Reading (in) the Holocaust. Malgorzata Wójcik-Dudek
discovery of truth.
According to Shoshana Ronen, Grossman’s novel includes an array of topoi which were later mandatory in the literature of the second generation: a child protagonist who grows up in a traumatised family, the silence of adults which forces him/her to construct a biography of his/her own, being named after a murdered family member, the feeling of estrangement and a sense of the loss of ←16 | 17→childhood.22 These thematic concerns seem universal and can also be found outside of Israeli literature, which Ronen examines.
In Poland, books by authors who survived the Holocaust as children have also been published, particularly after 1989, side by side with the texts produced by such writers as Henryk Grynberg, for whom the Holocaust has always been the axis of literary narrative. Among them are Michał Głowiński and Wilhelm Dichter, members of so-called generation 1.5.23 Still, crucial to investigations of postmemory are rather the voices of the second generation: Magdalena Tulli, Ewa Kuryluk, Agata Tuszyńska and Bożena Keff. It was actually in the new trends of representing the Holocaust that Przemysław Czapliński noticed an opportunity for forging a new language,24 even if it were to involve a risk of profanation, for profanation actually makes inquiry into the sacrum of the Holocaust possible.25 Therefore, the writings of the second generation can be considered to have broken the parental monopoly on the Holocaust narrative. Today, we are ←17 | 18→rather faced with the representations fashioned by the third generation – people of both Jewish and non-Jewish descent (e.g. the work of Piotr Paziński, Mariusz Sieniewicz or Igor Ostachowicz).
Pondering the changes in writing about the Holocaust, Michał Głowiński distinguishes three stages, which were dominated, respectively, by documentary writing, narratives akin to the literature of a personal document, and counterfactual, highly conceptual, post-Holocaust literature.26 This trajectory of aesthetic transformation has been compellingly captured by Czapliński: “We live on […] the sublimity we remember from literature. And as we produce history modelled on the books we have read, the past we have matches the library we hold in our minds.”27
Thus, if Czapliński announces the end of grand narratives, his proclamation would seem to herald the waning of the communal historical narrative which has engendered a sense of group identity.28 Yet Czapliński states that small narratives, published with increasing frequency and read with increasing eagerness, as they are, can gain in significance only if society is permeated by an urge for expiation, that is, for articulating one’s own individual truth.
It is thus no coincidence that the beginning of the new millennium abounded in literary writings about the Holocaust, many of which were to prove extremely important. This discourse was joined by survivors and members of the second and third generations, as well as historians, which certainly boosted the popularity of this theme and enhanced the diversity of its literary representations. This tendency was especially vividly manifested in shortlists for Poland’s prestigious literary prizes. In 2000, as many as three out of the eight books shortlisted for the NIKE Literary Award, one of the most coveted distinctions in Poland, addressed ←18 | 19→the vicissitudes of Polish-Jewish history: Osmaleni (Scorched)29 by Irit Amiel, Tworki (Tworki) by Marek Bieńczyk and Szkoła bezbożników (The Atheists’ School) by Wilhelm Dichter. The following year’s shortlist was similar: out of its twenty titles, no fewer than five concerned the Shoah or other Jewish themes: Sąsiedzi (Neighbors) by Jan Tomasz Gross, Memorbuch by Henryk Grynberg, Z Auszwicu do Belsen [From Auschwitz to Belsen] by Marian Pankowski, U progu Zagłady (On the Threshold of the Holocaust) by Tomasz Szarota and Zmierzchy i poranki [Dusk and Dawn] by Piotr Szewc. In 2002, a year when biographies and autobiographies proliferated unprecedentedly, the NIKE shortlist included Wspomnienia wojenne (Those Who Trespass against Us: One Woman’s War against the Nazis) by Karolina Lanckorońska, Postać z cieniem [The Figure with a Shadow] by Bożena Umińska, Nożyk profesora [The Professor’s Penknife] – Tadeusz Różewicz’s volume of poetry and W ogrodzie pamięci (In the Garden of Memory) by Joanna Olczak-Ronikier.30 This seems to be a well-entrenched tendency as, year in and year out, books exploring Jewish themes abundantly make their way to the shortlist of the NIKE Literary Prize, with recent nominees including Rejwach [Uproar] by Mikołaj Grynberg, Sendlerowa. W ukryciu [Irena Sendler: In Hiding] by Anna Bikont and Duchy Jeremiego [Jeremy’s Ghosts] by Robert Rient.
In all probability, the novels listed above represent “memory regained”31 (as distinguished and thoroughly discussed by Michael C. Steinlauf), which is capable of engendering cultural memory.32 For literature about the Holocaust ←19 | 20→is on the one hand an original product of the new generation and, on the other, an outcome of the experiences of the parents’ generation. In these knotted circumstances, references to the past warrant cultural continuity, although the modifications ushered in by the new generation attest to their exceptional input into the structures of memory. In this sense, cultural memory is a variety of collective memory,33 which primarily performs identity-related functions and, as such, calls for modes of preservation34 which make it transmittable to the following generation.
The topography of Jerusalem’s Mount of Remembrance (Har Hazikaron), as its very name suggests, seems to be perfectly in tune with the dialogicity of cultural memory. Founded in 1953, Yad Vashem together with the Holocaust History Museum established in 2005 occupy only a part of its area. The rest of the terrain is to be handed over to the next generation in order to construct a new narrative about the Holocaust. This venture perfectly exemplifies the transposition of cultural memory onto space.
What seems evident in this context is that the smoothness of transmission within cultural memory is immensely affected not only by art,35 but also by education.
Educational Practices vis-à-vis the Holocaust
An overwhelming impression is that the Holocaust has always been associated with memory, as the imperative to remember has invariably been intertwined with all Shoah-related practices. In her superb book, Israel’s Holocaust and the ←20 | 21→Politics of Nationhood, Idith Zertal observes that the Holocaust was inscribed in the Israeli project of remembering not simply as an incomprehensible event, but above all as an embarrassing one. However, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, which Zertal refers to as “Ben-Gurion’s last great national project,” transformed the awkward silence into a heated debate on the Event, inaugurating a period of conscious critical examination of “the numinous event of the Holocaust” and the attitudes of people, both the perpetrators and the victims.36
The Holocaust ceased to be solely the problem of the survivors and began to capture passionate attention not only in Israel but also all over the world. This development was largely precipitated by the reports from Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, published in The New Yorker by Hannah Arendt, who was deeply conflicted with Gershom Scholem and accused by him of not loving Israel and hating Zionism.37