. Eventually, English offered itself as a ——— neutral tongue, granting distance, conferring objectivity, and constituting a 13.0pt PgV universal audience for the Holocaust. Survivors were understandably wary ——— of such strategies, no matter how beneficent. To be sure, some of them preNormal Page ferred to tell the story in English. They did so, however, for other, palliative * PgEnds: Eject reasons. An adopted tongue enabled them to relate what happened with a buffer. At the margins of the events, English could, when called upon, [157], (3) fulfill this role more than adequately. But what would happen if English were not at the margins? This possibility is one of the extraordinary dimensions that Art Spiegelman’s survivor’s tale, as he refers to it, ushers in. For Spiegelman emphasizes the extraordinary role English plays in aiding the survival of his father, Vladek. Indeed, time and again, in Auschwitz and in Dachau, English plays such a role. At the epicenter of the terrible events, English has the power to shape destiny. This clearly reverses the equation, placing English squarely in the center. But the implications, as Spiegelman’s work shows, are still greater. For the prominence of English in the chronicle of events implicitly directs attention to the fractured English in which the survivor’s story is told and, more generally, to the complex significance of language and languages in representing the Holocaust. Maus’s exceptional concern with English operates on at least three levels. First, in Vladek’s biography, his knowledge of and competence in English is important both for initiating his relationship with his future wife, Anja,

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and for aiding or determining his survival while in concentration camps. Second, Spiegelman presents Vladek’s narrative of survival in immigrant English, rife with errors and neologisms. In contrast to the biographical events recounted, Vladek’s English here is noteworthy not because of competence but rather because of incompetence. Third, the fluent English of virtually all other characters (even those who, like the psychotherapist, Pavel, are also immigrants) frames and envelops both Vladek’s biography and his Holocaust narrative, establishing English as the dominant language. These three levels interrogate the status of English as a language of the Holocaust and, consequently, as a language (un)fit to recount the Holocaust. Intervening in the complex, even antithetical, legacy of English as a language of the Holocaust, Spiegelman’s Maus makes the position of English itself a theme. Indeed, this self-reflexive investigation of English begins with the title. On first hearing, the title would seem to be in English, the word “maus” (mouse) paralleling the audacious animal imagery Spiegelman uses to represent the Jews. But while the title is phonetically English, Spiegelman actually writes (draws?) it in German, a gesture that not so much eliminates the English as, I would suggest, contaminates it, associating it with, rather than opposing it to, the essential languages of the Holocaust. This strategy would seem to endow English with an authority that it previously lacked. There are, however, several ways that the association not only confers authority but provokes suspicion. First, the title links English with German, the language of the persecutors, thus implicitly associating English with the debate regarding the fitness of German as a language of representing the Holocaust. And second, the devious German title estranges the English, making it, for the American reader, not only curious but foreign, rendering the once familiar and comfortable into something strange and disconcerting. 1 Spiegelman’s choice of title suggests the complex ways he reformulates the issue of representing the Holocaust in English. On the one hand, he challenges its legacy of purity, moving English from outside to inside the Holocaust. On the other hand, by positing English as foreign, Spiegelman frustrates the American audience’s sense of familiarity, moving the reader in a sense from inside to outside the Holocaust. This chapter will elaborate the strategies that Spiegelman employs throughout Maus to effect his reformulation and revaluation of English. Admittedly, to foreground the verbal dimension of Maus appears perhaps

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to miss what is most singular about its approach to the Holocaust: the drawings. But as these preliminary comments suggest, this graphic novel compels attention to its words.

The Language of Secrets

English becomes a subject in the first represented conversation between Vladek and Anja. Vladek reveals to Anja that he has deciphered the private conversation in which Anja and her cousin praise Vladek. 2 They speak in English to protect their secret; Vladek’s capacity to understand English comes as a surprise, displaying not only his hitherto hidden capacity to negotiate English but also his access to the secrets that in this case were [159], (5) conveyed by means of English. English thus initially takes on a number of striking associations. As a language of secrets, English signifies a language spoken to prohibit understanding, specifically the understanding of the Lines: 75 to 95 one who is being spoken about. ——— Vladek discloses to Anja that he knows English by uttering the word 12.8pt PgV “stranger”: “You know,”Vladek lectures Anja,“you should be careful speak——— ing English – a ‘stranger’ could understand.” The first time Vladek actually Normal Page speaks English is to show that, contrary to what Anja believes, he is no * PgEnds: Eject stranger, that he can understand as well as she can. In its first appearance, English is the language that invokes the notion of stranger to declare the [159], (5) power of knowing. One hears an echo of this invocation when at the conclusion of Maus I, Vladek tries to heal the breach between himself and his son:“You should visit here more often – don’t be such a stranger.”3 Intuiting that the loss of Anja’s memoir will estrange his son, Vladek returns to the expression that first established the bond between husband and wife – a bond revealed through knowing English. By letting on to Anja that he is an English-speaking stranger, Vladek demonstrates the failure of English to be a language of secrets. One might have believed that it is possible to own a language, to have it available to one group and not another. But Vladek breaks down the barrier, suggesting that it is impossible to define and delimit the group who will have access. Indeed, what happens in the incident in English will later occur with Yiddish. That English cannot serve here as a kind of secret code provokes suspicion when there is an attempt to deploy Yiddish as a secret language. The reader is led to suspect that using a language as a secret code will once again fail. Additionally, the most explicit attempt to encode a language –

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when a passerby greets Vladek with the Hebrew word, “Amcha” – is met with suspicion by Vladek for the very reason that he himself assumes that language cannot be exclusively owned. Outsiders can always penetrate the society of those who speak a language. Thus, even the utterance of a Jewish language is no guarantee that the speaker is Jewish. The role of English in Vladek and Anya’s romantic encounter thus establishes what becomes the norm in Maus generally: strangers use foreign tongues to access secret information and to wield it in crucial ways. The associations around secrecy, resistance, and access also address the complex relation of Vladek and Anja as presented in Maus. For in this initial encounter, Vladek understands (or at least in his recounting suggests an understanding of) certain information that Anja would prefer he did not [160], (6) know. Whereas Anja resorts to English to deflect his understanding, Vladek employs it to appropriate a sensitive cluster of thought and feeling not his own. This dynamic parallels the ongoing issue of Vladek’s belief that he Lines: 95 t has full access to Anja’s story, a belief put in doubt repeatedly by Art’s ——— counterbelief that Anja’s memoirs would give another, alternative version 12.8pt P 4 to the events his parents lived through. ——— In his recounting of the episode in which he reveals his knowledge of Normal Pa English, then, Vladek has command of what is most secret, most impen* PgEnds: Ej etrable. In essence, English on this level suggests a fantasy of complete mastery. Indeed, it is a fantasy that accumulates economic, political, and [160], (6) psychological associations as the story unfolds. Tellingly, the discovery that Vladek understands English (and hence understands the appreciation that Anja feels for him) steers their initial conversation to further consideration of the role of English in their lives, considerations this time dominated by economic and class issues. To Anja’s question, “Did you study it in school?” Vladek responds, “I had to quit school at about 14 to work,” a reply that sets out sharply contrasting class assumptions and realities. 5 In presuming that English is learned in school, Anja is guided and constricted by her upper-class sensibility, a sensibility that takes for granted the leisure and resources for children to attend school. Vladek’s motivation for learning English – “I always dreamed of going to America” – continues to suggest contrasting class orientations. 6 Whereas Anja acquires her English as part of a secure life lived in a land of plenty, Vladek acquires his based on a dream, a fantasy of secure life in a different land of plenty, America. The dream of America, while never spelled out, implies a society redeemed by an alternative social vision – a


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vision of radical social mobility and opportunity, in other words, where a child would not have to quit school in order to support a family. Such a dream also, of course, offers an alternative to the social stratification that so powerfully governs the contrasting methods by which Anja and Vladek have acquired English. To be sure, Anja has her own revolutionary dreams linked to languages and secrets. Working surreptitiously for the communists, Anja translated secret documents, ostensibly meant to help the class struggle, into German. When the Polish police discover Anja’s complicity, she almost ends up in jail. For Anja to put her linguistic aptitude at disposal of the communist cause is more than Vladek can bear, and it nearly ruins their marriage. If Vladek’s cleverness with English reveals class distinctions, then Anja’s skill [161], (7) with language acts to reverse them or even to do away with them altogether. Although Vladek and Anja’s courtship weathers the stormy episode, the incident nonetheless also early on associates German with disruption, risk, Lines: 112 to 1 and incarceration – with what will be in store for them, in other words, ——— once the war breaks out. 12.8pt PgV If for Anja German places the family at risk, for Vladek it eases his ——— hardship. Having been taken a prisoner by German soldiers, Vladek is Normal Page beaten for putting up resistance. But by speaking German, he finds a way * PgEnds: Eject out: “I answered [the soldier] in German and his partner stopped him from beating me.”7 Spiegelman makes the connection between language [161], (7) and well-being explicit – “he answered him in German and his partner stopped” – as if speaking German (and, in Primo Levi’s terms, moving from non-language to language) made Vladek human in the eyes of his captors. In this case, even before one enters a concentration camp, German has the power to arbitrate life and death. Signifying risk but offering refuge, German cannot help but play a role in Vladek and Anya’s saga. But its significance clearly pales to that of English. What exactly English stands for in Maus is ambiguous and complex, partaking of the associations of Vladek’s American dream but going beyond it as well. At this stage of Maus, English is not yet a language of survival. Rather, the first meeting between Vladek and Anya represents English as a romantic language of secrets and of deciphering them, as well as a property that is acquired through various kinds of labor. Indeed, it is through the speaking of, and the speaking about, English that one sees class as a key factor in accounting for experience and perception in Maus. Moreover, it also becomes the site in which fantasies of mastery on the one hand

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and transformation on the other are entertained and played out. These fantasies will continue to operate when in three remarkable episodes in Maus II English becomes the language of survival and the language of the survivor.

The Language of Survival Early in Maus II, English returns to the foreground, serving as a form of knowledge that can generate extraordinary transformations. And in the context of the concentration camp, this power to transform can determine survival. After deportation to Auschwitz and separation from Anja upon arrival, Vladek tries simply to remain alive. Faced with little food, insufficient clothing, and a constant threat of brutal death, relief comes in an unexpected manner. The kapo of Vladek’s barracks decides to find a tutor in English, and after examining the proficiency of the candidates, the kapo deems Vladek the best qualified. 8 During his two-month tenure as the kapo’s tutor, Vladek is able to eat and dress well and to obtain the kapo’s protection. Because a Polish kapo is interested in bettering his own circumstances, English becomes the key to survival. English has such leverage because of, in the kapo’s word, its “worth.” The kapo wants to learn English because it will stand him in good stead with the Allies when the war is over. In the hiss view, language is generally a means to improve social status, and English is the specific instrument to achieve that end in the future, having the capacity not only to aid survival but also to secure privileged status in the society one inhabits. This view of the worth of English suggests that it is not pure, that it does not inhabit a place outside of camp society, but rather, like other commodities, it is subject to the particular logic and laws of camp life. And like other simple commodities in Auschwitz for which there is great demand and little supply, its value rises astronomically. Vladek’s competence in English, as well as the association with the kapo that it garners, enables him to achieve a meteoric rise in status. He obtains not only food but also preference in clothing –“With everything fitted,” says Vladek, “I looked like a million” – and secures privileges with which he can help friends. 9 That Vladek’s rise in status is so closely associated with his competence in English is powerfully suggestive. For paradoxically, in the midst of the deprivation of Auschwitz, Vladek’s success fulfills his “dream of America” – a dream of transformation that presumably centered on the acquisition of material abundance and that, we recall, originally motivated

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his own study of English. Even Anja’s fate becomes yoked to Vladek’s good fortune with English: when Vladek later relates what he knows of Anja after they were separated upon arrival at Auschwitz, the news that she is alive in Birkenau comes while giving language lessons: “This I found out by workers from Birkenau what passed where I was teaching English.”10 If teaching the kapo English may implicate English in the logic of Auschwitz, it may also, however, continue to operate according to its own laws. “How long were you in quarantine teaching English?” asks Art, trying to account for Vladek’s time in Auschwitz. 11 To do so, Art draws a timetable, a kind of graph, with “quarantine” designating the two months between March and May 1944 that he taught English to the Auschwitz kapo. Strikingly, Spiegelman uses this word rather than the occupation of “teaching English” itself to designate the time period. To be sure, the kapo himself used the word “quarantine” at the end of the episode to explain why he couldn’t have Vladek stay with him any longer: “I’ve kept you here in the ‘quarantine block’ as long as I can.”12 As the etymology of “quarantine” suggests – referring to a forty-day period – Vladek’s reprieve too must come to an end. But in the case of the graph, the word substitutes, as it were, for the occupation of teaching English. It is as if the separation or sequestering implied in the notion of being quarantined indicates the rarefied time and space where English could play a role in Auschwitz. As Art’s graph paradoxically implies, only being put in quarantine could English determine survival in Auschwitz. Yet English also gathers a momentum that has it show up in the most unexpected places. Trying to iron out the details of his father’s time in Auschwitz, Art’s questions lead Vladek to report on the inner workings of the killing process. Chosen by the soon-retreating Germans to help dismantle the crematoria so as not to “leave behind a sign of all what they did,” Vladek emphasizes that he saw what few could have seen. His grisly task, moreover, gave him the chance to see exactly how the enemy deceived the victims into thinking that nothing terrible was awaiting them: “People believed really it was here a place for showers, so they were told.” If the enemy wished to remove all signs, Art himself draws particular attention to them. To accompany Vladek’s report, Art diagrams the approach to the gas chambers, including the signs that instructed the victims how to proceed and that conveyed the pretense of a normal shower room. At first written in local languages – “disinfektion/dezynfekcie” – the signs soon give way to English. 13 This turn to English clearly allows the reader to quickly pick up on the mode of deception. It also replicates the representa-

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tional strategy that Spiegelman uses throughout Maus, whereby idiomatic English substitutes for the Yiddish or Polish spoken by Polish Jews. Here, again, English plays that role, the changing-room signs are meant to deceive the victim. Spiegelman thus moves from fidelity to the languages as they appeared at Auschwitz to an English stand-in. Supplanting the camp languages on the signs leading to death, English too becomes implicated in the killing process: “Please Tie Your Shoes Together,” reads one sign; “Important – Remember Your Hook Number” reads a second. Idiomatic to the extreme, even English at this moment submits to the wiles of the persecutor, helping to create the illusion of normalcy when the situation is anything but. The power of English to transform circumstances continues even as conditions worsen. The next instance in which English figures centrally occurs in the last stages of the war after Vladek tells of the death march that he and the other prisoners in Auschwitz were compelled to endure. Ending up in Germany, in the concentration camp Dachau, Vladek registers the new degree of torment that he underwent: “And here, in Dachau, my troubles began.”14 It is this phrase, of course, that Spiegelman uses for the subtitle of Maus II. On one level, the phrase is clearly ironic because it is absurd: Vladek’s troubles began significantly before this. The clumsiness of Vladek’s formulation is also emblematic of the problems involved in telling a story of this kind. By emphasizing through the subtitle an idiom inappropriate for the circumstances to which it refers, Art calls attention both to Vladek’s foreignness, his difficulty with mastering English idiom, and to the foreignness of the experience, a degree of suffering that resists idiomatic formulation. On another level, however, it is clear that Vladek (or Art) wishes to suggest with this phrase that a new dimension of anguish here enters the story, anguish generated by conditions in Dachau at the end of the war that bring Vladek closer to death than ever before – they were, he says, “waiting only to die.”15 Here then, when conditions have become most acute, English once again determines survival. On the verge of starvation, Vladek meets a Frenchman who in a camp filled only with Eastern Europeans is desperate to find someone to speak to. Vladek and the Frenchman discover they share a common language, English, and daily conversation relieves the Frenchman’s isolation. Grateful to Vladek, the Frenchman, a non-Jew who benefits from extra rations mailed to him via the Red Cross, “insisted,” says Vladek, “to share with me, and it saved me my life.”16

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Several aspects of this episode recall the earlier situation in Auschwitz: Vladek’s interlocutor is a non-Jew, a fellow prisoner, and English is a language foreign to both speakers. Again, Vladek’s ability to speak English results in his receiving abundant food in a situation where others are starving to death. The worth of English, however, is at least tacitly redefined. English here is not valued primarily as a commodity but rather as a therapy, as a means of countering the madness of isolation that the Frenchman suffers. The salvific encounter with the Frenchman in Dachau also recalls, in part, the original English episode with Anja. Here, too, Vladek’s ability to speak English provokes in the Frenchman the question: “How do you know English?” Vladek’s response, moreover, is virtually the same as the one he gives to Anja, foregrounding the “dream of America” as the motivating force for learning English. Once in America, however, Vladek’s dream of the future becomes transformed into a nightmare about the past, and this transformation is most glaringly felt when Art Spiegelman refers again to the French benefactor, and to the English that linked the Frenchman and Vladek. The two corresponded after the war, writing in English, an English that Vladek “taught him.” But Vladek destroyed the letters at the same time as Anja’s memoirs. Up to the end of the war, the English that plays such a vital role in Vladek’s story is spoken only by non-native speakers, by those for whom English is the other tongue. Though thus far in Maus II, knowledge of English has meant the power to determine survival,“knowledge”refers only to a relative mastery, a timely, if partial, competence among those who have little or none. But when the American army arrives, the real masters of the language set the standard for competence. Thereafter, Vladek’s knowledge of English no longer needs to be the key to survival that it was in the previous episodes. Nevertheless, English continues to play a vital, if altered, role in Vladek’s story. No longer the language of survival, English becomes the language of the survivor. For in response to the army’s command,“Identify yourselves,” Vladek responds not by giving his name but by telling for the first time his story of “how we survived to here.”17 While still in Europe, then, Vladek first tells the story of the Holocaust in English, to an American audience, a telling, moreover, that is linked to identity. Even while English is playing a key role in negotiating the change from survival to survivor and in constructing Vladek’s postwar identity as a witness, the encounter with the native speakers of English ushers in another, more problematic dimension. As the liberated Vladek settles in with the

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Americans, and English becomes the language of daily discourse, there is something unsettling about the relations that are mediated by the English that they speak. For, as it turns out, this English is spoken as much by colonizers as by liberators. Initially, Vladek and his friend are permitted to stay with the Americans only on the condition that they “keep the joint clean and make our beds.”18 The condition, in other words, is that Vladek and his friend serve as domestic servants for the soldiers. Spiegelman accentuates the imposition of servant status in exchange for protection by drawing Vladek receiving gifts for shining shoes and being called “Willie”; the stereotyping task and name recall the stigmatized position imposed by white Americans on African Americans in this era. 19 Although the American soldiers conquer the Nazis and set free their victims, the liberators are nevertheless primed, through gesture and language, to enact the role of colonizer, even subjugating (while liberating) those for whom, presumably, they have gone to war in the first place. 20 In this climactic episode, then, when English as other tongue encounters English as mother tongue, English becomes even more deeply associated with mastery and domination.

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0.0pt Pg Contending with the Sacred Mastery is nevertheless at times hard fought, English vying for authority in realms in which it usually has little. This is the case, for instance, in the domain of the sacred, an arena where in Jewish life Hebrew and Aramaic take precedence. In Maus, the struggle between English and the languages of Jewish ritual is most sharply drawn in “The Prisoner on the Hell Planet” sequence. Mourning the wife and mother who has committed suicide, Spiegelman shows his father and himself next to the coffin, his father intoning Kaddish, the Aramaic prayer recited by mourners. Strikingly, the first panel showing this scene contains only the Kaddish drawn in Hebrew script; English is literally out of the picture. For a moment English relinquishes a place to Aramaic as the language that addresses the fate of his mother and, in more general terms, the legacy of the war; it is, after all, the losses incurred in the Holocaust that have driven his mother to suicide. The second panel continues the Kaddish, but in this case, the holy letters are sandwiched between the English commentary on top and an English translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead beneath. Having yielded its narrative territory, English quickly reclaims it. This give-andtake also occurs in terms of the directional flow of the narrative. In contrast to English, Hebrew letters are read right-to-left. Their presence in an other-


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wise English narrative thus reverses the flow, signaling a kind of disruption. But the overall movement of Spiegelman’s panels – in these two instances as well as all others – remains left-to-right. So in this respect as well, the disruptive sanctity of Hebrew is swept along in the English. To an eye used to looking at Hebrew letters drawn on parchment, the Hebrew letters that Spiegelman draws in these panels appear natural, if displaced. Hebrew letters are regularly written by hand. Indeed, this is obligatory in the case of the lettering used in a Torah scroll, mezuza, or set of tefillin. In the case of these ritual objects, the Hebrew letters must be inscribed. If a press imprints them, the objects are rendered invalid. It is a different story with the Latin letters of English. To hand-letter the English narrative of a book is a novelty, of a piece with the drawings that define the novelty of Maus itself. For a moment, Spiegelman becomes something of a scribe, transferring into the arena of comics the hand-lettering of a sacred Jewish document. Perhaps this association accounts for the prominence of the hand inserted into “The Prisoner on the Hell Planet” in which the drawn Kaddish appears. A hand holds the book; a hand also holds the photograph of Art and his mother that occupies top left position on the page. The motif of the hand is repeated in the photograph itself: Art is posed with a hand on his knee; his mother with her hand on his head. To be sure, the repeated echo of the hand reminds the reader that Maus is the work of a visual artist; the distinctive nature of the book is that he drew it by hand. The hand motif is self-reflexive in another sense: the objects that tell the story, in other words, cannot stand by themselves. They require the hand of the author to bring them into being. But viewed within the context of the Hebrew letters that spell out the beginning words of the mourner’s Kaddish, the hand is the hand of a scribe, writing out traditional words for ritual purposes. 21 Hebrew is mainly set off as the language of ritual. But on occasion it, too, operates as a secret language, an undercover code that during the Holocaust served to connect one Jew with another. As Vladek returns to the city to try to get supplies for himself and Anja, he hears someone behind him call out, “Amcha,” the Hebrew code word for “our people.”22 Frightened that its a trick being used to expose him, Vladek plays dumb. But the Hebrew speaker turns out to be a Jew after all. Even when circumstances prove to be genuine, relying on a secret language to bind Jews together goes awry. How much more are things apt to go wrong, then, when the circle includes non-Jews. The attempt to use a Jewish language to act covertly and escape arrest reaches a pinnacle when Vladek, on the run in Nazi-occupied

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Poland, arranges for Anja and himself to be smuggled into unoccupied Hungary. Here it is not Hebrew but Yiddish which permits the Jews to ostensibly confer in secret and judge whether the non-Jewish smugglers can be trusted. The Jews conduct their negotiations in Yiddish “so the Poles don’t understand.”23 Drawn with a Pole waiting at the margin of the frame, the panel depicting the Yiddish conversation – the single example of such a conversation in Maus – shows the Jews relying on their language to convey a series of life-and-death secrets. This role of Yiddish in the escape attempt to Hungary is further complicated when a young friend who ostensibly has himself been smuggled out of Poland writes in Yiddish from Hungary, proclaiming his well-being and urging Vladek to go ahead with the smuggling operation. Importantly, it is because the friend’s letter is in Yiddish that it can be trusted. For whatever reason, Spiegelman holds back in this case, neither drawing the Yiddish conversation in Hebrew letters nor having the contents of the letter read in Yiddish. He reserves Hebrew letters only for prayer, as if the prayer book itself erupts into the narrative. In this case, a conversation dedicated to eminently pragmatic affairs avoids the sacred. Moreover, the covert conversation among the Jews, which Spiegelman underscores with English translation, is meant to be transparent to all of Maus’s readers – readers who, in other words, are meant to think of themselves as trustworthy, as enjoined to overhear the words spoken by the Jews trying desperately to find a haven. To draw the conversation in another alphabet would put too much distance between victim and reader. In contrast, the Hebrew prayers stand without translation, engaging those who can follow, distancing those who cannot. The Yiddish letter purportedly sent from Hungary has its own denouncement in Maus II. Once in Auschwitz, Vladek meets the letter writer, Abraham, who explains how a letter in a hidden language could have failed in its task: “The Poles who arranged our ‘escape’ understood Yiddish (Spiegelman’s emphasis]. . . . In Bielsko the Poles dictated that letter while the Gestapo held a pistol up to my head.”24 What is meant to be a language of secrets becomes a language manipulated by strangers. Indeed, these strangers – the Polish smugglers – not only understand but also dictate letters. In a bizarre reversal, the Jew serves as the conduit for the Poles speaking Yiddish; what are ostensibly his words are actually theirs. If strangers can decode a presumably secret language, they can also find things in it that remain opaque to Jews themselves. In Auschwitz, Vladek

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is about to give way to despair when a Polish priest gives him hope by interpreting the numbered tattoo on Vladek’s arm: Hmm . . . Your number starts with 17. In Hebrew that’s “k’minyan tov.” Seventeen is a very good omen . . . It ends with 13, the age a Jewish boy becomes a man . . . and look! Added together it totals 18. That’s “chai,” the Hebrew number of life.

The priest concludes that because the letters add up to“the Hebrew number of life,” Vladek “will come through all this alive.”25 Vladek takes the priest’s comments to heart. The priest’s unexpected fluency in Hebrew – and, for that matter, in Jewish modes of numerological interpretation – pulls Vladek out of depression. In this case, the outsider was able to decipher the secrets latent in Hebrew; for him it was clearly not a hidden tongue. Even more, the secrets contained within the tattoo imprinted on Vladek’s body were beyond the ken of Vladek himself. What would seem to belong to Vladek – his own number, his own body, his own language – can actually be best understood by the stranger coming from without. Hence, Maus shows Jewish languages as ultimately porous, available to non-Jew as well as Jew. As Spiegelman shows, this availability goes against the grain of what is expected. Indeed, Vladek and Anja were deported because such expectations were violated. Had Vladek not presumed that only a Jew would compose a letter in Yiddish, he would not have bought into the smugglers’ plan. In wartime Poland, these languages were assumed to be the property of Jews alone. And this was not only held to be the case by Jews. The Polish smugglers, too, could count on the fact that the letter written in Yiddish would serve as an affidavit of their trustworthiness. They were aware that everyone took for granted that Yiddish was a Jewish language. That outsiders could know it as the insiders did could sometimes signal death (as in the case of the smugglers) or life (as in the case of the priest). 26

Fractured English How does this account of English as the language of survival inform the story Vladek tells in English, the story told by the survivor? How are we to understand the association of English with knowledge, with power, with transformation, and eventually, with the capacity to attest to one’s identity on the one hand and the fractured English with which Vladek testifies on the other? And how does the tension between English as the competent

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language of survival and English as the incompetent language of the survivor address the issue of representing the Holocaust in English and the issue, more generally, of representing the Holocaust? In one respect, the function of this incompetence is clear and forceful. Vladek’s accented English is mimetically appropriate for a Polish Jewish immigrant to America, and critics have noted in this light that Art has a “good ear.”27 But I want to suggest that Vladek’s “tortured visualized prose” (the phrase is Nancy Miller’s) 28 is not only meant to represent an Englishspeaking foreigner but is also meant to torture English into being a foreign language. Indeed, this quality of foreignness is the means by which English can become a language of testimony. By fracturing Vladek’s English, and by making it the most foreign language in Maus (a point to which I will return), Spiegelman uses it to convey the foreignness of the Holocaust itself. That Vladek’s tortured English does more than reveal Spiegelman’s ear for language can be appreciated by contrasting it with the way he represents the language of the other survivors in Maus. These other émigrés, Mala, Pavel, and Anja, also European-born and arriving in the United States no earlier than the end of the war, are candidates for an accent like Vladek’s. But Spiegelman presents them as fluent in English, speaking like natives, virtually without accent. We know that these survivors are foreigners only by what they say and what is said about them, not by how they say it. It is for Vladek alone that Spiegelman reserves the distortions of syntax, the malapropisms, the quirky idiom – the stylistic correlates, as it were, of an accent. 29 Although it is but the inflection of an individual voice, Vladek’s accent also shapes the aesthetic structure of Maus, providing Spiegelman with the means to represent, and distinguish, present and past. For a time, says Spiegelman, he entertained the possibility of drawing the episodes depicting the past in black and white, those of the present in color, but rejected such a blunt visual dichotomy as too simplistic. 30 Yet what resisted visual coding yielded to an aural one: for episodes in the past, Spiegelman uses fluent, colloquial English to represent the languages of Europe as spoken by their native speakers; for episodes in the present, Vladek’s broken, accented English serves as a constant marker. On the surface, this strategy seems misguided; continental languages do not deserve an English better than English itself. But within the terms Maus establishes, Vladek’s broken English becomes the means by which Spiegelman articulates the incommensurability between present and past.

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Spiegelman’s decision to place a distinctive burden on Vladek’s English as a vehicle to represent the Holocaust came only after experimentation with other options. The earliest publication of the Maus project, a three-page vignette appearing in 1972, already draws Vladek recounting his ordeal by means of a tortured prose. 31 But for at least two reasons, Vladek’s accented narration in this earlier installment is less well defined and exceptional than it becomes in the later full-length treatment. First, Vladek speaks with an accent when he is recounting his story and also when he is shown in his European past; the distinction that informs both Maus I and Maus II between Vladek in America and Vladek in Europe, between Vladek in the present and Vladek in the past, does not obtain. And second, and perhaps even more fundamental, is that all European Jews speak with an accent. “The safest thing it would be that we kill him,” says one of the Jews hiding in a bunker with Vladek. A decade or so later, in a revised version of this scene in Maus I, Spiegelman eliminates the accent, and now the Polish Jew says simply: “The safest thing would be to kill him.”32 The contrast between the vignette and the books shows an evolution in Spiegelman’s representational vision of English. In the earlier version, every victim speaks with an accent, a strategy that divides the linguistic world of Maus between native speaker and foreigner, between American and European. In the books, however, the erasure of group accent and exaggeration of Vladek’s individual one make Vladek’s American English singular. Paradoxically, it is not the representation of the events of the Holocaust itself that is most foreign to the American readers of Maus; it is rather the telling about the Holocaust – the testimony – that carries the burden of everything foreign. That Vladek’s broken-English testimony is meant to carry immense authority is attested by the single instance in which Vladek speaks from a different vantage point. On the way home with Vladek from the supermarket, Art’s wife, Françoise, stops to pick up a black hitchhiker, whom Spiegelman represents as speaking a highly inflected (and also “visually tortured”) form of black English. Vladek condemns Françoise’s charitable gesture, using degrading racial stereotypes to justify his own admonitions. 33 Inclusion of this unflattering view of his father’s bigotry – Vladek himself, according to Art, appears not to have learned the lesson of the Holocaust – is clearly meant to complicate the reader’s reaction to Vladek. But the episode is made more remarkable by Spiegelman’s deployment of Vladek’s language. For at the moment when the hitchhiker speaks broken English, Vladek relinquishes his own. Instead, he expresses his bigoted

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regrets in his native Polish (the only example of Vladek speaking Polish in either Maus I or Maus II), represented here first in the original, then underscored with a fluent English translation. To be sure, Vladek’s recourse to Polish allows him to vent his bigotry without infuriating the other passengers in the car. But the movement from English to Polish also mobilizes a set of representational values. No longer telling the story of the Holocaust, but rather uttering racial slurs, it is as if Vladek has forgone the right to the tortured English that is the vehicle for his testimony. In reverting to his native Polish, he finally regains a fluency – even the English translation has overcome the foreignness that defines his usual American voice – but that fluency comes at the expense of, and suspends, the authority evinced by his tortured English. Moreover, the episode witnesses a shift of roles and voices. For the black hitchhiker himself, the victim of Vladek’s bigotry, speaks an English that, in its idiosyncrasy and visual effect, approximates the foreign English that defines Vladek’s authoritative voice as a survivor.

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English and Surviving Auschwitz

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For English to act as the language of survival in Auschwitz is of course remarkable but not entirely new. As we recall, English played this role in the case of Nelly Bundy, one of the dps interviewed by David Boder. Bundy’s story was strikingly similar to Vladek’s. Because of her knowledge of English, she was moved from Birkenau to Auschwitz, from hard labor to office work, and from severe deprivation to a life of endurable austerity. As with Vladek, her facility in English meant that she was granted privileges that others were not. The privileges that her facility in English garnered – better living conditions, more food, easier work – meant the difference between life and death. The similarity does not end there. In the interview, Bundy periodically showed that her English was not all that good. At times, she would draw attention to the limits of what she knew. More generally, Boder’s verbatim transcription attested to a lack of mastery. To be sure, Bundy’s occasional lapses were not Vladek’s fractured English; not every sentence bears the mark of incompetence. But in both cases, the fact that knowing English saved their lives stood in contrast to the less than competent English in which they told their story. For all the similarity, however, Vladek’s story differs tellingly from that of Bundy’s. In her case, we recall, she was chosen to tutor a Nazi pilot and is thereafter taken to where she will carry out her assignment. But the


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pilot never appears. Nor was his failure to show up for his lessons ever explained. Despite his non-appearance, Bundy remains in her privileged circumstances, continuing to benefit by the English she never was actually called upon to teach. In Vladek’s case, he teaches English daily to the shrewd Polish kapo. Additionally, the kapo spells out why learning English is worth the trouble; learning language for him is a way of weathering the tides of war, of making oneself useful to those in power. If Vladek learns English because he dreams of going to America, the kapo learns it because he knows that America is en route to him. In contrast to the mystery associated with Bundy’s saga, where she actually never taught English nor knew why she was being was requested to teach it, Vladek’s story gives English a reason and a role. The contrast between the two obtains in the interviews as well. In Bundy’s case, she enigmatically speaks English in France to a Latvian Jew. This runs counter to what one might expect. Given that Bundy is Austrian, that the interview takes place in Paris, and that Boder is fluent in German (we recall that he conducts the majority of interviews in German), the factors point to German as the most logical choice. But, for no apparent reason, Bundy chooses English to be the language of the interview. To be sure, Boder had lived and worked in America for years and thus had little trouble interviewing in English. But that English had become Boder’s adopted tongue plays little role in determining the language in which he conducted the interviews; only three of them, we recall, feature English as the primary tongue. With Bundy, then, there remained a question of why tell the story in English – a question that parallels the mystery in her story surrounding the role of English in Auschwitz. With Vladek, in contrast, just as it was clear how English played a role in aiding his survival in Auschwitz, so was it clear why he should tell his story in his adopted tongue. Vladek tells his story in English because he lives in America and, perhaps more importantly, tells it to an American son (one wonders how Vladek’s manner of telling the story would have changed had the interviewer been a landsman). Even if Vladek’s facility with English is at times questionable, the situation itself calls for the interview to be conducted in English. There is no enigma. In spite of the broken, unmastered, estranged English that Vladek speaks, his use of it in the interview can be explained. What for Bundy is opacity and mystery, for Vladek is clarity and transparency. On one level, then, Maus celebrates English. By displaying its heroic capacity to transform and pacify the most adverse conditions, Maus conveys a

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sense of the unlimited power of English, of its almost magical potency, even of its harboring the secret of life and death. English can apparently master anything it confronts, can dominate whatever demands subjection. This celebration would seem to authorize English as a language of testimony, investing it with the knowledge and power to chronicle the events of the Holocaust with unparalleled eloquence. This glorification of English would likely confirm what American reader’s of the late twentieth century believe about the language they – or their neighbors – speak. On another level, however, Spiegelman’s graphic novel tells a story about limitations, and particularly about the limitations of English as a language of the Holocaust. Maus inscribes these limits ironically, designating fluency, competence, and mastery as relative and questionable accomplishments. The very capacity to use words well often becomes the ironic sign of blindness and coercion. Significantly, Maus enforces the limitations of English by representing as authoritative an English that is uniquely broken, incompetent, unmastered. Indeed, the only English by which to tell “a survivor’s tale” is one that is singularly foreign. Such a repositioning of English goes against the expectations of an American audience, asking them, asking us, to question the fantasy – one that Maus itself rehearses – that English can know and master everything, even the Holocaust.

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chapter 11

Eaten Away by Silence English as Elegy in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces

It would seem that Maus took English as far as it could go. Always at the edge of the Holocaust, English in Maus claimed a place in the center. Rarely playing a significant role, it did nothing less than keep Vladek, family, and friends alive in camp after camp, even when his troubles really began. Dreams turned into nightmares, but within the nightmares of Auschwitz or Dachau, English was the source of what light there was to be had. Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces picks up where Maus leaves off. Here, too, English plays a dominant role. Different from Maus, to be sure, Fugitive Pieces represents nothing of concentration camps and little of the ghettos. Escaping from the massacres of Polish Jewry, the hero wanders, takes refuge, and only hears of European Jewry’s destruction indirectly. Yet in spite or because of this indirectness, English has a significance far beyond what it has had hitherto. 1 Whereas in David Boder and John Hersey English was a source of anxiety, or in Ruth Chatterton ironized as a language that (as the heroine fantasizes) everyone speaks, or in Eliach mocked as a “language of dollars,” English here is a medium that can be celebrated. In Fugitive Pieces English becomes the preferred language in which to write about the Holocaust. Published in 1996, Fugitive Pieces tells two stories: in part 1, Jakob Bier recounts the murder of his Polish Jewish family and his subsequent flight to the forest, where he hides. The boy is soon, however, discovered by a Greek geologist who then smuggles him to the Greek isles, where they spend the duration of the war. Afterwards, the boy and his foster father move to Toronto, the father teaching at a university, the boy maturing to become a poet and translator. He will also eventually write the memoir that is part 1 of the book Fugitive Pieces. Part 2 tells the story of Ben, who is able to come to terms with his own parent’s fate as Holocaust survivors through translating Jakob Bier’s poetry. The climax of Fugitive Pieces comes when

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Ben, in search of Jakob’s lost Holocaust memoir, finds it, and, through it arrives at a greater understanding of his role as a child of survivors. The novelty of Fugitive Pieces, at least on one level, lies in the locale of Greece. To be sure, Greece figures initially as a refuge; his life threatened, the boy Jakob flees and ends up in there. But the safety of Greece turns out to be illusory, as Michaels enfolds within Jakob’s story a chronicle of Greek Jewry’s decimation (sixty thousand of a wartime population of seventyfive thousand Jews were murdered). Fugitive Pieces thus shrewdly expands the boundaries of the destruction of European Jewry. 2 From The Wall to The Pawnbroker to “Rosa” to Maus, Polish Jewry understandably has taken center stage. And with a Yiddish-speaking protagonist hailing from a shtetl in Poland, Michaels continues to emphasize the plight of Polish Jewry. But what originates in Poland shifts to Greece; what starts in the center moves to the periphery. Greece represents then both periphery and center, the place that affords sanctuary is also the place from which very few survive. Yet this Poland-to-Greece itinerary begets its own questions. Can, one wonders, the story of Greek Jewry can be told only by telling that of Polish Jewry first? Can the elegy to the Greek center of Sephardic Jewry only be sung by a Jew whose first tongue was Yiddish? 3 Fugitive Pieces tells of languages acquired and those lost, languages learned and those forgotten. Multiple languages and even alphabets – Yiddish, Polish, German, Greek, Ladino, Hebrew – figure importantly in the plot of the novel as well as symbolically marking Jakob’s tragic journey and Ben’s parallel one. For our purposes, what is most astonishing is the newly starring role of English. And in featuring English, Michaels gathers together the many strands that have marked its journey through this study: global, neutral, therapeutic, heroic, and imperial. What English is not is also important: the English of Fugitive Pieces is never broken and is rarely represented even with an accent. In this respect, it is hard to imagine that Fugitive Pieces appeared only after the medium of accent had become increasingly central to Holocaust writing. But its premises are different: learned English is always written with native mastery. Finally, English’s elevated status carries with it an elegiac component: hand in hand with the mastery of English goes the erosion, loss, and devaluation of the primary languages, particularly Yiddish. 4 Criticism on Fugitive Pieces often highlights language issues. The focus, however, is not the multiple tongues spoken and written but the kind of language deployed. Indeed, criticism on Michaels’s novel demonstrates the degree to which essentialist notions of language have overshadowed

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multilingual considerations, even (or especially) when the multilingual issues are a crucial aspect of plot and narrative. Meira Cook, for example, writes that Michaels wishes “to bring to the prose of the traumatic narrative the unruly compulsions of poetry, and in so doing to restore to language what Adorno once mourned as necessarily lost forever.”5 By fashioning her novel as a prose poem, Michaels can restore what has been lost, can, in Cook’s phrasing, translate prose into the foreign language of poetry. Strikingly, Cook uses the metaphor of language and translation to speak of the stylistic strategies used by Michaels. But despite the fact that languages play such a fundamental role in the novel and in the life of its protagonist, Cook’s assessment of Michaels’ strategy remains in the realm of metaphor; not English (or Greek or German) but poetry is the foreign tongue. Nicola King, for her part, emphasizes how Michaels’ attempts to fashion a language commensurate with traumatic memory. Strikingly, King even enfolds in her analysis of traumatic absence Jakob’s moment of discovery of English as the suitable tongue: “ ‘On Idra,’ writes Jakob,‘I finally began to feel my English strong enough to carry experience. . . . The moment when language at last surrenders to what it’s describing.’ This suggests a fusion of word and image, but in the novel ‘language,’ as I have suggested, is often foregrounded at the expense of ‘what it’s describing.’ ”6 But King sees that the discovery of the particular powers of English to chronicle the memory of the Holocaust is part of Michaels’s representational problems generally. The discovery that English was “strong enough” concerns not English but issues of meaning and rhetoric. I do not bring the examples of Cook and King to highlight their inadequacy but rather to show how, even when commenting on a text in which the significance of languages is so much in the foreground, the critical questions lead one not to issues of multilingualism but in other directions. What such readings of Fugitive Pieces overlook is how Michaels links the chronicling of the Holocaust to the dynamic interplay of languages, how in other words the loss of some languages and the finding of others shapes when, how, and for whom the story will be told. At the outset of Fugitive Pieces, English is not on the scene. But the initial encounter between the boy, Jakob, and the geologist, Athos, hints at what is to come: I limped towards him, stiff as a golem, clay tight behind my knees. I

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stopped a few yards from where he was digging – later he told me it was as if I’d hit a glass door, an inarguable surface of pure air – “and your mud mask cracked with tears and I knew you were human, just a child. Crying with the abandonment of your age.” He said he spoke to me. But I was wild with deafness. My peat-clogged ears. So hungry. I screamed into the silence the only phrase I knew in more than one language, I screamed it in Polish and German and Yiddish, thumping my fists on my own chest: dirty Jew, dirty Jew, dirty Jew. 7

Jakob’s first moment of speech is thus emphatically multilingual, an urgent attempt on the boy’s part to bring forth all of the linguistic resources at his disposal. And yet the message transmitted by these primary tongues is self-negating: “dirty Jew, dirty Jew, dirty Jew” – one execration for each language. These primary languages, including Yiddish, can do nothing but speak the words of the anti-Semite, the Jew hater, to enable the hater and hated to be the one and the same. 8 Intriguingly, Michaels attempts to have the identical English phase (“dirty Jew”) convey three different utterances. This strategy combines both a mimetic dimension, repeating the phase three times, and an overtly fictional one, the English phrase masquerades as three languages. Michaels’s English here (representing Jakob’s three tongues) cannot help but evoke the figurative,“dirty Jew” characterizing someone as repulsive because they are Jewish, even while alluding to the literal, “dirty Jew” as the boy whose dirtiness (his “mud mask”) compels him to identity himself as human rather than as monster.

Twisting Twins: The Languages of Antiquity Conventionally, Greek and Jewish cultures are cast as opposing forces, two currents of antiquity that fashioned different – and mutually exclusive – priorities. Cultural criticism from Matthew Arnold on has further refined this antagonism. But Michaels wants to undo the opposition, designating them as “twisting twins”: “He taught me,” writes Jakob of his first lessons with Athos, “the Greek script, like a twisting twin of Hebrew.”9 Indeed, in Michaels’s scheme, the two scripts so closely resemble one another that when Jakob first sees Greek he mistakes it for Hebrew. Hailing from antiquity, the two are so alike that he cannot tell them apart. Michaels implies that the shared antiquity makes them more similar than

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different: “Both Hebrew and Greek, Athos liked to say, contain the ancient loneliness of ruins, ‘like a flute heard distantly down a hillside of olives, or a voice calling to a boat from a shore.’ ”10 Both languages signify something from a distant past that continues to work upon the present. From this perspective, it is natural that Greece should serve as Jakob’s sanctuary. Greece and its language are a second home, not opposing Hebrew but a mirror of it. And yet, despite this twinning, Greek also plays the annihilating role in which it is traditionally cast, not a twin of Hebrew but its opponent: Slowly my tongue learned its sad new powers. I longed to cleanse my mouth of memory. I longed for my mouth to feel my own when speaking his beautiful and awkward Greek, its thick consonants, its many syllables difficult and graceful as water rushing around rock. 11

To learn to speak Greek is bound up with eradicating what came before. Jakob’s declaration of longing reads like the program of the immigrant who wishes to overcome the impediments – linguistic and otherwise – that keep him from experiencing himself as a member of the new culture. By means of Greek, Jakob undertakes to refashion himself – to forget and to cleanse. From this vantage point, Jakob tells a familiar story: that of an Eastern European Jew who migrates to Western Europe (here, recast as Greece), sheds his outmoded cultural baggage, and continues on to the New World and a new life. In Jakob’s case, to be sure, he complies with the program of assimilation in order to overcome the painful memories of his family’s destruction. And this story of a child’s recovery from trauma is how Jakob’s chronicle is meant to be read. But Jakob’s story converges with that of other modern Jews (or Jews of modernity), stories in which language plays a crucial role. So Michaels joins a story of recovery from trauma to that of assimilation, using the “sad new powers” of Greek as the medium. Greek then is the language of assimilation and the twin of Hebrew, what weans him from that which is Jewish and returns him to it. Once Jakob and Athos are in Greece, English surfaces, serving as one of two languages – the other is Modern Greek – in which Athos tells stories to Jakob. From the first, Michaels implies the more crucial role of English: “I listened to Athos’s stories in English, in Greek, again in English.”12 To make these stories twice-told in English establishes it as the preferred storytelling language. But it also hints at English being the language that is difficult to comprehend, hence the one that demands two tellings: “At first I heard

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[the stories] from a distance, an incomprehensible murmur as I lay face down on the rug, anxious or despondent in the long afternoons. But soon I recognized the same words.” The stories are medicinal and help Jakob to distance himself from the searing memories of Poland. But the English story sessions heal wounds only at substantial cost: Athos’s stories gradually veered me from my past. Night after night, his vivid hallucinogen dripped into my imagination, diluting memory. Yiddish too, a melody gradually eaten away by silence. 13

Michaels indissolubly links the fate of memory and language: just as stories undo horrible memories, so does some equally potent force remove Yiddish from the scene. To be sure, there is an initial attempt on Athos’s part to help Jakob retain his boyhood tongue: “Gradually Athos and I learned each other’s languages. A little of my Yiddish, with smatterings of mutual Polish. His Greek and English.”14 But Michaels almost immediately sets in motion the possibility that this “learn[ing] each other’s languages” may come up against insurmountable obstacles: “Athos didn’t want me to forget. He made me review my Hebrew alphabet.” Given that Yiddish is written in the Hebrew alphabet, such review also attempts to preserve Jakob’s facility in Yiddish. As we will see, however, Michaels makes Athos’s role ambiguous in relation to memory and forgetting. Once the therapeutic assault on memory begins, Yiddish also comes under siege. What obliterates Yiddish is not the palliative stories that Athos tells but “silence,” presumably the cultural silence, the absence of any Yiddish voice that makes Jakob’s memory of, and thus facility in, Yiddish susceptible to erosion. But even if the agent here is circumstance, Michaels’s choice of a metaphor with geological associations (“eaten away”) to articulate the disappearance of Yiddish links the fate of Yiddish to Athos and his geological vocation. The stories Athos tells, by replacing Yiddish with other languages, do create a silence that eats away at Yiddish. Moreover, the metaphor is not only geological but culinary and, as such, pointedly reverses the process by which Jakob and Athos acquire, by “tasting,” new language: “We took new words into our mouths like foreign foods; suspicious, acquired tastes.”15 Yiddish therefore is not acquired through eating but rather disposed of by being eaten away.

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The Amnesiac Language When Jakob and Athos arrive in Toronto, the process continues; only now Jakob takes a more active role in acquiring English and “burying” the past: “with each mouthful,” Jakob says, returning to the metaphor of eating and learning language, “the past was further silenced.” “I tried,” he continues, “to bury images, to cover them over with Greek and English words.”16 A crucial moment comes when Jakob discovers that mastery of English can enable him to write a memoir, to chronicle the “events of my childhood in a language foreign to their happening.” The foreignness of English – what I have previously referred to as its neutrality or amnesia, “an alphabet without memory” – protects Jakob even while it allows him to draw close to the memory of loss and flight. Michaels’s conception is so powerful because it, too, regards English as something marginal to the life of Polish Jews. Only once the protagonist leaves Poland does English come to have a place. And that place is in nowise taken for granted. For even as the refugee from Poland has his story, so does English as well. Michaels documents the emergence of English on the scene and its increasing significance in the lives of the novel’s principle figures Michaels casts English as elegiac by making it neutral. Having not been in the thick of the events, particularly as a native language, gives to English several attractions: a vantage point to chronicle the events and a power to insulate the writer against the pain that recollection cannot help but induce. Writing a memoir in English thus plays a role in Michaels’s larger view of language and trauma: traumatic events are ineluctably linked to the languages in which they were first mediated. Whereas for many this connection marks those languages for special regard in chronicling the Holocaust, for Michaels the disconnection with those languages is a crucial step toward healing the trauma and enabling the victim to write about it. Michaels is not of course the first to suggest the benefits of a neutral tongue in addressing the Holocaust. But her version of neutrality puts the equation starkly. For the neutral language to achieve dominance, languages saturated with the experience must be rejected. They are the languages of pain, native (or acquired) languages spoken by the victim during the period of the events. Associated directly with scenes of immense suffering, native languages summon forth the suffering in an especially intense form. Hence, the turn to neutral languages means a turn away from native ones. Significantly, Michaels joins the discovery of English to a fleeting recovery of Yiddish. In a Toronto market, Jakob once again hears his native

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Yiddish, “the ardent tongue of [his] childhood.” This is apparently the first time that he has heard Yiddish spoken since he fled his Polish home. Michaels pictures the encounter with his native tongue in the setting of his new life as overwhelming: “I felt,” he laments, “a jolt of grief.”17 Hearing Yiddish summons forth the anguish of loss. Jakob’s response thus parallels the connection between Yiddish and trauma that Michaels has developed through the novel. It is this connection that justifies the silent erosion of Yiddish from Jakob’s life and its replacement by a neutral English. Yet while English comes to the fore, Michaels creates a scene from within the market that makes English suspect:“From wooden cages, chicken stared with a look of snobby incomprehension, as though they were the only ones who understood English and therefore couldn’t make out the babble around them.”18 Understanding English implies that other languages cannot be understood. Caged chickens here are a stand-in for the native who, unable to understand, terms what can’t be comprehended as “babble” – languages not worth understanding even if one could. First encountered when the “third person” entered “Eli, the Fanatic,” babble here, too, dramatizes the limits of English at the moment it wishes to render Yiddish an incomprehensible tongue. Yet in contrast to Roth’s story, English in Michaels’s does not submit. Jakob has just recorded the revelation of English as a language in which to record the traumatic events of his childhood. So even at this moment of discovery, whereby an amnesiac English enables a chronicling of trauma, the turn to English – represented here by the ridiculously snobbish chickens – bears within it a rejection of a lost yet more primal tongue. Indeed, even as Jakob registers the grief, he refrains from naming the language that he has lost. But this scene not only reinforces the association of Yiddish to Jakob’s childhood. It also extends the reach of Yiddish to include a community of survivors: I listened, thin and ugly with feeling. I watched old men dip their numbered arms into barrels of brine, cut the heads off fish. How unreal it must have seemed to them to be surrounded by so much food. 19

Yiddish has a present life, indeed one associated with those who like Jakob lived through the war. Yet unlike Jakob, these Jews did not survive the war at a remove and hence Yiddish remains for them the language of choice. Jakob, who survived at the edge of Nazi-occupied Europe, here confronts those who couldn’t flee. Strikingly, Michaels scripts the encounter in the voice of speculation: “how unreal it must have seemed to them.” Even after having gone through what he did, Jakob, according to terms of Michaels’s

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fiction, could only enter their context of survival through the indirect path of speculation. Associating this reencounter with Eastern European Jewry with the discovery of English, Michaels suggests that English, lacking memory, can deal with the central phenomena of the Holocaust only by means of speculation, a powerful but nonetheless hypothetical conjecturing of what must be (and must have been) the case. Linking the caged chickens to the status of English recalls an earlier occasion where chickens played such a role. Sent to buy fish, Jakob enters a store, places the order, and is answered by the word “suspicions.” Returning home, he tells Athos what has happened, and they return to the store, where Athos deciphers the word “suspicions” as “chickens” – the store sells not fish but chickens. Enlightened, Jakob is left embarrassed and Athos in laughter. With one immigrant speaking to another, the medium, native to neither, breaks down; what is chickens for one is suspicions for another and takes a third to translate. Hence “chickens” becomes the stumbling block to understanding and the catalyst of suspicions. 20 At this point in Michaels’s story, English, lacking memory and drawn to speculation, is hard put to do justice to “events of childhood” that Jakob tries to render; English achieves, writes Jakob, only an “awkward shrieking.”21 But this awkwardness is temporary. Later, after Athos has died, leaving Jakob again orphaned and bereft, Jakob returns to Greece, staying for a time in Athos’s family house. And now, paradoxically, the Polish Jewish survivor discovers the full power of English. On the Greek isle of Idhra, Jakob’s English becomes “strong enough to carry experience.”22 Strong enough, in other words, to write a lyrical memoir about the murder of his family and his own unsteady path to survival; strong enough, furthermore, to make a case for Michaels herself. For rather than wring hands anxiously over the evident inadequacy of English, as was the case with Hersey’s standin editor, Michaels celebrates the singular capacity of English to write about these events of childhood. In part 2, devoted to the story of Ben, the son of survivors and student of Jakob Bier, English continues to accrue power. As two episodes show, this power comes by means and at the expense of other tongues. First, Ben, retracing his mentor’s steps, also journeys to Greece in order to spend time in the setting where Jakob plied his poetic trade. Entering Jakob’s library, Ben takes stock of its volume, “immense in scope and size.” He goes on to note its holdings, “the most vigorous collection of poetry I’ve ever seen, Greek, Hebrew, English, Spanish.”23 Celebrating the library’s multilingual reach, Ben’s inventory of languages is also noteworthy because of what it

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leaves out: Yiddish, the language of “melody,” but also Jakob’s other native tongues, Polish and German. Indeed, the triad of languages with which the child Jakob, hungry and caked with mud, called “dirty Jew, dirty Jew, dirty Jew,” have disappeared from the scene. With the languages of childhood gone, English rises even more prominently to the surface. This is proclaimed one final time when Ben sees the title of Jakob’s last book, written in English, “What Have You Done to Time,” posted on the wall, sandwiched between a translation of the title in Greek and one in Hebrew. English is thus both primary and derivative: primary because Jakob, the survivor, writes in English; derivative because English draws its authority from its association from the great languages of antiquity, Greek and Hebrew. Hence, English replaces what is native, heals what is broken. A halfcentury after the Holocaust, English, the outsider tongue par excellence, becomes the insider; indeed, in Fugitive Pieces it becomes the insider because it is the outsider. The formula would read: the less intimate the connection, the greater the possibility of eloquence. Michaels’s own writing about the Holocaust in English would stand in no need of justification; or, put differently, the story of English she tells justifies, even celebrates, the English in which she writes.

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From Translation to Chronicle Forty-five years later, then, Anne Michaels rewrites Hersey’s experiment with English and the Holocaust. In both cases, the survival of Polish Jews is at the center, indeed survival by means of escaping to a surrounding forest. Both authors, furthermore, present their novels as a found manuscript, a recovered record of events that is exceptional when viewed against the background of epidemic loss of written testimony from the period. Jakob’s memoir, penned decades after the events in the civility of postwar Canada and Greece, would presumably not face the same vulnerability as did writing from the era of the Holocaust. But by making the loss and recovery of Jakob’s memoir a crucial facet of her narrative, Michaels imbues it with vulnerability similar to that of Hersey’s ghetto creation. Significantly, the opening sentence meditates on the perilous fate of wartime writings: “During the Second World War, countless manuscripts – diaries, memoirs, eyewitness accounts – were lost or destroyed.”24 The issues of loss and, in exceptional circumstances, recovery of such writings thus frames Michaels’s work just as they do Hersey’s.

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Most importantly, while both authors link their own narrative to the fate of a found one (specifically to manuscripts written by Polish Jews), both Hersey and Michaels conceive of the found text as being published originally in English. The editor of The Wall, we remember, believes that the size and disorder of the Yiddish original and Polish translation held back publication; it is only this unnamed but disciplined editor of English who can fashion a shapeless archive of notes into a book. In Fugitive Pieces, Jakob himself chooses to write in English (or, perhaps, it chooses him). The language’s neutralizing qualities make it most attractive. Both books share the fact that the English that we read is the English in which the text ostensibly first appeared. Sharing this fact, the two are nonetheless divided by another: whereas Hersey can only premise the English of The Wall as [185], (11) a translation of one of the primary languages of Eastern European Jewry, Michaels envisions Fugitive Pieces not as a translation into English but as a memoir written in English. Emboldened to the premise that English is a Lines: 220 to 2 primary language of the Holocaust, both authors nonetheless feel obliged to chronicle how English has come to such a position. For Hersey, the ——— account of the triumph of English over the Yiddish original and Polish * 228.02847p ——— translation is brief and pragmatic; for Michaels, in contrast, the narrative Normal Page relating the ascent of English is long and complex because, in Michael’s * PgEnds: PageBr novel, English is at least as important as the survivor Jakob himself.

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Conclusion In the Thick of the Fray, or English as the Third Tongue

The disappearance of Yiddish in Fugitive Pieces draws attention to the thread of Yiddish running through this study. In Hersey, Chatterton, Wallant, Ozick, Eliach, Spiegelman, and Michaels, Yiddish, as spoken by Polish Jews, plays a more or less consequential role. Even with Arendt, lurking in the background of her desire to pen an alternative view of the trial, is the specter of the Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jew. The Eastern European Jew conducting the trial in Hebrew (in this case, an ironic substitute in Arendt’s linguistic catalog for the parochial sentimentality of Yiddish) serves as the foil for her own celebration of German and English. The story of English and Holocaust is thus ineluctably paired with that of Yiddish and the Holocaust. I have been forced, in other words, to focus on Yiddish almost as much as on English. One can see a version of this pairing by working backwards through key points of my study. The elimination of Yiddish in Michaels was preceded by the Yinglish through which Maus’s survivor told his story. That, in turn, came after “Rosa’s” despised Yiddish, a Yiddish that not so much contended with as was parallel to English. In Roth, Yiddish was triumphant, emerging surreptitiously as a language of storytelling that, once unleashed, reformed English as well. In Chatterton, Yiddish was emblematic of a child survivor’s fragmentary language. For Hersey, the writing itself was ostensibly Yiddish, which, however, was so chaotic that it could never be published. If Yiddish ultimately yields to the encroachment of English, there is occasionally a countermovement in which English itself yields. Indeed, Schindler’s List, seemingly an ostentatious purveyor of the capacity of English to range wherever it might, makes not Yiddish but English disappear at a crucial juncture. To be sure, English serves as the dominant (indeed, almost exclusive) language for both victim and persecutor through the film’s early stages. No surprise here. But the turning point comes in the

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hellish scenes in which the Cracow ghetto is liquidated. Once the manhunt is set in motion, English disappears, leaving the eruptions of dialogue into the chaos solely to German and Yiddish, the languages of persecutor and victim respectively. Tellingly, English cedes pride of place even though the languages that take over remain opaque to most viewers. When the film, in other words, turns to that which most approximates the murderous frenzy of the Holocaust, English is, as it were, squeezed out, no longer part of the brutal landscape. Though one might object to the attempt at verisimilitude at work in this linguistic shift, the choice to exclude English from the scene, especially at a historical moment (the early 1990s) when English is most commonly brought in rather than left out, reinforces the immensely disturbing images unfolding in the ghetto liquidation sequence. 1 In the wake of a course dedicated to intense examination of the significance of languages in relation to the Holocaust, I assign my students a concluding exercise: “fantasize that you could write a story (or poem, or drama) about the Holocaust in any language. Which language would you choose and, given what we have read over the course of the semester, comment on why you chose this one?” Their responses are inevitably searching: “Were I to write a story about the Holocaust, the most appropriate language may be German,” writes a native Israeli, fluent in Hebrew and English but not German. She continues: “After all, [German] is the language that created the Holocaust, the language whose phonetic qualities (harsh, metallic, clear-cut pronunciation) correlate with the horrors inflicted by the Nazis.” Read aloud to the class, this fantasy, expressed in an accented English by a native Hebrew speaker, dramatizes in an almost breath-taking manner the issues upon which the course focused. Yet having apparently opted “for the language that created the Holocaust,” the student was not yet finished: “Still, it would be impossible for me to use German. I would therefore choose Hebrew . . . the language of Jewish history and its future.” Tellingly, my students – even those who speak a native English – rarely choose it as the preferred tongue: “I still feel sometimes,” says a student, drawing aptly on the idiom of host and guest, “that the English language tries to enter a lingual and cultural circle which does not welcome it.” Students comment wisely on the virtues that English possesses (for example, “neutrality”), but do not see it as the favored option. “It is its remoteness, its self-assuredness and arrogance even, that make me reluctant to consider writing about the Holocaust in English,” continues the student who spoke of English as an unwelcome guest in the circle of Holocaust writing. Remoteness may in fact engender arrogance, one might well respond. Able

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to claim a home anywhere in the world, English may presume that being a guest is exactly the most desirable position. My study has considered the specific role of English in representing the Holocaust. But there is the reverse side of the equation: the effect of the Holocaust on English. To a degree, the Holocaust has played a role in shaping English as we know it today. English is that language that, lodged at the corners of the globe rather than in the midst of Europe, escaped contamination. The Holocaust did not create a new English. To be on the margins, pure, liberal were characteristics ascribed to English at various times before the Holocaust, which confirmed what these images implied. Thus if languages remember, English was a blank slate. Hence English could stake out neutral territory, or the territory of neutrality. If neutrality confers on English the possibility of writing in a amnesiac language, so does this have the reverse affect. The Holocaust has helped English become the neutral tongue. The Holocaust offers support to both versions of the story of English: the global and the imperial. In the wake of the Holocaust, the story that emphasizes the unique opportunity of English as a worldwide language fulfills the need to rise above parochial interests. The closer the world appears to be engulfed by apocalypse, by conflicts between cultures, nationalities, and ethnicities that can lead to hugely murderous ends, so can the arrival of English as a global language afford a way to negotiate problems rationally. And yet the Holocaust intensifies the anxiety around the imperial dimension of English. The arrogance of English recapitulates many totalitarian features, privileging conformity at the expense of difference. Behind this general uneasiness may be one associated specifically with language. A tragic consequence of the Holocaust was the virtual destruction of Yiddish as a major language of cultural activity. Its audience profoundly diminished, only the last demon remains, in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s haunting parable by that title, to scavenge amidst the ruins. 2 That English frequently is said to usurp the place of native languages casts it in an especially pernicious role. Fugitive Pieces plays out the fantasy directly – Yiddish is killed again, this time by English. Ideally, one comes to appreciate the force of Anya’s question to Vladek, “Y – you know English?” The assumption behind this question was that one didn’t know English, didn’t need to know it, and hence one could be shocked to learn that a Polish Jew would know enough to pick up on a conversation in English. Yet, in Spiegelman’s hands, the marginality of

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English in Polish Jewish culture becomes a source of its power, of its ability to communicate secrets, of its strange capacity to negotiate survival. When we come to feel that the English they speak is – in terms of the Holocaust and the study thereof – a foreign tongue, we, too, will perhaps be in a position to harness its ambiguous power. As we recall, English is the third language on the street sign directing visitors to Yad Vashem, Jerusalem’s Holocaust memorial and museum. Situated on the sign beneath Hebrew and Arabic, Jerusalem’s lingua francae, it guides those who cannot negotiate the other two tongues. As I hope this study conveys, its position as a third term fits. On the sign as in the literature, the outsider tongue addresses the outsider, the tourist or pilgrim who comes to Jerusalem yet remains on its linguistic perimeter. This position nevertheless has salutary aspects here as elsewhere. Unlike the vandals who, from one or the other side, believed Arabic had no right to emblazon a sign with the name Yad Vashem, no one in the case of English has apparently thought to blacken it over. Its well-honed position of neutrality keeps English out of harm’s way. Clearly, whereas the other two languages are fraught with meaning in relation to the Holocaust (and much else, of course), English seems to rise above the fracas. Yet, as I have argued in this study, English, undesecrated though it may be, is in the thick of the fray.

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notes p re face 1. The problem that representing the Holocaust attempts to address often hinges on the inadequacy of language, a presumption that language – any language, under any circumstances – fails in the face of these years of atrocity. Elie Wiesel and George Steiner, for instance, have, in their respective postwar writings, emphasized the inadequacy of language when addressing the Holocaust. Writing from the point of view of a survivor, Wiesel refers to it in virtually every collection of essays (One Generation After, A Jew Today, Against Silence, The Kingdom of Memory) as well as in most of his fiction. Writing from the perspective of a cultural critic, Steiner referred to this inadequacy in early remarks on the Holocaust and has thereafter often drawn attention to the issue. See for example, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman (New York: Atheneum, 1977). Inadequacy plays a central role in most discussions of language and the Holocaust, including postmodern responses, where it frequently appears under the rubric of the “limits of representation.” See for instance Saul Friedlander, ed. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 1992). In this study, I shift the focus from the failure of language to the divergent possibilities of languages, from presuming the inherent limitations of language to examining the enabling (or disabling) role of specific languages – specifically, English – in relation to the Holocaust. 2. In terms of poetry, Susan Gubar’s recent volume, Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003) gives some attention to these questions. There is no comparable work on drama. For drama that lends itself to such analysis, see Barbara Lebow’s A Shayna Maidel (New York: New American Library, 1985). 3. I do not mean to suggest by this claim that previous critical writing has been insensitive to historical context and to the evolution of Holocaust writing. What I do mean is that generic, thematic, or national concerns have structured virtually all such studies. (One exception comes to mind: Judith Doneson’s The Holocaust in American Film [Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1987] – a study devoted not to writing but to film.) Structuring a critical work according to chronology thus implies a different organizing principle.

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4. I am thinking here primarily (but not only) of Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999). introduction 1. Emmanuel Ringelblum, Writings from the Ghetto (Yiddish) (Tel Aviv: Farley Y. L. Perets, 1985). The translation can be found in Emmanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, ed. and trans. Jacob Sloan (New York: Schocken, 1958), 67. 2. See Ringelblum, Writings, 157. On Zabludowski’s relationship with Czerniakow, see Adam Czerniakow, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow, ed. Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron, and Josef Kermisz, trans. Stanislaw Staron and Yad Vashem (New York: Stein and Day, 1979). Zabludowski owned a pharmaceutical enterprise, had a background in real estate, and held several positions in the ghetto, including being chair of the Personnel Commission and of the Fuel Allocation group. 3. See for example Joseph Kermish, ed., To Live with Honor and Die with Honor:! . . . Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives “O.S.” [“Oneg Shabbath”] (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1986), 300. 4. I am indebted to Samuel Kassow for information on the “allrightniks.” 5. Chone Shmeruk, “Hebrew-Yiddish-Polish: A Trilingual Jewish Culture,” in The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars, ed. Yisrael Gutman and others (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1989). 6. On Jewish multilingualism, with emphasis on Ashkenazic Jewry, see Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, trans. Shlomo Noble with Joshua A. Fishman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Baal-Makhshoves, “One Literature in Two Languages,” trans. Hana Wirth-Nesher, in What is Jewish Literature? ed. Hana Wirth-Nesher (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994), 69–77.; Shmuel Niger, Bilingualism in the History of Jewish Literature, trans. Joshua Fogel (New York: University Press of America, 1990; Ruth Wisse, The Modern Jewish Cannon: A Journey through Language and Culture (New York: Free Press, 2000); Hana Wirth-Nesher, “Traces of the Past: Multilingual Jewish American Writing,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature, ed. Michael Kramer and Hana Wirth-Nesher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 110–28. 7. David Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 200. Roskies also addresses the centrality of Jewish multilingualism for the Holocaust in David Roskies, “Ringelblum’s Time Capsules,” in The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). The most re-

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markable multilingual primary source from this period is the four-language (Yiddish, Polish, French, and English) diary written in the Lodz Ghetto by an unidentified author. For a facsimile of the text, written on the margins of a French novel, see Hanno Loewy and Andrzej Bodek, eds., “Les Vraies Riches” Notizen am Rand. Ein Tagebuch aus dem Ghetto Lodz (Mai bis August 1944) (Leipzig: Reclam Verlag, 1997). For other critical studies that attend to multilingualism and the Holocaust: Sidra Ezrahi, By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980); Sidra Ezrahi, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Sander Gilman, “The Ashes of the Holocaust and the Closure of Self-Hatred,” in Jewish Self-Hatred: AntiSemiticism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Sander Gilman, “Introduction: The Frontier As a Model for Jewish History,” in Jewish Frontiers: Essays on Bodies, Histories, and Identities (New York: Palgrave, 2003); and Shoshana Felman, “The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah,” in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992). Asking a different set of questions than those that I pursue, Anita Norich has nonetheless offered one starting point for looking at English in relation to the Holocaust. See “Harbe sugyes/Puzzling Questions: Yiddish and English Culture in America during the Holocaust,” Jewish Social Studies 5 (1999): 91–110. She examines how English and Yiddish language writing differed primarily in its explicit reaction – English, oblique at best; Yiddish, engaged and impassioned – to the decimation of European Jewry. She argues that crucial to assessing Jewish cultural response is to take account of English as an “unthreatened language” and to see the contrast between the two tongues as “two languages whose fates were also so radically different” (92). While Norich’s account is suggestive, she relies on a static view of English in America and assumes, as many have done, that English language writing about the Holocaust only came “decades” later. My study challenges these assumptions. A less direct reckoning of the complex relation between English, Yiddish, and the Holocaust can be found in Ruth Wisse, “Language as Fate: Reflections on Jewish Literature in America,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 12 (1996): 129–47. A latter section of Wisse’s formidable essay considers American Jewry’s response to the Holocaust on the basis of language: “American Yiddish writers cared obsessively about the war against the Jews in Europe while American Jewish [English-language] writers ignored it almost completely” (145). In Wisse’s account, as I read it, English is not simply benign but rather a preserve of Christian values “that tempts the Jew into believing

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that a neutral language can be possessed and shaped by all its speakers alike.” The notion of neutrality that Wisse touches on here is one that I develop in what follows. 8. See Yitzhak Katznelson, Yidishe Ksovim fun Vashe, 1940–1943 [Yiddish Writings from Warsaw, 1940–1943], ed. Yechiel Szeintuch (Israel: Ghetto Fighter’s House, 1984), and Yechiel Szeintuch’s monograph on Katznelson, Yitzhak Katzenelson’s Rescued Manuscripts From the Warsaw Ghetto and the Vittel Concentration Camp (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1990). 9. Peretz Opoczinski,“The Jewish Letter Carrier,” in Anthology of Holocaust Literature, ed. Jacob Glatstein, Israel Knox, and Samuel Margoshes, trans. E. Chase (New York: Atheneum, 1980), 59. 10. Primo Levi, “Communicating,” in The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage, 1989), 88–104. 11. Levi, “Communicating,” 91–92. 12. On German during the war, see Victor Klemperer, lti. Notizbuch eines Philologen (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1947); Nachman Blumental, “On the Nazi Vocabulary,” Yad Vashem Studies 1 (1957): 49–66; Nachman Blumental, “Action,”Yad Vashem Studies 4 (1960): 57–96, and Nachman Blumental,“From the Nazi Vocabulary,” Yad Vashem Studies 6 (1967), 69–82; Shaul Esh, “Words and Their Meaning: Twenty-Five Examples of Nazi-Idiom,” Yad Vashem Studies 5 (1963): 133–68; Haig Bosmajian, The Language of Oppression (Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1974); Christopher M. Hutton, Linguistics and the Third Reich: Mother-Tongue, Fascism, Race and the Science of Language (London: Routledge, 1999). On German’s postwar literary legacy, see George Steiner, “The Hollow Miracle,” in Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman (New York: Athenaeum, 1977); Alvin Rosenfeld, “The Immolation of the Word,” in A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980); Shoshana Felman, “Poetry and Testimony: Paul Celan, or the Accidenting of Aesthetics,” in Testimony: The Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 25–42; Sara Horowitz,“The Night Side of Speech,” in Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 157–80. 13. Levi, “Communicating,” 99. It is possible that Levi, intent on letting the Bayer representatives know he was a camp survivor, overestimated the shock value of the phrase. Werner Sollors has commented that the phrase “Jetzt hauen wir ab” was (and is) regularly used in normal social discourse. Werner Sollors, e-mail message to the author. 14. Levi, “Communicating,” 99.

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15. See Israel Kaplan, Jewish Folk-Expressions under the Nazi Yoke (Yiddish), 2nd ed. (Tel Aviv: Beit Lohamei Hagettaot, 1987); Lucy Dawidowicz, ed., “Introduction,” in A Holocaust Reader (New York: Behrman, 1976), 16–20. 16. Sander Gilman, “Primo Levi: The Special Language of the Camps and After,” Midstream 35 (1989): 22–30. A slightly different version of the essay, with notes, appeared under the title:, “To Quote Primo Levi: ‘Redest keyn jiddisch, bist nit kejn jid’ [‘If you don’t speak Yiddish, you’re not a Jew’], Prooftexts 9 (1989): 139–60. 17. Gilman, “Primo Levi,” 23. 18. Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). 19. A question arises regarding English-language radio transmission to continental Europe, particularly under the auspices of the bbc and the Voice of America. Both British and American broadcasts were transmitted by foreignlanguage service in the language of the respective country to which the broadcast was aired. The news heard generally by those in Europe was not in English. Holly Cowan Shulman’s study of Voice of America wartime broadcasting dramatizes foreign-language transmission: “The Voice of America broadcast to Europe twenty-four hours a day throughout the Second World War from a building on West Fifty-Seventh Street. . . . In this cavernous building renowned but underpaid European writers translated propaganda policy into radio shows as they churned out stories on battles and American war production. Announcers retreated from the babble of languages into soundproof rooms.” See Holly Cowan Shulman, The Voice of America: Propaganda and Democracy, 1941–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 3. That said, various factors made for exceptions. Asa Briggs notes that although the foreign service provided foreign-language broadcasts to all European countries, there was considerable “eavesdropping” on British Home Service English-language broadcasts, the incentive being a wish to hear the news ostensibly free of Allied propaganda. The War of Words (New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1970), 489–90. While Briggs implies that the temptation to eavesdrop was substantial, it is not clear how significant was the number of those who were able to take advantage of English-language broadcasts. Other relevant studies include Jeremy Harris,“Broadcasting the Massacres: An Analysis of the bbc’s Contemporary Coverage of the Holocaust,” Yad Vashem Studies 25 (1996): 65–98; Jean Seaton, “Reporting Atrocities: The bbc and the Holocaust,” in The Media and British Politics, ed. B. Pimlott and J. Seaton (Aldershot: 1987); Holly Cowan Shulman, “The Voice of America,

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U.S. Propaganda and the Holocaust: ‘I Would Have Remembered,’ ” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 17 (1997): 91–105; and the in-depth case study of Hungary, Gabriel Milland,“The bbc Hungarian Service and the Final Solution in Hungary,”Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 18 (1998): 353–73. Michael Stenton’s study broadens the canvas to France, Yugoslavia, Poland, and Denmark. See Radio London and Resistance in Occupied Europe: British Political Warfare, 1939–1943 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 20. Shmeruk, “Hebrew-Yiddish-Polish,” 289. In dealing with Polish Jews and non-Jewish languages in an earlier period, Daniel Stone implies that English had little currency in eighteenth-century Poland. To be sure, Jews would learn foreign languages – Polish, German, Russian, Latin, French. But English doesn’t seem to be among the list. Even Haim Solomon, Polish-Jewish financier who traveled to America and supplied materials for revolutionary forces, learned many non-Jewish languages before heading to America (Polish, German, French, Italian, and Russian) but remarkably English wasn’t among them. See Daniel Stone, “Knowledge of Foreign Languages Among Eighteenth-Century Polish Jews,” Polin 10 (1997): 200–218. 21. Ringelblum, Notes. 22. See my discussion of Nelly Bundy in the chapter on Boder and Vladek Spiegelman in the chapter on Maus. 23. Levi, “Communicating,” 100. 24. See, for example, Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea (New York: Knopf, 1996), 98. 25. Jacob Glatstein, Israel Knox, Samuel Margoshes, eds., Anthology of Holocaust Literature (New York: Atheneum, 1980). 26. Glatstein, Knox, and Margoshes, Anthology, xiv. 27. Glatstein, Knox, and Margoshes, Anthology, xv. 28. Bruno Bettleheim, The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age (Glencoe il: Free Press of Glencoe, 1960); Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1961); Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1963). 29. Glatstein, Knox, and Margoshes, Anthology, xx. 30. Jacob Robinson, The Holocaust and After: Sources and Literature in English (Jerusalem: Israel University Presses, 1973), 323. 31. Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution (London:Vallentine Mitchell, 1953). 32. Dan Michman accords with this judgment in his analysis of linguistic cultures in shaping historical research on the Holocaust: “One Theme, Multiple Voices: Language and Culture in Holocaust Research,” in The Holocaust: The Unique and the Universal. Essays in Honor Yehuda Bauer (Hebrew), ed.

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S. Almog, and others (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2001), 8–37. An English version of the essay appeared in Dan Michman, Holocaust Historiography: A Jewish Perspective: Conceptualizations, Terminology, Approaches and Fundamental Issues (London and Portland: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003), 357–88. 33. These remarks appear in Yisrael Gutman and Avital Saf, eds., “Discussion: The Holocaust and Concentration Camps in Literature,” The Nazi Concentration Camps: Proceedings of the Fourth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference, Jerusalem, January 1980 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1984), 715–17. 34. Eliach,“Discussion,” 716. Ruth Wisse believes this is the effect of writing in Hebrew for Aaron Applefeld, who was born in Czernowitz and whose native tongue was German: “Applefeld’s Hebrew creates an atmosphere of remoteness even when he later writes about people whose language is Hebrew. The language of remoteness also insulates him from the past, as though the Hebrew narrative were the closed scar over the wound.” The Modern Jewish Cannon: A Journey Through Language and Culture (Boston: The Free Press, 2000), 219. Wisse’s metaphor (“closed scar over the wound”) recalls Levi’s association of language and tattoo. 35. Eliach, “Discussion,” 715. 36. Yaffa Eliach, personal communication with the author, July 3, 2000. 37. Yaffa Eliach, Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust (New York: Oxford, 1982), xxiv. 38. James Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 160. 39. Sidra Ezrahi, By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 12. 40. Cited and glossed by Ezrahi, By Words Alone, 12. Lind, an Austrian Jew who spent the war years in flight, concludes his essay recounting his path to English: “Just to read and wish to speak English, even when we . . . didn’t understand much of it, was an act of defiance, a hidden armour, a breastplate of steel”: Jakob Lind, “John Brown and His Little Indians,” Times Literary Supplement, May 25, 1973, 590. 41. Gerry Knowles, A Cultural History of the English Language (London: Arnold, 1997). 42. David Crystal, English as a Global Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 8. 43. Crystal, English as a Global Language, vii. 44. Dick Leith, “The Origins of English,” in English: History, Diversity,

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Change, ed. David Graddol and others (London and New York: Routlege, 1996), 96–97. 45. Domna Stanton,“From Imperialism to Collaboration: How Do We Get There?” pmla 117 (2002): 1267. 46. Stanton, “From Imperialism to Collaboration,” 1268. 47. Stanton, “From Imperialism to Collaboration,” 1268. 48. Stanton, “From Imperialism to Collaboration,” 1268. 49. In addition to Foucault, Stanton draws explicitly on the cultural linguistics of Robert Phillips and Franz Fanon. 50. Werner Sollors sets forth this position in his introduction to a collection of essays that includes critical writing on American literature in these languages. While guided by Sollors’s work on these issues, I am not fully persuaded by his“English Plus”formula, presuming a harmonious fusion of English with non-English tongues in the study of American literature. In the aftermath of such a transformed canon, the ensuing position of English writing seems to me much less stable than he envisions. See Werner Sollors,“Introduction: After the Culture Wars; or, From‘English Only’ to‘English Plus,’ ”in Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 1–13. The essays in the collection can be supplemented by the preceding 1997 interroads internet discussion on the topic of English and multilingualism. An essay by Sollors (an earlier version of his introduction for Multilingual America) initiates the discussion, followed by invited responses, list responses, a counter-response from Sollors, and, finally, a postscript from Robert Allison. See http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/interroads/. Marc Shell’s even more encompassing manifesto, arguing for a wholesale reconsideration of American history that would take seriously its polyglot self-perception and aspirations, appeared some years earlier. See Marc Shell, “Babel in America; or, The Politics of Language Diversity in the United States,” Critical Inquiry 20 (1993). Sollors and Shell co direct the Longfellow Institute at Harvard University, an institute dedicated to reclaiming and publishing the non-English contributions of American literature. 51. Shell, “Babel in America,” 112. 1 . ev i d e n ce o f t r au m a 1. Geoffrey Hartman has often noted Boder’s pioneering efforts in recording survivor testimony and doing so in “their own language.” See for instance Geoffrey Hartman, “Preserving the Personal Story: The Role of Video Documentation,” in The Holocaust Forty Years After, ed. Marcia Littell, Richard

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Libowitz, and E. B. Rosen (Lewiston, Maine: Edwin Mellon, 1989). However, no previous analysis of Boder’s interviews (or any individual interview, for that matter) has taken place. 2. David Boder, Topical Autobiographies of Displaced People Recorded Verbatim in Displaced Persons Camps, with a Psychological and Anthropological Analysis 16 vols. (Chicago, David Boder, 1950–57), 3161. 3. This assessment appears in Boder’s abridged version of Topical Autobiographies, published in 1949 under the title I Did Not Interview the Dead (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949), xiii–xiv. This volume presents eight (of the seventy transcribed) interviews. A second abridgment of Boder’s interviews has recently been published under the title, Donald L. Niewyk, ed., Fresh Wounds: Early Narratives of Holocaust Survival (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). In light of Boder’s comments and the overall thrust of his project, it is regrettable that Niewyk has chosen to filter out what doesn’t conform to standard English – what Boder referred to as the “peculiar verbal structure.” For Niewyk’s comments on his editorial decisions regarding language, see page 6. The seventy interviews of Boder’s Topical Autobiographies are now accessible on the Voices of the Holocaust website, http://voices.iit.edu sponsored by the Illinois Institute of Technology, Boder’s former employer. While the site indicates that at some point in the future it hopes to make available the aural interviews in the original languages, it, too, presents exclusively the English transcripts. The tapes in the original languages are available at the Library of Congress and in the archive of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 4. One the 1949 book, the other the monumental set of transcriptions. 5. Boder, Topical Autobiographies, 3160. 6. “Udel Stopnitsky,” chap. 2 in Boder, Topical Autobiographies, 1:134–35. 7. See Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 5. 8. A less common denotation,“able to distinguish or discriminate in a high degree” (oed, 12, b), is perhaps most apposite here. 9. The Voices of the Holocaust website not only lists the language of each interview but also diagrams the percentage of interviews conducted in every language. 10. Boder, “Nelly Bundy,” chap. 33 in Topical Autobiographies, 9:1500–1580. 11. Boder, “Nelly Bundy,” chap. 33 in Topical Autobiographies, 9: 1533. 12. Boder, “Nelly Bundy,” chap. 33 in Topical Autobiographies, 9: 1534.

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13. Boder, “Nelly Bundy,” chap. 33 in Topical Autobiographies, 9: 1535–36. 14. Boder, “Nelly Bundy,” chap. 33 in Topical Autobiographies, 9: 1533. 15. Boder, “Nelly Bundy,” chap. 33 in Topical Autobiographies, 9: 1534. 16. Michael Rothberg has recently analyzed the iconic status of the tattoo in relation to Holocaust representation. See Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 229, 265–73. 17. Boder, “Bella Zgnilek,” chap. 53 in Topical Autobiographies, 14: 2572. 18. Boder, “Bella Zgnilek,” chap. 53 in Topical Autobiographies, 14: 2591. 19. Letter to Maurice Jacobs, November 13, 1948. Box 21, David Pablo Boder Papers (Collection 1238). Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, ucla. 20. Letter to Francis and Maggie Coughlin, May 23, 1957. Box 22, David Pablo Boder Papers. 2 . a n e n t i re ly d i f f e re n t c u lt u re 1. Boder published a number of scholarly articles that were based on the interviews, including “The Displaced People of Europe: Preliminary Notes on a Psychological and Anthropological Study,” Illinois Tech Engineer (March 1947); and“The Impact of Catastrophe: I. Assessment and Evaluation,”Journal of Psychology 38 (1954): 3–50. Whatever the limits of audience, Boder himself – as his correspondence in the Boder collection attests – worked tirelessly to send his articles or summaries of his work to whomever he thought might be interested. 2. Indeed, The Wall has been listed as the fourth best-selling fiction book of 1950, selling almost 330,000 copies. Alice Payne Hackett, Seventy Years of Best Sellers, 1895–1965 (New York: R.R. Bowker, 1967). 3. Werner Sollors,“Holocaust and Hiroshima: American Ethnic Prose Writers Face the Extreme,” pmla 118 (2003): 57. On Hersey’s life and work, see also David Sanders, John Hersey Revisited (Boston: Twayne, 1991) and Robert Franciosi, “John Hersey,” in Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work, ed. S. Lillian Kremer (New York: Routledge, 2003), 524–27. While The Wall has been mentioned in major works on Holocaust writing, it has nevertheless received surprisingly little sustained analysis. An exception appears in Daniel Schwartz, Imagining the Holocaust (New York: St. Martins, 1999); Schwartz’s interpretation, however, falls regrettably short of in-depth analysis. On its shortcomings, see Alan Rosen, “Review of Imagining the Holocaust, by Daniel Schwartz.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 15 (2001): 520–23.

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4. Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais’s appropriation of sections of Hersey’s essay for Hiroshima mon amour (text by Maguerite Duras for the film by Alain Resnais, trans. Richard Seaver [New York: Grove, 1961]) attests to the essay’s continued international influence. On the significance of this appropriation for looking at language and trauma, see Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1996), 54–56, 130. On the implications for trauma theory of Hersey’s particular style of chronicling the Hiroshima disaster, see Georges Bataille, “Concerning the Accounts Given by the Residents of Hiroshima,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 221–35. 5. John Hersey, “The Mechanics of a Novel,” The Yale University Library Gazette 27 (1952): 3. 6. Hersey, “The Mechanics of a Novel,” 5. 7. It is worth noting Dawidowicz’s recollection of her training for this role. “The events of the Warsaw ghetto burned into my consciousness. At times they seemed to replace the placid realities of my everyday life. They even pushed aside my real memories of Vilna. The Warsaw ghetto became a constant part of my internal life. I used to imagine myself there, test myself as to how I would have behaved. Would I have had the courage to fight? Would I have had the stamina against despair? When I was cold and reached for a sweater, I thought of winter in the ghetto. I developed a secret moral code of human behavior that depended on options open only to those imprisoned in the ghetto. A few years later, in 1948, when I was asked to do research for John Hersey on a novel he was writing about the Warsaw ghetto, The Wall, I was ready for the task.” Lucy Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938–1947 (New York: Norton, 1989) 243–44. 8. Hersey, “The Mechanics of a Novel,” 5. 9. Hersey, “The Mechanics of a Novel,” 5–6. 10. Hersey, “The Mechanics of a Novel,” 5. 11. John Hersey, The Wall (New York: Knopf, 1950), 11. That Hersey uses the word “task” to refer to the work of translation is strangely prescient of the translated (by Harry Zohn) title of Walter Benjamin’s influential essay, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968). Benjamin’s original title is “Die Aufgabe des Ubersetzers”; the German translation of The Wall, “Die Mauer,” fittingly translates Hersey’s “task” with “Aufgabe”: “Ihre Aufgabe war sehr schwierig . . .” John Hersey, Die Mauer, trans. Ernst Bucher and Edwin Maria Landau (Zürich: Diana Verlag, 1951), 13. Although not readily available even in German until the mid-1950s,

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Arendt notes intriguingly that Benjamin’s essay first appeared in 1923, when it served as the introduction to his translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens. 12. Hersey comments on The Wall’s debt to Ringelblum in “To Invent a Memory” (Baltimore: Baltimore Hebrew University, 1990), 16–18. 13. Hersey, The Wall, 10. 14. John Hersey, “A Short Wait,” New Yorker 1947, 27. 15. The modifications, however, may be more specific. Michael Kramer believes that Hersey here refers to the Yiddish shtick – phrases, words, jokes – that often passes in America for Eastern European Jewish culture but is actually nothing of the sort. Personal communication with the author. 16. Zelig Kalmanovich, in Dawidowicz, ed., The Holocaust Reader, 227. 17. Lucy Dawidowicz, “The Epic of the Warsaw Ghetto,” Menorah Journal 38 (1950): 548. Nathan Blumenthal describes an evolution of the ghetto police that parallels Hersey’s rendering: “Initially, only young men of fine behavior ‘and with a flawless past’ were accepted to serve. The Judenrat chose only the finest among the candidates.”(6) Corruption thus came with time. Nathan Blumenthal,“The Judenrat and the Jewish Police: Preliminary Remarks.”Yivo Colloquium on the German-Imposed Jewish Representations before and during World War II, December 2–5, 1967 (New York: Yivo, 1968). See also Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 475–569; Aharon Weiss, “The Relations between the Judenrat and the Jewish Police,” Patterns of Jewish Leadership in Nazi Europe, 1933–45 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1979), 201–7; and Kermish, ed., To Live and Die, 304–17. 18. The editor records the events under the date “Events April 9, 1941. Entry April 10, 1941.” 19. See Hersey’s other Holocaust-based writings: his reportage, “Prisoner 339, Klooga,” “Not to Go with the Others,” and “Tattoo Number 107, 907” in his Here to Stay: Studies in Human Tenacity (New York: Knopf, 1963), based on interviews with survivors that Hersey conducted soon after the war; “Successors,” New Yorker, December 16, 1974, reprinted as “Children of Holocaust Survivors,” in Life Sketches (New York: Knopf, 1989); and his lecture, Hersey, “To Invent a Memory.” Compare his essay,“The Novel of Contemporary History,” The Atlantic Monthly, 1949, 80–84. I am indebted to Robert Franciosi’s paper, “A Blueprint for The Wall: John Hersey’s Reconstruction of the Warsaw Ghetto,” delivered at the December 1999 Modern Language Association conference in Chicago. 20. Hersey, The Wall, 106. 21. Hersey, The Wall, 105.

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22. Hersey, The Wall, 49. 23. Hersey, The Wall, 82–83. 24. Hersey, The Wall, 5–6. 25. Hersey, The Wall, 3. 26. Hersey’s implied connection between book and box is strengthened by the fact that they share the same etymology: from “beech tree.” Elaborating their connection in a different context, D. A. Miller refers to their “secret consubstantiality” – an affinity that Hersey clearly wished to evoke. See D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) 216. 27. Hersey, The Wall, 67. 28. Hersey, The Wall, 75. 29. Hersey, The Wall, 133. 30. Hersey, The Wall, 329. 31. Hersey, The Wall, 609. 32. Hersey, “The Mechanics of a Novel,” 5. 33. Hersey, “To Invent a Memory,” 10. 34. Rothberg, Traumatic Realism, 130. 35. Alan Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 62. 36. Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust, 63. 37. For consideration of Hersey’s Hiroshima and The Wall under the rubric of the extreme, see Sollors, “Holocaust and Hiroshima.” 38. Hersey, Here to Stay, 131. 3 . w h at d o e s h e s p e a k ? 1. The three novels that followed Homeward Borne were The Betrayers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953), The Pride of the Peacock (Garden City ny: Doubleday, 1954) and Southern Wild (Garden City ny: Doubleday, 1958). 2. Dorothy Bilik, Immigrant-Survivors: Post-Holocaust Consciousness in Recent Jewish American Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981), 9. 3. Bilik, Immigrant-Survivors, 24. 4. Bilik, Immigrant-Survivors, 19. 5. Bilik, Immigrant-Survivors, 25. 6. Ruth Chatterton, Homeward Borne (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950), 16. 7. Chatterton, Homeward Borne, 34. 8. Chatterton, Homeward Borne, 18. 9. It is not difficult to find in this period pronouncements assuming the

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global “spread” of English:“The roots of English,” writes Mont Follick in 1946, “spread into the continent, and the influence of English spreads throughout the world. There is no language anywhere in any continent of the world, which has the importance of English . . . our language has spread more than any other, and on top of the others.” Quoted in Richard Bailey, Images of English: A Cultural History of the Language (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 119–20. What is striking about Chatterton’s rendering of this fantasy is how cleverly she satirizes it. 10. See Deborah Lipstadt, “America and the Memory of the Holocaust, 1950–65,” Modern Judaism 16 (1996): 195–214. 11. According to Shoshana Felman, Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge” sets forth this mastery of German while also dramatizing the reprehensible consequences of it. Whereas Celan works from within the tradition of German and German romantic poetry, Chatterton, writing in English (or what Germans refer to as Americanisch), positions German as the strangely favored foreign tongue. 12. See Lipstadt, “America and the Memory of the Holocaust.” Those children who survived were of course the exception. But there gratefully were some. For discussion of the fate of children in general in the camps, see Deborah Dwork, “The Unrecognizable World: Death and Slave Labor Camps,” in Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). For studies of children in Auschwitz in particular, see Helena Kubica,“Children,”and Nil Keren,“The Family Camp,”in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). Although she emphasizes the difficulty of documentation, Kubica numbers children under age fourteen at Birkenau in October 1944 at 2,510. Dwork, Kubica, and Keren do not, however, touch on the issue of children’s languages in the camps. See also Lawrence Langer, “Damaged Children in Holocaust Fact and Fiction,” in Humanity at the Limit: The Impact of the Holocaust Experience on Jews and Christians, ed. Michael A. Signer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 329–42. Langer refers to the role of languages in passing for non-Jewish. But he does not explore the language issues special to children’s predicament nor to the representation of children’s language in the few works of fiction on which he comments. 13. Chatterton, Homeward Borne, 18. 14. Boder, I Did Not Interview the Dead, xiii–xiv. 15. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 95. 16. Primo Levi, The Reawakening: A Liberated Prisoner’s Long March through East Europe, trans. Stuart Woolf (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), 21–22.

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17. Benjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, trans. Carol Brown Janeway (New York: Schocken, 1996), 3. Wilkomirski brought out Fragments as a memoir of his childhood in a concentration camp; the authenticity of the memoir, however, has been challenged, leaving open the question of how to critically respond to Wilkomirski’s powerful narrative if it is indeed fabricated. On the book’s uncertain status, see Elena Lappin, “The Man with Two Heads,” Granta 66 (1999): 9–65; Philip Gourevitch, “The Memory Thief,” New Yorker, June 14, 1999, 48–68; Susan Suleiman, “Problems of Memory and Factuality in Recent Holocaust Memoirs,” Poetics Today 21 (2000): 543–59; Stefan Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Schocken, 2001); and Blake Eskin, A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski (New York: Norton, 2002). 18. Chatterton, Homeward Borne, 18. 19. Chatterton, Homeward Borne, 227. 20. Chatterton, Homeward Borne, 193. 21. Alternatively, Chatterton may have wanted to emphasize that such a word would have limited circulation in, and little significance for, New England communities of this period. 22. In Fugitive Pieces (New York: Vintage, 1996) Ann Michaels has her protagonist, also a Polish Jew transplanted to North America, link mastery and punning:“Puns were a kind of core sample: they penetrated into the heart of comprehension, a real test of mastery of a new tongue. Each of my terrible puns represented a considerable achievement.” (100). For various angles on the pun as a key figure of language, see Jonathan Culler, ed., On Puns: The Foundation of Letters (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1988). 23. Chatterton, Homeward Borne, 287. 4. please speak english 1. Murray Roston has forcefully made the case for understanding Eli Peck in the context of the modern anti-hero. See Murray Roston, The Search for Selfhood in Modern Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 127–31. In Roston’s reading, Eli, who parallels the antiheroes of Graham Greene and J. D. Salinger, is a visionary who fails to “come to terms with society” because of his “perception of its hollowness” (129). In my reading, Eli discovers that the English language is itself a symptom of this “hollowness” and thus to be rejected in favor of an alternative medium. 2. Eli follows in the footsteps of a lineage of literary protagonists who are lawyers. See David Weisberg, The Failure of the Word: The Protagonist

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as Lawyer in Modern Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984) and Richard Posner, Law and Literature, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). Although neither Weisberg nor Posner comment on “Eli, the Fanatic,” Posner does note Roth’s attention to legal issues in his 1993 novel, Operation Shylock. 3. Philip Roth, “Eli, the Fanatic,” in Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (New York: Bantam, 1970), 181. This is the third (and, as far as I can determine, the accepted) version of the story to appear. Further on I characterize in greater detail the variants of the editions and specify how they play a role in my analysis of the problem of English. 4. Vicky Aaron has emphasized the opacity of what Eli hears and how that opacity disarms him: “The children’s unintelligible language, foreign, that is, to Eli, takes human form, is anthropomorphized into the outsider, a symbol /of/ difference, a secret unbreakable code by which Eli feels himself threatened, persecuted, ironically, by a group of vulnerable children.” Vicky Aaron, “Is It Good-For-the-Jews or No-Good-For-the-Jews: Philip Roth’s Registry of Jewish Consciousness,” Shofar 19 (2000): 11. What seems additionally significant is that the language is viewed in a bifurcated manner, initially appearing as outsider and then as insider. Aaron’s formulation is nevertheless striking: if the “children’s unintelligible language” is a “secret unbreakable code,” I argue that the story is about how Eli cracks it, an accomplishment that leaves English, as it were, in splinters. 5. Roth, “Eli, the Fanatic,” 181. 6. Roth, “Eli, the Fanatic,” 122. 7. R. Robert Linowes and Don Allensworth, The Politics of Land Use: Planning, Zoning, and the Private Developer (New York: Praeger, 1973). On the intricacies of American suburban life in this period, see Robert Wood, Suburbia: Its People and Their Politics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959).Wood’s volume was published the same year as Roth’s story. 8. Elana Gomel, e-mail to author, May 2002. 9. Roth, “Eli, the Fanatic,” 191. 10. Hana Wirth-Nesher, “Resisting Allegory, or Reading ‘Eli, the Fanatic’ in Tel Aviv,” Prooftexts 21 (2001): 107. Many critics precede Wirth-Nesher in designating the character as mute. 11. Roth, “Eli, the Fanatic,” 194. 12. Tellingly, Henry Sperling Ankory links English (or lack of it) and being mute:“Ted says [the gentleman] is a regular greenhorn,‘a greenie,’ who knows no English and never opens his mouth.”Henry Sperling Ankory, Commentary on the Story: “Eli the Fanatic” by Philip Roth (Tel Aviv: Afik, 1974), 27. I am

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tempted to read into Ankory’s phrasing (it is his rather than that of the character Ted) that the gentleman “never opens his mouth” because he “knows no English”; English would hence become bound up with the presumption of muteness, a reading that would make it closer to my line of argument than Ankory had probably intended (but had perhaps intuited?). Another opening comes by way of Alan Cooper’s ambiguous formulation: “Tzuref ’s assistant is a Hasid in black coat, traditional broad-brimmed hat, and protruding tzitzit fringes. He is otherworldly, almost mute” [emphasis added]: Alan Cooper, Philip Roth and the Jews (Albany: suny, 1996), 39. Cooper implies that the gentleman’s being mute is of a piece with his being otherworldly, a silence cultivated by a mystic (if “otherworldly” connotes mystical) or perhaps an angelic silence that distinguishes him from this-worldly creatures (the Woodenton Jews?). More intriguing is Cooper’s ascription to Roth’s “gentleman” of being “almost mute,” the “almost” leaving an opening for some (but not much) of a speaking role. I imagine that Cooper, whose analysis of the story shows him a careful reader, felt responsible to factor in the “talking about us?” that the gentleman does with fluency. His “almost” stops short, however, of revising an assessment of muteness – and hence of language(s) – in the story. 13. Roth, “Eli, the Fanatic,” 183. 14. See David Roskies, “Inside Shalom Schanah’s Hat,” Prooftexts 21 (2001): 39–56. My discussion of the deferred impact of Sholem Aleichem’s story is indebted to Roskies. Sholem Aleichem’s story original appeared as “Iber a hitl,” in Fun peseyh biz peysekh, Ale verk fun Sholem Aleyhem (New York: Folksfond, 1917–25), 2:241–54. 15. Sholem Aleichem, “On Account of a Hat,” in A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, trans. Isaac Rosenfeld (New York: Viking, 1954), 111–18. 16. Roth, “Eli, the Fanatic,” 180. 17. See “Eli, the Fanatic,” Commentary (April 1959), 292–309. As far as I am aware, three versions of the story exist: 1) the Commentary version cited above; 2) a first edition, which appeared in book form together with a number of stories under the title, Goodbye, Columbus. This version modifies details of the story as well as substantially revising the conclusion; 3) the version that appeared in the paperback edition of Goodbye, Columbus sometime in the 1960s and that became the version of the story generally referred to by critics. The version I cite maintains the modified details but restores the original Commentary conclusion. The evolution of Roth’s various emendations in these versions guides my discussion of accents. 18. Roth, “Eli, the Fanatic,” Commentary, 294.

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19. Roth, “Eli, the Fanatic,” Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, 184– 85. 20. Kathryn Hellerstein, “Yiddish Voices in American English,” in The State of the Language, ed. Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 193–96. 21. Jay Halio, Philip Roth Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1992), 35. In a note on page 207, Halio extends the group who, to his eye and ear, invoke Yiddish rhythms. 22. Bellow’s review of Roth’s collection, Goodbye, Columbus, appeared in Commentary in late 1959 under the title, “The Swamp of Prosperity.” 23. Ted tries to convince Eli that half-measures will not be effective with those who do not abide by the laws of common sense: “Eli, you’re dealing with fanatics. Do they display common sense? Talking a dead language, does that make common sense?” (201). Suggestively, categorizing Yiddish as a “dead language” not only proves a lack of common sense, but also associates it with prestigious languages of antiquity, including Latin and Greek. 24. Roth, “Eli, the Fanatic,” 210. 25. Roth, “Eli, the Fanatic,” 210. 26. Roth, “Eli, the Fanatic,” 192. 27. Shoshana Felman, “Theaters of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial, and the Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust,” Critical Inquiry 27 (2001). 28. Roth, “Eli, the Fanatic,” 198. 29. Roth, “Eli, the Fanatic,” 189. 30. Roth, “Eli, the Fanatic,” 189. 31. Roth, “Eli, the Fanatic,” 200. 32. Roth, “Eli, the Fanatic,” 196. 5 . f r o m l aw to o u t l aw 1. Edward Lewis Wallant, The Pawnbroker (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1961). 2. See John P. Caskey, Fringe Banking: Check-Cashing Outlets, Pawnshops, and the Poor (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1994). Caskey lists increasing inner-city violence as one catalyst for the decline. He argues however that the decline did not last; since the 1970s, pawnbroking has made a comeback but has shifted terrain, relocating from the Northeast to the South and Southwest and from urban to rural locales. On Jewish life in Harlem in the first half of the twentieth century, see Jeffrey S. Gurock, When Harlem Was Jewish, 1870–1930 (New York: Columbia

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University Press, 1979); Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait, 1900–1950 (New York: Noonday, 1981); Winston C. McDowell,“Keeping Them ‘In the Same Boat Together’? Sufi Abdul Hamid, African Americans, Jews and the Harlem Jobs Boycotts,” in Americans and Jews in the Twentieth Century: Studies in Convergence and Conflict, ed. V. P. Franklin and others (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 208–36. 3. Eichmann’s trial was the first to be telecast. Israel, the location of the trial, did not, however, have at that relatively early date a television network and hence listened to the trial over radio. For response and commentary on the events related to Eichmann’s apprehension, trial, and execution, see Randolph Braham, ed., The Eichmann Case: A Source Book (New York: World Federation of Hungarian Jews, 1969). 4. This may be the reason that, even though many reviews of The Pawnbroker appeared as the trial was in session, not a single one referred to it. See, for example, “Lacerating,” Newsweek, August 14, 1961, 70; “Within a Tower of Junk,” Time, August 18, 1961, 75; “Bitter Legacy of the Nazi Horror,” New York Herald Tribune Books, August 20, 1961, 8; “Without Hope or Illusion,” New York Times Book Review, September 3, 1961, 14. 5. Both “Eli, the Fanatic” and The Pawnbroker highlight commemoration, the preeminence of the calendar, in framing a response to the Holocaust. Story and novel thus prefigure the featured place of the calendar in Holocaust commemoration that dominates response decades later. In the case of Roth’s story, however, the standard edition omits Eli’s declaring a day on which he and his newborn son should don the black suit as a commemorative gesture. This calendar-centered ending appears in the first edition of the story to appear in the collection, Goodbye Columbus. Omitting this conclusion from later editions, Roth heightens the sense of apocalypse. Wallant’s stress on the calendar’s role is pervasive. His earliest novel, The Human Season, heads each chapter with a (Gregorian) calendar date significant to the protagonist. On the complex interplay between the Gregorian and Jewish calendars and issues of narration, see Alan Rosen, “August Implies Av: Strategies of Marking Time in Wallant’s The Pawnbroker,” paper delivered at the mla Convention, 2000, Washington dc. For the role of the calendar in Wallant’s The Pawnbroker in comparison with that of the film adaptation, see Alan Rosen, “ ‘Teach Me Gold’: Pedagogy and Memory in The Pawnbroker,”Prooftexts 22 (2002), 77–117. 6. Wallant, The Pawnbroker, 10. 7. Wallant, The Pawnbroker, 58. 8. At least one critic noted the dissonance between the protagonist’s competent English and his immigrant status: Dorothy Bilik refers to the lack

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of accent but claims that Wallant’s strategy proceeds from not wanting to “detract from Nazerman’s dignity and culture”: Immigrant-Survivors, 97. Yet Wallant does not hesitate to risk detracting from his dignity in other ways, including the illegal money laundering he takes part in, the abuse he doles out to his customers and friends, and the callousness with which he responds to human need in general. In his review of the novel, Morris Gilbert (“Without Hope or Illusion,” Time,August 18, 1961, 75) draws attention to Nazerman’s anti-mimetic English: one doubts, he writes, “that Nazerman, recently arrived in America, although a learned man in his native Poland, would be able to express himself quite so subtly and articulately as he does in the English language.” To be sure, Wallant keeps it vague exactly when Nazerman came to America. Yet the routines of home and work life are meant to indicate he has been on the scene for at least some years. Thus Gilbert’s “recently arrived” seems to put the case too strongly. But I would say that Gilbert is nevertheless well-attuned to Wallant’s complex representational strategy. I am indebted to Rachel Gwilly for providing me with reviews of The Pawnbroker, including Gilbert’s. 9. Gilbert,“Without Hope or Illusion,” 31. This notion of accent as an intolerable mark, or even a pathology, is clearly a significant view in America life of this period. In his study, Foreign Accent, speech pathologist Fred M. Chreist begins his discussion with a section entitled, “Foreign Accent – A Speech Defect.” Chreist uses the term “defect” because such accents produce “evident interference with the communication process” and bring about a “temporary maladjustment”for the defective speaker. Fred M. Chreist, Foreign Accent (Englewood Cliffs nj: Prentice Hall, 1964), xxii, xxiii. My discussion of Cynthia Ozick’s work below elaborates the implications of accent as defect. 10. Wallant, The Pawnbroker, 17–18. 11. On Wallant as urban realist, see Leo Gurko, “Edward Lewis Wallant as Urban Novelist,” Twentieth Century Literature 20 (1974): 252–61. 12. Lillian Kremer argues that Wallant’s use of a survivor choir – contemporaries whose comments and reflection serve as counterpoint to the protagonist – is the first example of what becomes a standard element of American Holocaust writing: Lillian Kremer, Witness Through the Imagination: Jewish American Holocaust Literature (Detroit mi: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 63. I want to say that the blacks that patronize Nazerman’s pawnshop, speaking with their own accents shaped by a legacy of suffering, provide equally important choral accompaniment and counterpoint. 13. Wallant, The Pawnbroker, 4, 279, the second and the final pages of the novel.

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14. On the controversies surrounding representing black dialect and the resources latent within it, see Henry Louis Gates, “Dis and Dat: Dialect and Descent,” in Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 15. Wallant, The Pawnbroker, 5–6. 16. Wallant, The Pawnbroker, 157. Mechanization has hitherto played an enabling role. Boder and Hersey recruited state-of-the-art mechanical devices as a means to enhance their storytelling powers. Wallant, for his part, mechanizes Nazerman’s (and Murillio’s) voice, seeing this mechanization as the objective correlative for their denatured voice. 17. Wallant, The Pawnbroker, 244. 18. Wallant takes the words from the nineteenth-century Italian opera, La Gioconda. 19. In a striking parallel, Henry Louis Gates draws on the separation between face and voice to characterize Europe’s disenfranchisement of black Africans from being creators of culture. See Gates, Figures in Black. 20. Wallant, The Pawnbroker, 49. 21. Wallant, The Pawnbroker, 167. 22. Wallant, The Pawnbroker, 6. 23. Wallant, The Pawnbroker, 241. 24. Wallant, The Pawnbroker, 120. 25. Wallant, The Pawnbroker, 13–16. 26. Edgar Allen Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” in The Poems of Edgar Allen Poe, ed. Killis Campbell (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 328. This essay, in which Poe chronicles his process of composing “The Raven,” was first published in 1846. Campbell notes that “opinion has differed as to how far Poe’s account is to be credited” (250), a caution which does not blunt the force of Poe’s viewing (even if in retrospect) mourning as central to the poem. 27. Edgar Allen Poe, The Poems of Edgar Allen Poe, ed. Floyd Stovall (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1965), 95. 28. Wallant, The Pawnbroker, 14. 29. Wallant, The Pawnbroker, 129. 30. Wallant, The Pawnbroker, 323. 31. Betsy Erikka, “The Poetics of Whiteness: Poe and the Racial Imagery,” in Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 63. 32. A graphic artist by training and profession, Wallant in his own pursuits combined the visual with the written word.

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33. This echoes (but does not carry the same meaning as) terms used by Stanley Cavell in his autobiography, A Pitch of Philosophy (Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 1994). Cavell titles the concluding chapter “The Pawn of the Voice,” and focuses therein on the meaning of women, voice, and death in opera. But the idiom of pawning informs Cavell’s reflections regularly in the book, a choice set in motion by the fact that his father owned a pawnshop. Indeed, several of the exchanges that Cavell considers crucial to his development took place in his father’s shop. 34. Wallant, The Pawnbroker, 15. 35. Wallant, The Pawnbroker, 16. 36. Wallant, The Pawnbroker, 26. 37. Wallant, The Pawnbroker, 27. 38. Wallant, The Pawnbroker, 27. 39. Wallant, The Pawnbroker, 250. 40. Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, The Growth of the American Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942), 479–80. 41. Steven Vincent Benet, “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” Vincent Benet initially wrote the short story and later adapted it into a play. 42. Kenneth E. Shewmaker, “Daniel Webster,” The Oxford Companion to United States History (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2001), 822. See also Craig R. Smith, Defender of the Union: The Oratory of Daniel Webster (New York: Greenwood, 1989); and Paul Erickson, The Poetry of Events: Daniel Webster’s Rhetoric of Constitution and Union (New York: nyu Press, 1986). 6 . l aw ’s l a n g uag e s 1. Arendt’s articles appeared in the February 16 and 23, March 2, 9, and 16 issues of the New Yorker in 1963. Randolph Braham, The Eichmann Case: A Source Book (New York: World Federation of Hungarian Jews, 1969), lists many of the responses that sought to correct Arendt’s assessment. Arendt believed that the New Yorker, being a periodical not affiliated with a Jewish group, would allow her to achieve a sense of distance: “How great a distance I want to put between myself and these very questions you can judge from the fact that I will be reporting for a non-Jewish publication.” Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, eds., Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers: Correspondence, 1926–1969, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1992), 417–18. The concluding section of my analysis shows how important this issue of distance was for Arendt. Jennifer Ring analyses the role of the New Yorker audience, an analysis weakened, however, by the unconvincing contrast proposed by Ring between the reception given Arendt’s work on the one hand

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and that of historian Raul Hilberg on the other. Jennifer Ring, The Political Consequences of Thinking: Gender and Judaism in the Work of Hannah Arendt (Albany: suny, 1997). 2. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951). 3. Arendt’s identification of herself as a refugee comes through strongly in her essay,“We Refugees”(1943) in The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Ron Feldman (New York: Grove, 1978), 55–66. As Arendt spells out in this stinging essay, loss of a German-language context is one of key aspects of a her refugee predicament. The trauma produced by such loss is deftly recast in Bernard Malamud’s story,“The German Refugee,” in Complete Stories, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997). In Malamud’s story, the refugee’s shuttling between German and English uproots him from fluency just at the point when he most needs it to order to elegize his losses. Indeed, even his success with English leads to disaster. Set in the late 1930s, Malamud first published the story in 1963 – the same year that Arendt published her trial report. As we see below, Arendt was clearly more adept (or fortunate) at negotiating between native and adopted tongues. But she nevertheless intimately knew what “German refugees” faced. I am grateful to Lillian Kremer for bringing Malamud’s story to my attention in the context of the Holocaust and the problem of English. 4. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, rev. ed. (New York: Viking, 1965). 5. On the flippant tone, see Gershom Scholem, “Letter to Hannah Arendt,” in Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken, 1978), 302. 6. Shoshana Felman, “Theaters of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial, and the Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust,” Critical Inquiry 27 (2001): 204n. 7. Felman, “Theaters of Justice, 205n. 8. Hannah Arendt, “A Reporter at Large: Eichmann in Jerusalem – I, “New Yorker, February 1963, 40. 9. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 3. 10. “Not once does [David Ben Gurion, the Israeli prime minister] attend a session; in the courtroom he speaks with the voice of Gideon Hausner, the Attorney General, who representing the government, does his best, his very best, to obey his master. And if, fortunately, his best often turns out not to be good enough, the reason is that the trial is presided over by someone who

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serves Justice as faithfully as Mr. Hausner serves the State of Israel” (Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 5). 11. Arendt’s letters from Jerusalem at the time of the trial to Karl Jaspers, her friend and mentor, make clear that she did not have facility in Hebrew. 12. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, eds., Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers: Briefwechsel, 1926–1969 (Munich: Piper, 1985), 471. 13. The concluding sentence does not appear in the New Yorker version. Adding it to the book, Arendt seems to emphasize the particular irrational force of political intrigue. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 3. 14. Mary G. Dietz, “Arendt and the Holocaust,” The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2000), 87. 15. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 4. 16. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 4. 17. In addition to Hebrew and German, Yiddish, according to Lawrence Douglas, also shaped the nature of the trial. Douglas helpfully notes that the prosecution’s first witness, Ada Lichtman, was permitted by Moshe Landau to give her testimony in Yiddish. To Douglas’s mind, this practical gesture had broader repercussions, erasing “whatever distance might have separated the Israeli court from the history of the final solution. . . . the language of the exterminated Jewish population of Europe filled the courtroom.” Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 102–3. Although I believe Douglas correct in drawing attention to the importance of Lichtman testifying in Yiddish, I think the associations of Yiddish in the Israeli courtroom were probably more complicated than Douglas’s comments imply. On a pragmatic basis, it is not clear who in the courtroom (the German-born judges?) or in the country (listening to the broadcast of the trial) would fully understand Yiddish. On a symbolic level, Yiddish was clearly linked to diaspora Jewry; the designation of Hebrew as the official language in Israel was meant to supersede Yiddish. Thus to cede to Yiddish the task of testimony may well have prompted mixed emotions. I am indebted to Liora Bilsky for directing me to Douglas’s work. 18. As an alleged expert on Jewish affairs, Eichmann apparently claimed that he had some knowledge of Hebrew and Yiddish. See Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 41. Gideon Hausner seems to date Eichmann’s learning of Jewish languages to around 1935, when Eichmann was appointed to the Jewish department of the SS. Gideon Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem, 4th ed. (New York: Holocaust Library, 1977), 32. 19. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 48.

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20. Christian Gerlach has recently pointed to Eichmann’s “peculiar use” of the German language, a problem that “has yet to be researched adequately.” In contrast to Arendt, however, Gerlach believes Eichmann’s language was “part of his strategy” of self-defense. Christian Gerlach, “The Eichmann Interrogations in Holocaust Historiography,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 15 (2001): 440. 21. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 48. 22. Felman links the two different references to German-as-comic, but does not spell out what comprises the essential connection. Felman, “Theaters of Justice,” 204. 23. Generally, Arendt makes clear that she – along with the judges – is struggling to preserve law and justice over against the Israeli government’s desire to make the trial into theater and show. Mark Osiel, however, believes that Arendt wanted the trial to succeed as “drama” but it failed because the protagonists were too mediocre. This reading loses sight of the opposition between theater and court that Arendt frequently emphasized. See Mark Osiel, Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory, and the Law (New Brunswick nj: Transaction, 1997), 17–18. 24. Terrence Des Pres, “Holocaust Laughter?” in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988), 232. 25. Hannah Arendt, “ ‘What Remains? The Language Remains’: A Conversation with Günter Gaus,” in Essays in Understanding: 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 12. The German original appears in Hannah Arendt, Gespräche mit Hannah Arendt, ed. Albert Reif (Munich: Piper, 1976), 9–34. 26. Arendt, “What Remains?” 13. Pursuing what he refers to as reflections on “Jews of the Twentieth Century, the Mother Tongue and the Language of the Other,” Jacques Derrida has recently criticized Arendt for holding this position: “Arendt is not willing or able to think this aberration: in order for the [German] ‘subjects’ of a language to become ‘mad,’ perverse, or diabolical, evil with a radical evil, it was indeed necessary that language have a hand in it”: Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 87. Leaving aside that Derrida invokes a concept of evil that Arendt does not subscribe to, he also seems to misjudge the context in which Arendt was responding to Gaus’s question. Commenting in Germany in 1964, Arendt is addressing her own continuing relation to German (the language in which the interview is being conducted) while simultaneously acknowledging that she resides in the United States and writes predominantly in English. The subtext to Gaus’s

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question thus seems to be, How can we be speaking German if they [the Nazis] did? Should I abandon (or have I by writing in English abandoned] German as a medium of cultural work? Can German in the aftermath of the Holocaust no longer inspire productive thought and writing? What are the implications of my writing not in my native German but in my adopted English? Stating that “it wasn’t the language that went crazy”was, I believe,Arendt’s way of accounting for the specific role that German continued to play in her life and thinking. Although more in tune with the context of Arendt’s response, Julia Kristeva follows Derrida in criticizing Arendt’s view of language and madness. See Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 217n, 238–39, 272. Neither Derrida nor Kristeva considers Arendt’s position in the broader context of Arendt’s multilingualism and, specifically, of her relation to English. 27. George Steiner, “The Hollow Miracle (1959),” Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman (New York: Atheneum, 1977), 95–109. 28. It may be that for Arendt the essential accomplishments of the Enlightenment also “remained.” As Steven Aschheim has noted, “as early as 1945 [Arendt] declared that the Western, and especially the German, tradition, ‘Luther or Kant or Hegel or Nietzsche[,] . . . have not the least responsibility for what is happening in the extermination camps.’ Nazism was about the breakdown, not the realization, of tradition and culture; its sources were to be found in nihilistic rupture, not continuity”: Steven Aschheim, Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 51. The quotation from Arendt can be found in Jerome Kohn, ed., “The German Problem,” in Essays in Understanding: 1930–1954, (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 111. 29. Arendt, “What Remains?” 13. On Arendt and her mother tongue, see further Liliane Weissberg,“In Search of the Mother Tongue: Hannah Arendt’s German-Jewish Literature,” in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Steven Aschheim (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 149–64; and Liliane Weissberg,“Introduction: Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, and the Writing of (Auto)biography,” in Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, by Hannah Arendt, ed. Liliane Weissberg, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 30. Arendt, “What Remains?” 13. 31. Arendt, “What Remains?” 13. 32. Elizabeth Young-Bruehl also links Arendt’s “clinging” to German and the effort to not fall victim to cliché: “[Arendt] clung to her European back-

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ground and particularly to the German language, never really exchanging her mother tongue for English. ‘The words we use in ordinary speech,’ she explained in one of her Germanic-English sentences, ‘receive their specific weight, which guides our usage and saves us from mindless clichés, through the manifold associations which arise automatically and uniquely out of the treasure of great poetry with which the particular language . . . has been blessed.’ ” Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), xiv. Young-Bruehl cites as her source Arendt’s unpublished address on receiving the Sonning Prize, 1975, Library of Congress. 33. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 48. 34. Young-Breuhl, Hannah Arendt, 164–68ff. 35. Arendt, “What Remains?” 13. 36. Arendt, “What Remains?” 13. 37. Carol Brightman, ed., “Editor’s Foreword,” Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949–75 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995), xxxiii. Brightman’s foreword and “Introduction: An Epistolary Romance” comment frequently on issues of language as well as on issues connected to the Eichmann trial. 38. Brightman, ed., Between Friends, 2. The letter is dated “4/26/51.” 39. Brightman, ed., Between Friends, 296. 40. Brightman, ed., Between Friends, xxiii. 41. It is worth pointing out that McCarthy is not quite accurate in how she presents the oed’s definition for “thoughtlessness,” attributing to it what the oed actually gives for “thoughtless.” 42. Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture,” Social Research 38 (1971). 43. See Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking, vol. 1 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1978), 4. 44. Seyla Benhabib,“Identity, Perspective and Narrative in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem,” History and Memory 8 (1996): 35. 45. Benhabib, “Identity, Perspective and Narrative,” 45. 46. Correspondence from the 1940s indicates both Scholem’s respect for Arendt and also his frustration over what he considered her grievous misunderstanding of Zionism. See Gershom Scholem, A Life in Letters, 1914–1982, ed. and trans. Anthony David Skinner (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). 47. The letters were originally published under the title, “Ein Briefwechsel u¨ ber Hannah Arendts Buch Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Neue Zurcher Zeitung

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20 October, 1963: 5. Translation into Hebrew and English soon followed. In addition to the English translation cited above, another appears in Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, 240–51. The recent volume of Scholem’s correspondence also includes Skinner’s new translation of the Scholem-Arendt exchange. 48. See Arendt’s 1964 assessment of the materials she drew on. Arendt, “Postscript,” Eichmann in Jerusalem, 282. 49. Liora Bilsky, “Between Justice and Politics: The Competition of Storytellers in the Eichmann Trial,” in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Steven Aschheim (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 240–41. 50. My words echo those of Daniel Bell: Arendt, notes Bell, writes “from the standpoint of a universal principle that denies any parochial identity.” Daniel Bell: “The Alphabet of Justice,” Partisan Review 30 (1963): 428. Quoted in Lisa Jane Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994). 51. Felman, “Theaters of Justice,” 202.

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Lines: 747 7. s ay ‘‘g o o d b oy ’’ 1. Wallant, The Pawnbroker, 6. On the possible meanings of the threeball “ugly” pawnbroking symbol, see Alfred Hardaker, A Brief History of Pawnbroking (London: Jackson, Ruston and Keeson,1892), 6–8; Raymond De Roover, “The Three Golden Balls of the Pawnbrokers,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society 20 (1946), 117–24; and Caskey, Fringe Banking, 15. 2. In its adaptation, The Pawnbroker, according to Geoffrey Wagner’s categories of fidelity or alteration, can be seen as a “commentary” on the novel: “where an original is taken and either purposely or inadvertently altered in some respect . . . when there has been a different intention on the part of the film-maker, rather than infidelity or outright violation”: Geoffrey Wagner, The Novel and the Cinema (Rutherford nj: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975), 222. Given that the loyalty or infidelity of Ortiz to Nazerman (and vice-versa) is a crucial dimension of The Pawnbroker, it would be interesting to investigate how the issue of loyalty within The Pawnbroker might be played off against the issue of loyalty in the process of adaptation. That said, however, recent studies of adaptation advance models of characterizing the relation between film and novel (or novel and film) that break free of the fidelity-infidelity paradigm. See Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, eds., Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text (London and New York: Routledge, 1999); James Griffith, Adaptations as Imitations: Films From Novels (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997); Brian McFarlane, Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (Oxford: Clarendon,

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1996). Several shorter studies focus some attention on issues of adaptation in The Pawnbroker: Joseph Lyons, “The Pawnbroker: Flashback in the Novel and Film,” Western Humanities Review 20 (1966): 243–49; Graham Petrie, “A Note on the Novel and the Film: Flashbacks in Tristram Shandy and The Pawnbroker,”Western Humanities Review 21 (1967): 165–69; and Gabriel Miller, Screening the Novel: Rediscovered American Fiction in Film (New York: Ungar, 1980). I emphasize certain aspects of adaptation. But there are others: the film has omitted a number of important dimensions of the novel (including Nazerman’s violated body; the epic role of the river), modified others (Nazerman’s sister becomes in the film his sister-in-law; he hails not from Poland but from Germany; spinster Birchfield acquires – and then loses – a husband), and added material of its own. Authorial responsibility for the changes can be attributed to various screenwriters (David Friedkin and Morton Fine receive credit, but earlier versions of the screenplay, according to Leonard Leff, were crafted by Ted Allen, with assistance from Rod Steiger), the director Sidney Lumet, and even the editor Ralph Rosenblum. Leff ’s account, based in large part on the correspondence of and assessment by Roger Lewis, deviates at points from both that of director Sidney Lumet and editor Ralph Rosenblum. Leonard J. Leff, “Hollywood and the Holocaust: Remembering The Pawnbroker,” American Jewish History 84 (1996): 353–76. 3. I base the quotations for the film on “The Pawnbroker: Cutting – Sound – Dialogue Continuity Sheets,” dated April 30, 1965 (a film script has apparently never been published). Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington in. Special thanks to Rebecca Cape for copying and forwarding this material. I have checked the dialogue against the film and vice-versa. The sheets are numbered according to reel and page. The page number for this quotation 1:9. I use this numbering to refer to all subsequent quotations from the film. 4. “Pawnbroker Continuity Sheets,” 1:9. 5. The scene and the Spanish dialogue are original to the film. 6. Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot (Cambridge ma: mit University Press, 1963), 127. For a comprehensive view of the Spanish-English issues among New York’s Puerto Ricans in this period, see Joshua Fishman and others, eds., Bilingualism in the Barrio (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971). On the struggle of this community in Harlem during this period, see Patricia Cayo Sexton, Spanish Harlem: Anatomy of Poverty (New York: Harper and Row, 1965). 7. “Pawnbroker Continuity Sheets,” 3:6.

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8. Lumet’s biography is relevant to note here. His career began as a child actor in Yiddish theater, where his father – who played the role of Mendel, father of Nazerman’s friend, Rubin, in The Pawnbroker – was an established performer. The Pawnbroker’s multilingual sensitivity, which I discuss here and below, may be informed by Lumet’s non-English American lineage. I am indebted to David Roskies for reminding me of Lumet’s beginnings in Yiddish theater. 9. Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (New York: Vintage, 1983). 10. Several articles address the technique in relation to The Pawnbroker: Lyons, “The Pawnbroker: Flashback in the Novel and Film,” and Petrie, “A Note on the Novel and the Film: Flashbacks in Tristram Shandy and The Pawnbroker.” Although Petrie focuses on the relation between film and novel, he does note that The Pawnbroker derives the technique from Hiroshima mon amour. Lyons, for his part, does not take up the origin of the flashback. For a fuller discussion of The Pawnbroker and the issues of the flashback, see Alan Rosen, “ ‘Teach Me Gold’: Pedagogy and Memory in The Pawnbroker,” Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 22 (2002): 77–117. In spite of the legacy Hiroshima mon amour has bequeathed, Resnais claims that the film does not deploy flashbacks: “Je n’aime pas utiliser le ‘flash back’ – pour moi, Hiroshima mon amour est toujours au présent” [I don’t like to use the word flash back – for me, Hiroshima mon amour is always in the present]. Quoted in Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 123. In terms of the Europe-America conflict, it is striking that, when Resnais invokes what is for him the unacceptable term, “flash back”, he shifts from French to English. 11. Commenting on the film in 1964, prior to its American release the following year, Lumet tried to distance the film’s innovations from European high culture and sketch instead an American pedigree: “We did a lot of this kind of insane cutting in the early days in TV, when often television technique was far in advance of movies. I’m always amused by avant garde critics who’ll probably sit down and say about this film ‘Well, the two frame cuts came from Last Year in Marienbad, and this came from . . .’ which is nonsense. There’s one general premise: almost anything that any of us has done you can find in a John Ford film.” (Sidney Lumet, “Keep Them on the Hook,” Films and Filming, October 1964, 20.) Last Year in Marienbad (1961) is a film directed by Resnais a few years after he made Hiroshima mon amour. For other sources that cite Lumet’s comments on The Pawnbroker, see “30 Responses D’Amerique,” Cahiers Du Cinema 25 (1963–64): 56–57; and Sidney Lumet, Making Movies (New York: Knopf, 1995), 158–61, 175–77. Critical studies of

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The Pawnbroker in the context of Lumet’s oeuvre include Graham Petrie, “The Films of Sidney Lumet: Adaptation as Art,” Film Quarterly 21 (1967–68): 9–17; Frank Cunningham, Sidney Lumet: Film and Literary Vision (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1991) 157–85; Jay Boyer, Sidney Lumet (New York: Twayne, 1993) 17–29; and David Desser and Lester D. Freidman, “Sidney Lumet: The Memory of Guilt,” in American-Jewish Filmmakers: Traditions and Trends (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993). 12. Editor Ralph Rosenblum uses both “flashback” and “flash cut” to refer to the technique used in the film. Ralph Rosenblum and Robert Karen, When the Shooting Stops . . . the Cutting Begins: A Film Editor’s Story (New York: Penguin, 1980). According to the oed, “flashback” first denoted a process of combustion; thereafter it appears in association with cinema, only later finding its way into the idiom of psychology and other fields. In more precise film terminology, The Pawnbroker deploys exclusively “external flashbacks.” See David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 78–79. 13. Indeed, the three sequences that open the film can be read as recapitulating in broad strokes one version of the history of Hollywood film: silent movies, screwball comedy, and the urban problem film. Such a progression accentuates the experimental sense of The Pawnbroker: having run the gamut of style and technique that Hollywood has to offer, the film, confronting difficult material, will try to do what is unprecedented. 14. Such a strategy perhaps carries other resonances. Primo Levi has commented that the first days in Auschwitz were like “a black and white film, with sound but not a talkie,” Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 93–94. 15. According to the oed, this connotation of “trigger” is of recent vintage; even more so is the use of trigger as a verb (circa 1930). It is not a matter of clear consensus in psychological literature on trauma that a trigger must be literally analogous (whether for instance seeing a train triggers the recollection of deportations in trains) or not. For one view of traumatic memory that takes up some of these issues see Bessel A. Van Der Kolk and Onno Van Der Hart, “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 158–82. 16. My remarks are indebted to previous scholarship and reflection on the German language and the Holocaust. 17. Although pivotal to the film (and novel) in its own right, prostitution also connects to the issue of illicit (and/or perverted) sexuality that both versions of The Pawnbroker elaborate. As far as I can determine, only a single

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book-length work has to date addressed prostitution in the context of the Holocaust. See Christa Paul, Zwangsprostitution: Staatlich Errichte Bordelle im Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1994). 18. For another example in which English and German play off one another to make a reader uncomfortably aware of the associations of the German, see chapter 10, “The Language of Survival: English As Metaphor in Spiegelman’s Maus.” 19. One more flashback actually comes after the scene of the train deportation. But a conventional “dissolve” prompts this sequence, which replays in a modified form the silent picnic scene that opened the film. Rosenblum comments that “The old-fashioned memory-device seemed appropriate for this last reverie. We are too emotionally exhausted now to go the other route [which is the flash cut?] and the dissolve suggests the coming end”(162). The reversion to what is “old-fashioned” thus sets this episode off from the technique and issues with which I’m centrally concerned. 20. “Pawnbroker Continuity Sheets,” 5:3. 21. Pamela Ballinger has argued that this surfeit of memory distinguishes survivors of collective catastrophe – particularly the Holocaust and Hiroshima/Nagasaki – from those who have suffered situations of individual abuse and who consequently repress the memory. She uses this distinction between victims of collective and individual trauma to question the individual victim’s appropriation of the authority of victims of collective violence. See Pamela Ballinger, “The Culture of Survivors: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Traumatic Memory.” History and Memory 10 (1998): 99–132. Ballinger assumes, however, that survivors always suffer debilitating pathologies, an assumption that has not always been made. To cite just one pertinent contrasting example: Stanley Kaufmann, reviewing The Pawnbroker in 1965, saw Nazerman as the exception and not the rule: “Why is Sol [Nazerman] still so much in the grip of the past? Why is this particular survivor so specially paralyzed? Many of us have known people who have suffered similarly, suffered so grossly that the fact of life thereafter seems (to us) incredible; yet there they are living – working, quarreling, remarrying, propagating deliberately (in one case that I know) to refute the ovens. They are certainly not unmarked or forgetful; yet they are certainly not numb like Sol. I do not argue that all people must respond similarly to experience, only that, because Sol is such a remarkable exception, we miss an explanation.”“Melpomene in Harlem” New Republic 152 (April 24, 1965): 24. Finally, it is also striking that while Ballinger discusses various “triggers” that incite or intensify traumatic memory, she does not refer to the provocation of anniversaries, the yearly date or season

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marking the occasion of loss – the very pivot on which the plotting of The Pawnbroker turns. 22. “Pawnbroker Continuity Sheets,” 3:9. 23. “Melpomene in Harlem,” 24. 24. Judith Doneson writes that The Pawnbroker reflects “the Jew as a weak, almost feminine figure, dependent upon the Christian/gentile as symbol of maleness.” See Judith Doneson, The Holocaust in American Film. Doneson elaborates this, to my mind, unpersuasive argument in “The Jew as a Female Figure in Holocaust Film.” Shoah: A Review of Holocaust Studies and Commemorations 1 (1978): 11–13, 18. Viewing feminine attributes as negative (“weak”) and opposing the Jewish and Christian protagonists seems a strategy alien to both novel and film versions of The Pawnbroker. Wallant, for his part, gives both Nazerman and Ortiz some conventionally feminine characteristics that serve, among other things, to indicate the affinity between them. 25. This quality of inversion also suggests why, in contrast to the novel, where Jesus dies inside the pawnshop, the film has Jesus’ death takes place outside it, on the streets of Harlem. 26. “Pawnbroker Continuity Sheets,” 2:9. 27. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 117–26. 28. Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews first appeared in 1961 and, arguing that a “ghetto mentality” dictated the inadequate response of Europe’s Jews, was also greeted with some pointed attacks that focused on Hilberg’s assertions regarding “the victims.” A number of these responses came in the wake of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s glowing review that appeared in Commentary in April 1962. See, for example, the “Letters to the Editor” in the August issue by Isaiah Trunk, Saul Goodman, and Bernard Weinryb decrying Hilberg and Trevor-Roper’s claims, and Oscar Handlin’s full-blown response in Commentary in November of that year (“Jewish Resistance to the Nazis,” Commentary, November, 1962: 398–405). Handlin does not mince words: “By defaming the dead and their culture, [Hilberg’s] interpretation completes the process of destruction begun by the Nazis, reducing two thousand years of experience to ashes and adding Jewish history itself to the list of the destroyed and forgotten.” Similar responses in the American and British Jewish press of these years include Maurice Rosenthal, “The Murdered are not Guilty,” Jewish Spectator 9 (March 1962): 24–27; A. A. Roback, “A Modern Baalam in Reverse: The Hilberg-Trevor-Roper Slur on Jewish Courage,” Jewish Quarterly 18 (Autumn 1962): 6–8; and Yuri Suhl, “Is This Responsible Scholarship, Dr. Hilberg?” Jewish Currents (June 1964): 16–18. Two things should be pointed out here. First, reviews of Hilberg’s book – as the reference to Trevor-Roper

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makes clear – were not uniformly negative. Indeed, reviews in the scholarly press, while often critical of certain aspects of The Destruction of European Jews, were generally more appreciative than the popular press of Hilberg’s overall contribution. And second, I am concerned here with making a historical link between the intense debate around the issue of Jews-as-victims that emerged in the period 1962–1964 in response to Hilberg’s analysis on the one hand and Lumet’s strategies of representing victim and persecutor in the same period on the other hand. This is not the place to try to say more than that regarding Hilberg’s overall approach to this issue. Arendt is clear about her debt to Hilberg: “As can be seen from the text, I have used Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution, and I have relied even more on Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews, which appeared after the trial and constitutes the most exhaustive and the most soundly documented account of the Third Reich’s Jewish policies.” Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 282. Thus both Hilberg’s and Arendt’s studies appeared and were crucial in arbitrating the discussion about the Holocaust’s victims and persecutors during the period in which The Pawnbroker was in production. 29. The universal claim might of course go too far. A third model could modify this claim to suggest that not all victims but only some (in this case, Jews and African Americans) respond according to this pattern. 30. See Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattos, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, 3rd ed. (New York: Continuum, 1994), 207. 8 . c r ac k i n g h e r t e e t h 1. As Lillian Kremer notes, the originally title, The Blue Light, was changed to The Shawl at Lumet’s insistence: Personal communication from the author, 2004. Kremer has also noted that the play is “neither a dramatized adaptation of the original collection nor a sequel but incorporates matter from the short story and the novella to denounce Holocaust denial.” S. Lillian Kremer, ed., “Cynthia Ozick,” in Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Authors and Their Work (New York: Routledge, 2003), 906. Kremer here is using a more conservative notion of adaptation than I am. 2. For discussion of The Blue Light, see Joyce Antler, “ ‘Three Thousand Miles Away’: The Holocaust in Recent Works for the American Theater,” in The Americanization of the Holocaust, ed. Helene Flanzbaum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 136–39; and S. Lillian Kremer, Women Holocaust Writers (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). While they

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mention Lumet, neither critic refers to The Pawnbroker or the connections between the film and the play. 3. Cynthia Ozick, “The Shawl,” New Yorker, May 26, 1980, 33–34; Cynthia Ozick, “Rosa,” New Yorker, March 21, 1983, 38–71. 4. Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl (New York: Knopf, 1989). 5. Published separately in different issues of the New Yorker, the stories appeared without an epigraph. 6. The note inside the title page – on the page facing the Celan epigraph – reads: “Grateful acknowledgment is made to Persea Books for permission to reprint an excerpt from ‘Todesfuge’ from The Poems of Paul Celan, a bilingual edition, translated by Michael Hamburger.” 7. John Felstiner, “Loss and the Mother Tongue,” in Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) and Shoshana Felman, “Education and Crisis,” in Testimony (New York: Routledge, 1992), 26–28. 8. Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl (New York: Vintage, 1990), 57. All subsequent quotations are cited from this edition. 9. See especially George Steiner, “The Long Life of Metaphor,” in Writing and the Holocaust (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1989). 10. Felstiner, Paul Celan, xvii. 11. On Celan and other survivors writing in German out of generosity or confrontation, see Horowitz, Voicing the Void, 172–74. 12. Zygmunt Bauman, “Assimilation into Exile: The Jew as Polish Writer,” in Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances, ed. Susan Suleiman (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), 347. 13. Bauman, “Assimilation into Exile, 347. 14. Ringelblum, Notes, 289. 15. Ringelblum, Notes, 289. 16. In her otherwise admirable essay on ghetto writings, Sara Horowitz does not make clear that Ringelblum views the “love of Polish” as a symptom not of protest but assimilation. She gives the impression that the two views he cites, rather than contesting the truth, comprise two complementary elements in a larger whole. “Voices from the Killing Ground,” in Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 45– 46. 17. Joseph Kermish, ed.,“Answers to a Questionnaire by St. [sic] Stupnicki,” in To Live with Honor and Die with Honor:! . . . Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives “O.S.” [“Oneg Shabbath”](Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1986), 739.

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18. Lucy Dawidowicz, ed., “Evaluating the Ghetto: Interviews in Warsaw, 1941: Hillel Zeitlin,” in A Holocaust Reader (New York: Behrman, 1976), 218. 19. Dawidowicz, ed., “Evaluating the Ghetto,” 218. 20. Michael Steinlauf,“Mark Arnshteyn and Polish-Jewish Theater,” in Jews of Poland Between the Two Wars, ed. Yisrael Gutman, and others (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1989), 399–400. 21. Shmeruk, “ Hebrew-Yiddish-Polish,” 286. 22. See Cynthia Ozick, “The Phantasmagoria of Bruno Schulz,” in Art and Ardor (New York: Knopf, 1983), 224–28. The review originally appeared in The New York Times Book Review (February 13, 1977). 23. Hellerstein, “Yiddish Voices in American English,” 196. 24. Ozick, The Shawl, 53. 25. Arendt, “What Remains?” 26. Cynthia Ozick, “The Question of Our Speech: A Return to Aural Culture,” in Metaphor and Memory (New York: Knopf, 1989), 146–72. The essay originally appeared in The Partisan Review, Fiftieth Anniversary Issue, 1984– 1985. 27. James is a abiding figure in Ozick’s essays. See for example, “A Lesson of the Master,” “Henry James’ Unborn Child,” also in Metaphor and Memory, and Cynthia Ozick, “What Henry James Knew,” in Fame and Folly (New York: Knopf, 1996). My analysis inverts the order of the two episodes – James’s lecture and speech training – that form the core of Ozick’s essay. 28. Henry James, The Question of Our Speech/The Lesson of Balzac: Two Lectures (New York: Haskell House, 1972), 37–39. 29. Ozick, “The Question of Our Speech,” 148. 30. Ozick, “The Question of Our Speech,” 149. 31. James Stokesbury, “The United States and the War,” in A Short History of World War II (New York: William Morrow, 1980), 117–22. Stokesbury concludes his review of United States’ dogged embrace of neutrality by noting: “In the first week of December, 1941, the Wehrmacht was closing in for the kill in Russia. Americans were concerned bystanders, but most of them still thought it was not their war”(emphasis mine). In this context it should be noted that Stokesbury’s phrase, “closing in for the kill,” refers not, I believe, to deathly work of the Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi troops who slaughtered Jews as the Wehrmacht moved East, but solely to the progress of the German Army in fighting their Russian counterparts. 32. Ozick, The Shawl, 18. 33. Ozick, The Shawl, 23. 34. Ozick, The Shawl, 23.

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35. Ozick, The Shawl, 33. 36. Ozick, The Shawl, 33. 37. Ozick, The Shawl, 20. 38. From a different angle, Ozick explores the interplay between Yiddish and English in one of her most celebrated stories, “Envy, or Yiddish in America,” first published in Commentary in 1969. In “Envy,” however, the relation between English and Yiddish is not so much analogous as it is contentious. 39. Ozick, The Shawl, 37. 40. Cynthia Ozick, “Toward a New Yiddish,” Art and Ardor (New York: Knopf, 1983). The essay originally appeared under the title, “America: Toward Yavneh,” Judaism 19 (1970): 264–82. For one skeptical response to Ozick’s proposal, see Ruth Wisse, “American Jewish Writing, Act II,” Commentary 61 (1976): 40–45. 41. Elaine Kauvar argues the importance of Virgil’s Aeniad; see Cynthia Ozick’s Fiction: Tradition and Invention (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 197–200. Hana Wirth-Nesher, responding to the Celan epigraph, invokes the German Romantic tradition, particularly Goethe’s Faust: see Hana Wirth-Nesher, “The Languages of Memory,” in Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature ed. Werner Sollors. (New York: New York University Press, 1998). Both the classic and romantic intertexts open the story out; the English ones refer back to Ozick’s own idiom. 42. Ozick, The Shawl, 14. 43. The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 1997), 4.1.25. 44. Ozick, The Shawl, 7. 45. The Norton Shakespeare, 5.3.231–35. Both Folio and Quarto editions of Lear include the fourfold “howl.” 46. Ozick, The Shawl, 26. 9 . t h e l a n g uag e o f d o l l a r s 1. Eliach, Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, xxiii. 2. Leon Wieseltier, “The Life Before the Death,” New Republic 1983, 38. 3. Bonnie Gurewitsch, personal communication with author. Gurewitsch, an associate of Eliach’s at the Center for Holocaust Studies, is presently an archivist at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York, the institution that now houses the collection formerly at the center. 4. Eliach’s attention to multilingual issues is also of a piece with the history of Jewish writing. For reflections on this theme, see Baal-Makhshoves, “One

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Literature in Two Languages,”in What is Jewish Literature? ed. and trans. Hana Wirth-Nesher (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994), 69–77 and Shmuel Niger, Bilingualism in the History of Jewish Literature, trans. Joshua Fogel (New York: University Press of America, 1990). 5. Michael Berenbaum, “Review of Hasidic Tales and the Holocaust,” Simon Wiesenthal Annual 1 (1983): 237. 6. Kathryn Hellerstein does not however simply rule out such “Yiddish voices”; she rather argues that some authors (Cynthia Ozick, for example) integrate them more authentically than those who, to her mind, exploit Yiddish for sentimentality: Hellerstein, “Yiddish Voices in American English.” 7. Arthur Green, “On Translating Hasidic Homilies,” Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 3 (1983): 67. Green’s translation appears in Upright [228], (38 Practices, The Light of the Eyes, R. Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl (New York: Paulist, 1982). 8. To be sure, perception of accent is also in the eye (and/or) ear of the Lines: 992 beholder: Bonnie Gurewitsch has communicated to me that she believes the ——— English of Hasidic Tales is clearly accented. For a searching analysis of the issue * 23.9001 of perception of accents, see Mari J. Matsuda, “Voices of America: Accent, ——— Antidiscrimination Law, and a Jurisprudence for the Last Reconstruction,” Normal Pa Yale Law Journal 100 (1991): 1329–1407. While Matsuda particularly argues * PgEnds: Ej for legal reform with regard to cases that discriminate against accent – for example, the refusal to hire an otherwise competent candidate as a teller [228], (38 because his (substantial or minimal) Philippino accent was perceived by his Hawaiian interviewers as too great a liability – she addresses general issues and cites an extraordinary range of pertinent studies. 9. Eliach, Hasidic Tales, xvi. On the history and context of Hasidic tales, including issues of audience and language, see Joseph Dan, Ha-Sipur haHasidi (Jerusalem: Bet hotsa’at Keter Yerushhayim Mosad Byalik ha-Makhow le-heker ha-sifnut ha-Hasidit, 1975); Mendel Piekarz, Hasidut Braslav (Jerusalem: Mosad Byalik, 1972); Gedaliah Nigal, Ha-siporet ha-Hasidit toledoteihah ve-nose’eihah (Jerusalem: Hotsa’at Mosad ha-Ravkuk, 1981); and Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters (New York: Schocken, 1975). 10. For S. A. Horodezky’s view, see Ha-Hasidut ve-ha-Hasidim, 2nd ed. (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1953) and the abridged English version, Leaders of Hasidism (London: Hasefer Agency for Literature, 1928). 11. Most trenchantly, Ada Rapoport-Albert disputes S. A. Horodezky’s contention that Hasidism provided Jewish women with religious opportunities

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previously unavailable. See Ada Rapoport-Albert, “On Women in Hasidism: S. A. Horodezky and The Maid of Ludmir Tradition,” in Jewish History: Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky, ed. Ada Rapoport-Albert and Steven J. Zipperstein (London: Peter Halban, 1988). Nehemia Polen has, however, argued that, while offering a necessary corrective, Rapoport-Albert takes things too far. See“Miriam’s Dance: Radical Egalitarianism in Hasidic Thought,”Modern Judaism 12 (1992): 1–21. In distinguishing different currents within Hasidism, Naftali Loewenthal has recently suggested that the Habad movement, from the outset but increasingly in the twentieth century, established a full-fledged spiritual role for women in Hasidism. See his “Women and the Dialectic of Spirituality in Hasidism,” in Within Hasidic Circles: Studies in Hasidism in Memory of Mordecai Wilensky, ed. Immanuel Etkes, and others (Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute, 1999), 7–65. 12. David Roskies, for instance, sees the Yiddish text of Rebbe Nachman’s of Breslov’s bilingual Sippurey Mayses as specifically directed toward women: “Bilingual texts were always aimed at a differentiated Jewish audience. Because Hebrew remained the language of the learned Jewish male, the Hebrew record of Nahman’s stories, parables, and dreams was more complete and reliable than the Yiddish original. The Yiddish was for proste mentsn, the simple folk, especially women”: David Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 30. Sippurey Mayses was first published in 1815, virtually at the same time as Shivhei HaBescht. Roskies reference to “proste mentsn” is taken from Rabbi Noson’s Yiddish preface to the Sippurey Mayses. In an influential study on the relation between Yiddish and Hebrew writing in the nineteenth century, originally published in 1973 but reissued in 1996, Dan Miron believes that writing in Yiddish was directed toward women:“True,Yiddish literature never occupied a high position in the cultural hierarchy of traditional Ashkenazic Jewry. It always addressed itself to the unlearned, particularly to women.” He goes on to link Hasidic tales to this tradition of earlier Yiddish literature: to this tradition “was added toward the end of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth the immensely popular literature of hasidic legend and hagiography, which was also written (in part) in Yiddish.” Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised: A Study in the Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Schocken, 1973), 2. 13. The first printing of the first collection of Hasidic tales – Shivhei HaBescht (In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov) – was in Hebrew (in 1814). But four Yiddish editions of the tales were soon published (between 1815 and 1817). Yiddish editions thereafter appeared throughout the nineteenth century. See

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Murray Jay Rosman, “In Praise of the Ba’al Shem Tov: A User’s Guide to the Editions of Shivhei HaBescht, Jews in Early Modern Poland, ed. Gershon David Hundert (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1997) and see his Founder of Hasidism: In Quest of the Historical Ba’al Shem Tov (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) for a list of earliest editions; for a list that includes later editions, see Y. Rafael, “Shivhei HaBescht,” Areshet 2–3 (1960–1961): 358–77, 440–41 (Hebrew). 14. For a broader assessment of this controversy, see Iris Parush, “The Politics of Literacy: Women and Foreign Languages in Jewish Society of 19thCentury Eastern Europe.” Modern Judaism 15 (1995): 183–206; Shaul Stampfer, “Gender Differentiation and Education of the Jewish Woman in NineteenthCentury Eastern Europe.” Polin 7 (1992): 63–87; Miron, A Traveler Disguised; and Roskies, A Bridge of Longing. As the titles of their articles indicate, Parush and Stampfer emphasize the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; they nonetheless address issues relevant to those of Eliach. Stampfer brings numerous examples to show the gender divide between men and women in terms of reading and study in Hebrew and Yiddish. He argues however that the linguistic divide did not necessarily translate into an inferior position for women’s study of tradition. Parush too emphasizes the gender divide between Hebrew and Yiddish and, contra Stampfer, believes the divide operated (and was designed to operate) to restrict women’s engagement with tradition. But her concerns lie in a broader view of the significance of languages for Jewish women and modern Judaism. 15. Eliach, Hasidic Tales, xxii. 16. Eliach, Hasidic Tales, 23–24. 17. The response of women during the Holocaust, as well as women’s postwar writing about the Holocaust, have received significant attention in recent years. For a foundational study, see Madeline Heineman, Gender and Destiny: Women Writers and the Holocaust (New York: Greenwood, 1986). For a range of writing, narrative and analytical, that addresses response both during and after, see Carol Rittner and John Roth, eds., Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust (New York: Paragon, 1993). More recently, see Judith Tydor Baumel, Double Jeopardy: Women and the Holocaust (Portland, Ore: Vallentine Mitchell, 1998); Brana Gurewitsch, Mothers, Sisters, Resisters: Oral Histories of Women Who Survived the Holocaust (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998) and S. Lillian Kremer, Women’s Holocaust Writing: Memory and Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). This literature can be viewed in the context of women’s response to crisis and catastrophe in Jewish history. For a focus on women’s special initiative, see Shlomo Noble, “The

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Jewish Woman in Medieval Martyrology,” in Studies in Jewish Bibliography, History and Literature in Honor of I. Edw. Kiev, ed. Charles Berlin (New York: Ktav, 1971), 347–55, and Ivan Marcus, “From Politics to Martyrdom: Shifting Paradigms in the Hebrew Narratives of the 1096 Crusade Riots,” in Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 2 (1982): 40–52. Finally, see David Roskies’s brief comments on the paucity of material detailing Jewish women’s responses to catastrophe. In Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984) and in The Literature of Destruction (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1988). One can find in this literature intermittent but suggestive references to the role of languages in relation to women. 18. Eliach, Hasidic Tales, xxii. 19. Eliach has said that she made an initial agreement with the Bluzhover Rebbe, the dominating figure in Hasidic Tales, that her male graduate students would conduct the interviews with him, during which time Eliach would be in attendance, listening. At an early meeting, however, Eliach had an opportunity to demonstrate facility in traditional texts, and her facility prompted the Rebbe to change his mind and permit her to conduct the interviews herself. I am indebted to Nehemiah Polen for his initial reference to this incident and to Yaffa Eliach for recounting it in detail in a personal communication on July 3, 2000. 20. Eliach’s task of chronicling the independent role of traditional women is evident as well in her massive study, There Once was a World: A Nine HundredYear Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998). 21. An exception here is Jerome Mintz, Legends of the Hasidim: An Introduction to Hasidic Culture and Oral Tradition in the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). Styled as an anthropological study, the interview for Mintz is field work. Although she implicitly shares some of Mintz’s anthropological strategies and clientele, Eliach is involved in a different form of cultural mediation. In her foreword to Hasidic Tales, Eliach traces her antecedents (I believe correctly) to Buber, Peretz, Kafka, and Agnon – literary (and in the case of Buber, philosophical) figures who collected Hasidic tales and rewrote them for non-Hasidic, often secular, audiences. Among the vast commentary on such projects, Sander Gilman’s remarks on Aron Marcus, Buber, Czech writer Jiri Langer, and Kafka come closest to paralleling my own approach. See Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jew (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 271–86. David Jacobson terms such projects “Neo-Hasidic” (he is not the first to do so); the issues that inform his discussion under this

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rubric, however, feel distant from those most crucial for considering Eliach’s collection. See David Jacobson, Modern Midrash: The Retelling of Traditional Jewish Narratives by Twentieth-Century Hebrew Writers (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), especially chapter one, “Neo-Hasidic Tales: Micha Yosef Berdyczewski and Y. L. Peretz.” 22. James Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1988), 40–43. Young comments on Hasidic Tales in the chapter entitled “From Witness to Legend: Tales of the Holocaust.” Young presumes Hasidic Tales, because it often features Hasidic Jews, to recuperate a traditionally conservative theological agenda – “justifying the ways of divine providence” – and he interprets the tales accordingly (he actually refers only to a single tale, the first in the collection). While some tales can be read in this way, however, many (including those I focus on in this chapter) can be seen to challenge such a view. Young’s subtext here, I would argue, is that “legend,” because unconcerned with the events themselves, bolsters “divine providence,” a view that does not confront the cruelest dimensions of the Holocaust. Hence, Young’s model leaves little room for the genre of interview to play a fundamentally constitutive role. 23. As we have seen in relation to David Boder’s project, interviews are among the earliest postwar written responses. But the 1970s appear pivotal, due in part to be sure to the maturing of the field of oral history and to the intensifying dissatisfaction with models of description and explanation of the Holocaust based almost exclusively on Nazi documents. I develop this briefly in the analysis that follows. 24. Center for Holocaust Studies Newsletter 3 (1991): 3. 25. Eliach also clearly articulates this polemical agenda on behalf of the victims in the “Discussion” section that follows her 1980 lecture, “Jewish Tradition in the Life of the Concentration Camp Inmate,” in The Nazi Concentration Camps: Proceedings of the Fourth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference, Jerusalem, January, 1980, ed. Y. Gutman and A. Saf (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1984), particularly pages 243–47. 26. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, “The Paradigm Challenged: Victim Testimony, Critical Evidence, and New Perspectives in the Study of the Holocaust,” Tikkun 13 (1998): 40–47. Goldhagen persuasively, if briefly, contrasts Holocaust historiography with that of the Soviet Gulag. Goldhagen’s list of historians includes Martin Broszat, Eberhard Jackel, Hans Mommsen, Raul Hilberg, Christopher Browning, and Istvan Deak. In contrast, H. G. Adler, Israel Gutman, and Hermann Langbein draw heavily on survivor accounts.

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Although Goldhagen does not refer to Saul Friedlander, Friedlander’s recent work, attempting to integrate his own perspective as a survivor with critical history of the Holocaust, would seem both symptom and revision of the trend Goldhagen takes to task. See Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1, The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939, particularly Friedlander’s polemical comments on pages 2 and 5. 27. The archive at Yale has nourished interpretations by a number of important scholars. Geoffrey Hartman, long associated with the Yale Video Archive, reflects on the contributions of oral history in The Longest Shadow (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). In Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), Lawrence Langer bases his analysis on material from this archive as well. See also Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), where material from the archives gives rise to reflections pedagogic and psychoanalytic. This said, the success of the oral history endeavor has also bequeathed its own set of problems. Dominick La Capra, for instance, can refer to “testimony” and problematically assume that what is meant is videotaped interviews of survivor accounts. While these accounts rightly come under the rubric of testimony, they do not exhaust the category; written memoirs and, of course, personal oral communication, antedate video accounts and constitute a major source of Holocaust testimony. That a scholar as thoughtful and industrious as La Capra could inadvertently make such an assumption suggests the potential extent of the problem. See Dominick La Capra, History and Memory After Auschwitz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 10–11. For a more extended critique of these issues, see my essay,“The Specter of Eloquence: Reading the Survivor’s Voice,” in Celebrating Elie Wiesel: Stories, Essays, Reflections, ed. Alan Rosen (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 41–56. 28. Hana Wirth-Nesher develops this evocative notion in commenting on Henry Roth’s use of English in Call It Sleep. See Hana Wirth-Nesher,“Between Mother Tongue and Native Language: Multilingualism in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep,” Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 10 (1990): 297–312. Whereas Wirth-Nesher invokes this notion to refer to a presence that never was, I draw on it to commemorate a phenomenon that once existed. That said, the experience is similar. 29. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 88–104. 30. This is the same Bronia referred to in the tale, “The Vision of the Red Stars.” She is featured in a number of tales and cited regularly by Eliach as

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a interviewee. She appears both under the name Koczicki and, having later remarried (to Rabbi Israel Spira), under the name Bronia Spira. 31. Eliach, Hasidic Tales, 26. Lenore Weitzman has recently discussed the crucial role of language in “passing” during the Holocaust. See Lenore Weitzman,“Living on the Aryan Side in Poland: Gender, Passing, and the Nature of Resistance,” in Women in the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 187–222, especially 211–12. Facility, accent, and passive knowledge of a language – particularly here German and Polish – were salient factors. Weitzman’s premises regarding the facility with languages of Polish Jewry are however impressionistic. A more detailed and rigorous account can be found in Chone Shmeruk,“Hebrew-Yiddish-Polish”. 32. Eliach, Hasidic Tales, 31. 33. Eliach, Hasidic Tales, 117. 34. Parush, Stampler, and Shmeruk each address, with various emphases, the intersection between language and acculturation in the different strata of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Eastern European Jewish society. 35. Eliach, Hasidic Tales, 195. 36. Historically, however, it is a question whether the statue was ever geared to the “masses.”As Higham has observed, however, the poem could come into prominence only when the politics of immigration were receptive. Only when immigration was no longer in “significant numbers,” were the connotations Lazarus assigned it brought to the foreground. In Higham’s words, “So long as millions of immigrants entered ‘the golden door,’ the Statue of Liberty was unresponsive to them; it served other purposes. After the immigrant ships no longer passed under the New Colossus in significant numbers, it enshrined the immigrant experience as a transcendental national memory”: John Higham, “The Transformation of the Statue of Liberty,” in Send These to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America (New York: Atheneum, 1975). 37. The Hebrew reads: “lakachti etchem echad me’ihr v’sh’naim m’mishpacha,” and continues “v’heveti etchem tzion” [and I will bring you to Zion, i.e. Israel] (Jeremiah 3:14). The verse in its entirety, then, prophesies a comprehensive redemption of all Jews, including transporting them to Israel. Traditional commentaries emphasize that “one of a city, and two of a family” implies that at the time of redemption God will not leave any one – no many how few or how remote may be the place where they reside – behind. Seen against this tradition of interpretation focusing on comprehensive redemption of every member of the Jewish people, the rebbe’s use of this verse to dramatize the tragic plight of Holocaust survivors is that much more pointed.

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38. It may be that, after all, a similar prophetic vision guided Lazarus’s original formulation: Dan Marom has argued that the prophet Jeremiah nourished the conception of Lazarus’s poem. See his “Who is the ‘Mother of Exiles’? Jewish Aspects of Emma Lazarus’s ‘The New Colossus,’ ” Prooftexts (2000): 251–52. Even if so, however, the Rebbe (and Eliach) still play the modern off against the ancient to articulate the legacy of the Holocaust. 39. Mary Louise Pratt,“Comparative Literature and Global Citizenship,” in Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, ed. Charles Bernheimer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 64. 40. That the words at issue are Lazarus’s makes the issues of opacity and translation apposite, for Lazarus was known for her gift for languages (she was fluent in French, German, and Italian, and, according to her friend, Sophia Hawthorne, perhaps was adept in Greek and Latin as well) and for her accomplishments in translating these languages. Moreover, the postwar moment appeared ripe for circumventing the opacity of the poem. For just as, according to Eliach’s rendering, the GI was translating for the Bluzhover Rebbe the words (or some words) of Lazarus’s Statue of Liberty poem, “The New Colossus,” into Yiddish, so was I. L. Beilin celebrating Lazarus and “The New Colossus” in his Yiddish monograph, Dos Lebn fun Ema Lazarus (The Life of Emma Lazarus), published in New York in 1946. According to Beilin, Lazarus had herself rewritten the message of the statue: “she has given [to the statue] the possibility of a deeper content than the sculptor has ever seen to give” (37, translation mine). 41. Eliach, Hasidic Tales, 206. 42. According to Eliach, her interviewees would also be moved by this mimetic impulse and would quote in the original language. In contrast to Tula, however, who narrates traumatic events mimetically but keeps ironic distance, invoking the original language moved the speaker “totally into the past” (personal communication with the author, July 2000). Noting a special way that this impulse played itself out, Gurewitsch emphasizes that her interviewees would “always” mime the persecutor’s German commands in the original German (personal communication with the author, November 1999). 43. Eliach Hasidic Tales, 206–7. To be sure, dreaming of bread is not unique to this story but is poignantly common in contemporary as well as postwar accounts of the Holocaust. What is special to this story is the way the dream is played out many years later and, most interesting to me, the link to languages and storytelling. 44. Born in Tomaszow, in southeastern Poland, Lerman was a partisan

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fighter from 1942 until the end of the war. Having settled after the war in the United States, Lerman has been an important figure in efforts to memorialize the Holocaust, particularly in his association with the United States Holocaust Council (of which he served as chair, 1993–2000) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Even given his prominence, his interruption of the commemoration was likely viewed as provocative. 45. Eliach, Hasidic Tales, 212. 46. Eliach, Hasidic Tales, 212. 47. Eliach, Hasidic Tales, 213. 48. For an excellent survey of the images of English associated with commerce, see Bailey, Images of English. To know that such associations go back centuries does not, however, take the sting out of the Cracovian’s caustic expression, “the language of dollars.” 1 0 . t h e l a n g uag e o f s u rv iva l 1. It is, I think, fairly clear that by deploying the German word for the title, Spiegelman is asking the reader to view the Jews (mice) through the Germans’ (cats’) eyes, a strategy that emphasizes Jewish weakness and vulnerability on the one hand and German power and ruthlessness on the other. The strategy of the title parallels and reinforces the visual animal metaphor. The appropriateness of this metaphor has been the subject of substantial critical contention. That said, I believe the reading that I give the title, focusing on the interplay between English and German, can be further supported by noting that whereas Spiegelman’s choice of the singular,“maus,” enables the play between English and German, the choice of the plural, “mause,” would not. And yet it is probably more fitting that the title (like the image of the mice on the cover) be in the plural. I suggest, therefore, that at least in part Spiegelman opted for the singular, “maus,” to sound the echo between the two languages. I would like to thank J¨org Drewitz for drawing my attention to the singular/plural issue. 2. Art Spiegelman, Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History (New York, Pantheon, 1986), 16. 3. Spiegelman, Maus I, 159. 4. On the significance of this alternative version, see Marianne Hirsch, “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory,” Discourse 15 (1992– 1993): 19–22 and her book, Family Frames; Rothberg, Traumatic Realism; and Rosen, “Specters of Eloquence.” 5. Spiegelman, Maus I, 16.

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6. Spiegelman, Maus I, 16. 7. Spiegelman, Maus I, 49. 8. As Vladek makes clear in the transcripts, his English was merely good enough: “And I, I was a teacher in English. Here I couldn’t be, of course. But there I gave lessons.” Art Spiegelman, “The Working Transcripts,” in The Complete Maus, cd-rom (New York: Villager, 1994), 71. The gap between “here” and “there” that Vladek refers to encapsulates the tension between incompetence and competence – and much else – that I focus on in this chapter. 9. Art Spiegelman, Maus II: A Survior’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began (New York: Pantheon, 1991), 33. 10. Spiegelman, Maus II, 51.. 11. Spiegelman, Maus II, 68. 12. Spiegelman, Maus II, 36. 13. Spiegelman, Maus II, 70. According to Franciszek Piper, the signs leading to Crematoria IV and V actually read “Zum Desinfektion.” At least in Crematoria II and III signs in languages other than German played a beguiling role: “After selection for death,” writes Piper, “the Jews who could walk were marched from the loading ramp to the crematorium. The weak, the invalid, and the sick were transported on trucks. In the crematorium yard, the ss men told the prisoners that they would undergo a disinfection that consisted of delousing and bathing. The victims were led down the staircase to the dressing room in the basement, where they could see the signs (in German) ‘To the Bath’ and ‘To Disinfection.’ Similar signs were posted on a portable board in the native language of the victims” (169). Piper also cites the testimony of Yehuda Backon, who had heard a description from members of the Sonderkommando: “When a transport arrived, they had to climb down. Outside were signs ‘Bath’ and ‘Sauna.’ Then they were brought to the Entkleidungskammer [dressing room]” (173). Once inside, rather than dupe with beguiling signs, the SS, says Backon, told the victims, “Remember your clothes hook number.”See Franciszek Piper,“Gas Chambers and Crematoria,” Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Yisrael Gutman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1994). In the same volume, see also Jean-Claude Pressac, with Robert-Jan Van Pelt, “The Machinery of Mass Murder at Auschwitz.” 14. Spiegelman, Maus II, 91. 15. Spiegelman, Maus II, 91. 16. Spiegelman, Maus II, 93. 17. Spiegelman, Maus II, 111–12.

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18. Spiegelman, Maus II, 112. 19. Spiegelman, Maus II, 112.Vladek notes in the transcripts that “Willie” properly translates as the Polish “Vladek.” Clearly, then, Willie was not a name chosen by the Americans simply in order to signal superiority. But since Spiegelman does not make the reader of Maus aware of the conventional connection between the English and Polish names, the context, gestures, and language suggest the racial overtones. 20. It is important to note that, historically, the American army generally did not have as a military objective the liberation of concentration camps and of Jewish prisoners. See for example Robert Abzug, Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). The logic of this sequence in Maus, however, not only shows the actions taken on behalf of Vladek and his friend but also suggests that the rescue of the Jews was an aspect of the American army’s mission. This may accord with the gratitude that some survivors feel, ambiguously or not, toward the Allied soldiers who liberated them. I wish to thank Alan Berger for calling my attention to the relevance of these issues here. 21. Spiegelman, moreover, emphasizes the hand in his drawing throughout this section. For instance, the image of a hand on a hand precedes the “Prisoner on Hell Planet” insert (99); the insert itself features Spiegelman’s hand shown holding the book in which it first appeared. 22. Spiegelman, Maus I, 138. 23. Spiegelman, Maus I, 150. 24. Spiegelman, Maus II, 27. 25. Spiegelman, Maus II, 28. 26. Hence, I remain unpersuaded by Michael Levine’s thoughtful account of Spiegleman’s representational strategy, based on a contrast between nonJews (speaking a single national language) and Jews (speaking “a variety of idioms”). Michael G. Levine, “Necessary Stains: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the Bleeding of History,” in Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman’s “Survivor’s Tale” of the Holocaust, ed. Deborah R. Geis (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 68–69. As I argue in what follows, Spiegelman divides his speakers along lines other than Jew and non-Jew. 27. As Alice Yaeger Kaplan phrases it, “one of the many extraordinary features of Maus is that Spiegelman gets the voices right, he gets the order of the words right, he manages to capture the intonations of Eastern Europe spoken in Queens,” in Alice Yaeger Kaplan, “Theweleit and Spiegelman: Of Mice and Men,” Remarking History, ed. Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani (Seattle: Bay, 1989), 155. It is striking that, in commenting on a text that

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is revolutionary in drawing a fable of the Holocaust, Kaplan argues for a thoroughgoing mimetic dimension to the dialogue, as if Spiegelman wanted the“voices”to go in a direction 180 degrees from the visual. As I go on to argue, however, Spiegelman’s rendering of Vladek’s voice uses distancing strategies of its own. 28. Nancy K. Miller, “Cartoons of the Self: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Murderer, Art Spiegelman’s Maus,” M/E/A/N/I/N/G 12 (1992): 58. Miller’s phrase does nicely, of course, at showing how Spiegelman incorporates the substance of Vladek’s tortured testimony into the language in which he relates it. 29. While significant in its own right, Spiegelman’s representation of Vladek’s accent thus falls within the conventions and contexts of Yiddish voices in American literature – a point apparently overlooked by most critics. For a review of these conventions, see Hellerstein,“Yiddish Voices in American English.” 30. Spiegelman, “Art on Art,” in The Complete Maus. In 1955, Alain Resnais employed this strategy in his important documentary film on the Holocaust, Night and Fog. 31. First published as “Maus,” Funny Aminals [sic] 1 (1972); reprinted in Comix Book 2, ed. Denis Kitchen (New York: Magazine Management, 1974); included in the appendices of The Complete Maus. In “Maus,” Spiegelman also deployed accent unevenly: some adult Jews accent thickly (“Psst . . . you vant a potato to buy?”) while Jewish children have no accent at all (“Next time I want to play the cat”). Does the child/adult dichotomy reproduce how Spiegelman’s perceives his relation to his father, transporting the schema as lived in America to wartime Europe? Or does the dichotomy imply a developmental aspect, whereby one grows into an accent? In either case, the gap here between speech with an accent and speech without is greater in this earlier installment than virtually anywhere in the later books. 32. Spiegelman, Maus I, 113. 33. Spiegelman, Maus II, 98–99. 1 1 . e at e n away by s i l e n ce 1. Michaels, Fugitive Pieces. 2. As Steven Bowman, scholar of Greek Jewry in this period, wrote close to the time Fugitive Pieces was published: “The tragedy of Greek Jewry is relatively unknown, and is generally underappreciated within the wider context of European Jewry.” See “Bibliographical Essay,” in Michael Matsas, The

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Illusion of Safety: The Story of the Greek Jews During World War II (New York, Pella, 1997). 3. Strikingly, a Polish Jew was historically at the center of the fate of Greek Jewry. Rabbi Zvi Koretz served as the Jewish community’s leader at the time of Nazi occupation and deportation. His role in this position was (and continued to be) controversial: “The Jewish leader, Chief Rabbi Dr. Koretz,” writes Raul Hilberg, “was an Eastern Jew with a Western education:” Hilberg, The Destruction of European Jews, 444. Hilberg follows an early negative appraisal by Cecil Roth that viewed Koretz as believing in “unquestioning compliance.” Cecil Roth, “The Last Days of Jewish Salonika,” Commentary 10 (1950): 49–55. Natan Eck presented a more charitable view of Koretz in “New Light on the Charges Against the Last Grand Rabbi of Salonika,” Yad Vashem Bulletin 17 (1965): 9–15 and Yad Vashem Bulletin 19 (1966): 28–35. Michaels’s Polish-Greek Jew thus has an eerie historical shadow behind him. 4. Most commentary on Fugitive Pieces alludes to issues of language – even to multilingual issues – but does not develop a context for considering these issues. See D. M. R. Bentley, “Preface: Anne Michael’s Fugitive Pieces,” Canadian Poetry 41 (1997): 5–20; Annick Hillger, “ ‘Afterbirth of Earth’: Messianic Materialism in Anne Michael’s Fugitive Pieces,” Canadian Literature 160 (1999): 28–45; Meira Cook, “At the Membrane of Language and Silence: Metaphor and Memory in Fugitive Pieces,” Canadian Literature 164 (2000): 12–33; Nicola King, Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 140–49; and “ ‘We Come After’: Remembering the Holocaust,” in Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present, ed. Roger Luckherst and Peter Marks (Essex: Longman, 1999) 94–108; Susan Gubar, Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003) 5. Cook, “At the Membrane of Language and Silence,” 29. 6. King, Memory, Narrative, Identity, 147. 7. Michaels, Fugitive Pieces, 12–13. 8. Sander Gilman analyses the intersection of multilingualism and hatred of Jews in Jewish Self-Hatred. 9. Michaels, Fugitive Pieces, 21. 10. Michaels, Fugitive Pieces, 21–22. 11. Michaels, Fugitive Pieces, 22. 12. Michaels, Fugitive Pieces, 25. 13. Michaels, Fugitive Pieces, 28. 14. Michaels, Fugitive Pieces, 21. 15. Michaels, Fugitive Pieces, 21.

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16. Michaels, Fugitive Pieces, 92–93. 17. Michaels, Fugitive Pieces, 101. 18. Michaels, Fugitive Pieces, 101. 19. Michaels, Fugitive Pieces, 101. 20. Michaels, Fugitive Pieces, 94–95. 21. Michaels, Fugitive Pieces, 112. “Awkward,” we recall, was Boder’s word for the kind of “sound” that he sought to preserve in his “verbatim translations.” 22. Michaels, Fugitive Pieces, 162. 23. Michaels, Fugitive Pieces, 261–62. 24. Michaels, Fugitive Pieces, 1. c o n c lu s i o n 1. Even those who have chastised Schindler’s List generally have voiced respect for the ghetto liquidation sequence. See for example, Leon Wieseltier, “Close Encounters of the Nazi Kind,” New Republic, January 24, 1994. Neither Wieseltier nor other critics, however, draw attention to the role of languages. 2. Isaac Bashevis Singer, “The Last Demon,” [Mayse Tishevits], in Selected Short Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, ed. Irving Howe, trans. Martha Glicklich and Cecil Hemley (New York: Modern Library, 1966), 300–311.

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s o u r c e ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s A version of chapter 7, “Say ‘Good Boy’: Legitimizing English in Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker,” originally appeared as “ ‘Teach Me Gold’: Pedagogy and Memory in The Pawnbroker” in Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 22 (2002): 77–117. Copyright © by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York. A portion of the introduction appeared in “ ‘Y—You Know English?’: Multilingual English and the Holocaust,” in Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes (New York: Modern Language Association, 2004). Copyright © by Alan Rosen.

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Portions of the introduction and chapters 1, 2, 3, and 11 appeared as “ ‘Strong Enough to Carry Experience’: The Holocaust, Multilingualism, and the Problem of English,” in Jewish Culture and History 7, no.1 (2005), in press.

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A version of chapter 9, “The Language of Dollars: English as Intruder in Yaffa Eliach’s Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust,” originally appeared as “ ‘The Language of Dollars’: Multilingualism and the Claims of English in Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust,” in Witnessing the Disaster: Essays on Representation and the Holocaust, ed. Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 46–74. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher. A version of chapter 10, “The Language of Survival: English as Metaphor in Spiegelman’s Maus,” originally appeared in Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 15 (1995): 249–62. Copyright © by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York.

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index Aaron, Vicky, 206n4 accent: Bronx, 132; compared to tattooing, 5, 22, 28; eliminating one’s, 37, 71–72, 79–82, 103, 170–71, 176; and narrating the Holocaust, 170–72; preserving, 103–4, 130–35 Adams, John, Webster’s oration for, 91 America, wartime neutrality of, 65, 226n21 American army, 165–66 Anthology of Holocaust Literature (Glatstein, Knox, Margoshes), 9–10 Antler, Joyce, 224n2 Arabic, ix–x, 1, 190 Aramaic, 2, 166 Aschheim, Steven, 216n28 Auerbach, Rachel, 3 Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp: gas chamber signs in, 163– 64; and Levi’s view of language, 5–7; teaching English in, 25–31, 162–63 Ba’al Shem Tov (the Bescht), 229nn12– 13 “babbling”: in “Eli, the Fanatic” (Roth), 66, 73, 77, 81, 94; in Fugitive Pieces (Michaels), 182 Ballinger, Pamela, on trauma, 222n21 Baumen, Zygmunt, 126–27 bbc radio, 195n19 Bedzin, Poland, 22–24 Bell, Daniel, 218n50 Bellow, Saul, 72, 130 Ben Gurion, David, and Eichmann trial, 213n10 Benhabib, Seyla, on Arendt and English, 108–9 Benjamin, Walter, 14, 36, 201n11 Berenbaum, Michael, 140–41 Bettleheim, Bruno, 10

Bilik, Dorothy, 51–53, 209n8 Brightman, Carol, on Arendt and English, 106, 217n37 broken speech, 85, 87–88, 92, 134, 174, 176 Bundy, Nelly, Boder interview of, 25–31, 172–73 Cahan, Abraham, 130 Celan, Paul, 124–26, 225n5 children, 52–53, 56–58, 204n12 class relations, in Maus, 160–61 Clendinnen, Inga, 24 cliche, Arendt on, 103, 121 Cold War, 13, 56 concentration camps, 5–7. See also Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp; Dachau concentration camp; Drancy concentration camp (France); lager jargon; traumatic realism; Treblinka death camp conversion, in The Wall, 40–43 Cook, Meira, 177 Coughlin, Francis and Maggie, Boder’s correspondence with, 32 Cracow, Poland, 150–52 crisis of identity, in “Eli, the Fanatic” (Roth), 70, 73 Crystal, David, 13–15, 153 Czerniakow, Adam, 2 Dachau concentration camp, 157, 164 Dawidowicz, Lucy, 35–37, 201n7 deculturation, Boder on, 56 Derrida, Jacques, 215n26 Des Pres, Terence, on comic response to the Holocaust, 102 Dietz, Mary, on Arendt and the Holocaust, 99 diglossia, 3

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Index

discourse of death, 5–7, 133. See also lager jargon displaced person(s) camps, 21 Doneson, Judith: chronological approach to Holocaust film, 191n3; on The Pawnbroker, 223n24 Douglas, Lawrence, 214n17 Drancy concentration camp (France), 25 Eichmann trial: coverage in The New Yorker, 74–75, 78; in Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt), 78, 94–111; media languages of, 96–98; official language of, 96–97; translations at, 96 “Eli, the Fanatic” (Roth): babbling in, 66, 73, 77, 81, 94; crisis of identity in, 70, 73; law and art in, 75; versions of, 71–72, 78–79, 94 Eliach, Yaffa, 11–12 English language: awkwardness of, 31– 32, 183; of blacks, 80–81, 88–89; colloquial, 71–72, 79; global, 11, 13–15, 17, 55, 61, 189; idiomatic, 71; as imperial, 15, 17, 60, 189; neutrality of, 12, 111, 181; and mastery of through puns, 59, 205n22; unnatural, 143 Ezrahi, Sidra, 12, 131 Felman, Shoshana, 74–75, 95–96, 111, 204n11, 215n22 Felstiner, John, on Celan and mother tongue, 125–26 flashback, and multilingualism, 116–21, 220nn10–11, 221nn12–15 Ford, John, Lumet’s debt to, 116 “found text” motif, 184–85 Fugitive Pieces (Michaels): babbling in, 182; Meira Cook on, 177; and Yiddish, 180–81 Gates, Henry Louis, 211n14, 211n19 Gaus, Günther, interview of Arendt, 102–6 Gerlach, Christian, 215n20 German language: at Eichmann trial,

96–102; in epigraph to The Shawl (Ozick), 124–26; as the language of persecutors, 146–47, 158, 161, 188; used in concentration camps, 4, 146–47 Germany, 55–56 Gilbert, Morris, 210n8 Gilman, Sander, 5–7, 11, 76 Glazer, Nathan, 113, 219n6 Goldhagen, Daniel, on victim testimony, 145, 232n26 Great Deportation (Warsaw Ghetto), 3 Greek Jewry, 176 Greek language, 16; and Hebrew, 179 Green, Arthur, 141 Gubar, Susan, 191n2 Gurewitsch, Bonnie, 144–45, 228n8 Halio, Jay, 72, 225n6 Hamburger, Michael, 125 Handlin, Oscar, 223n28 Harlem, 79, 122–23 Hausner, Gideon, 110, 213n10, 214n18 Hebrew language: at the Eichmann trial, 96–98; as a Jewish language, 2, 167; and Greek, 178–79; as sacred, 166–67; and writing about the Holocaust, 188, 197n34; on direction sign to Yad Vashem, ix–x, 190 Hellerstein, Kathryn, 130, 141, 228n6 Hilberg, Raul, 10, 110, 123, 213n1, 223n28 Horodezky, S. A., 142 Horowitz, Sara, 225n11, 225n16 Idhra, Greece, 177 immigrants, 51–53 Insdorf, Annette, on The Pawnbroker, 115 interviews of Holocaust victims: by Boder, 17–33, 61, 139, 172–73; by Eliach, 12, 139–46; in research on the Holocaust, 145, 232nn23–26, 233n27 James, Henry, on threat to English, 131 Jaspers, Karl, 97–98, 110, 214n11 Jeremiah the prophet, 148

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Jerusalem, and multilingual direction signs to Yad Vashem, ix–x, 190 Jewish police, 38–41 Jewish Publication Society, 31–32 Judenräte (Jewish councils), 1–2, 39–40 Katznelson, Yitzhak, 3 Kaufman, Stanley, 120, 222n21 Kauvar, Elaine, 227n41 King, Nicola, 177 Knox, Israel, 9–10 Kosinski, Jerzy, 52 Kramer, Michael, 202n15 Kremer, S. Lillian, 210n12, 224nn1–2 Kristeva, Julia, 216n26 Kubica, Helena, 204n12 Ladino, 2, 176 lager jargon, 5–7 Landau, Moshe, and German at Eichmann trial, 100, 104 Langer, Lawrence, 6–7, 204n12 language of dollars, 151, 153, 175 Lanzmann, Claude, 74–75 law, 65, 74–77, 111; in “Eli, the Fanatic,” 75 laws of kashrut, and languages, 85 Lazarus, Emma, 148 Leff, Leonard, 219n2, 234n36, 235n38, 235n40 Leith, Dick, 14 Lerman, Miles, 150–52 Levi, Primo, 4–8, 22, 56–57 Lewin, Abraham, 3 Lewis, Roger, 219n2 Lichtman, Ada, 214n17 Lind, Jakob, on defiance, 13, 197n40 Lodz ghetto four-language diary, 192n7 Loewenthal, Naftali, on women in Chabad Hasidism, 229n11 madness, and language, 87–88, 103, 215n26 Malamud, Bernard, 130, 213n3 mastery, 58–60, 160, 173

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Matsuda, Mari J., on perception of accents, 228n8 McCarthy, Mary, and Hannah Arendt, 106–8, 217n41 The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), 74, 93 Mintz, Alan, 48 Miron, Dan, on women and Yiddish, 229n12 mother tongue: and adopted tongue, 11–12, 166; Arendt on, 99–106; Celan on, 125; in “Rosa” (Ozick), 125–27 muteness, 68–74, 133 New Yorker magazine, 94–95, 124 Norich, Anita, 193n7 Nowogrodski, Marc, 35, 37 “On Account of a Hat” (Sholem Aleichem), 70–71 Oneg Shabbes underground archive, 1 Opoczinski, Peretz, 3–4 oration, and mourning, 86–92 Ossiel, Mark, 215n23 pawnbroking, 78, 208n2 perplexity, 23–24 Poe, Edgar Allen, 86–91 Polen, Nehemia, on women in Hasidism, 228n11 Polish language: and Polish Jews, 129; and post–World War II writing, 126– 27; in “Rosa” (Ozick), 126–27; Vladek Spiegelman’s reversion to, 171–72; in the Warsaw Ghetto, 2–4, 42, 127–29 Pratt, Mary Louise, on U.S. foreign languages, 14 privacy, 83–84, 88 prophetic lamentation, 148 prostitution: in The Pawnbroker (Lumet), 117–18; in the Holocaust, 221n17 puns, and mastery of English, 59, 205n22 Radom, ghetto in, 1

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Index

Rapoport-Albert, Ada, 228n11 Reitlinger, Gerald, 10, 110, 228n11 re-reading, in Wallant, 82–84 Resnais, Alain, on flashbacks, 116, 201n4, 220n10 Ring, Jennifer, 212n1 Ringelblum, Emmanuel, 1, 8, 36–37, 127–29 Robinson, Jacob, 10–11 Rosenblum, Ralph, on editing The Pawnbroker (Lumet), 221n18 Roskies, David, 3, 133, 207n14 Rothberg, Michael, 47–48, 200n16 Schindler’s List (Spielberg), 187–88 Scholem, Gershom, 109, 217n46 Sened, Jonat, 11–12 Shakespearean tragedy, 137–38 Shell, Marc, 16, 198n50 Shmeruk, Chone, 2, 8, 129 Sholem Aleichem, 70–71 “A Short Wait” (Hersey), 37–38, 50 Shultz, Bruno, 129–30 Sollors, Werner, 34, 194n13, 195n19 Spencer, Herbert, 83 Stanton, Domna, 14–15 Steiner, George, 103, 147, 191n1 Stokesbury, James, 226n31 Stopnitsky, Udel, Boder interview of, 22–25 Stryjkowski, Johan, 126–27 suburbia, 65, 78. See also zoning laws tattoo(s): Levi’s view of language and, 5; and Nelly Bundy, 27–29; in relation to accent, 135; Michael Rothberg on, 200n16 third person, 71, 73 “Todesfudge” (Celan), 124–26

Topical Autobiographies of Displaced People (Boder), 32–33 Tower of Babel, 53, 133 traumatic realism, 47–48 Treblinka death camp, 45 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 223n28 A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (Howe and Greenberg), 70 verbatim translation, 21, 31 Voice of America, 195n19 Voices of the Holocaust Web site, 199n3, 199n9 Wagner, Geoffrey, on adaptation, 218n2 Warsaw Ghetto, 1–4, 8, 34–49, 127–29 Webster, Daniel, 86; and commemorative oratory, 89–92 Weissberg, Liliane, 216n29 Wiesel, Elie, 52, 191n1 Wieseltier, Leon, 140, 241n1 Wilkomirski, Benjamin, 57, 205n17 wire recorder, 21, 35 Wisse, Ruth, 193–4n7, 197n34 Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, ix, 113, 190 Yiddish: in Fugitive Pieces (Michaels), 180–81; as theme, 187; translated into English, 36; as victims’ language, 9– 10; in Warsaw Ghetto, 2–4 Young, James, 12, 232n22 Young-Bruehl, Elizabeth, 216n32 Zabludowski, Benjamin, 1–2, 192n2 Zeitlin, Hillel, 128–29 Zgnelek, Bella, 30 zoning laws, 67–68, 75–77

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