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Bearing Witness: Second Generation Literature of the "Shoah" Author(s): Alan L. Berger Source: Modern Judaism, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Feb., 1990), pp. 43-63 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1396049 Accessed: 17/02/2010 17:23 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=oup. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Modern Judaism. http://www.jstor.org
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Page 1: Bearing Witness

Bearing Witness: Second Generation Literature of the "Shoah"Author(s): Alan L. BergerSource: Modern Judaism, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Feb., 1990), pp. 43-63Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1396049Accessed: 17/02/2010 17:23

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=oup.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to ModernJudaism.

http://www.jstor.org

Page 2: Bearing Witness

Alan L. Berger

BEARING Wl'lNESS: SECOND GENERATION LITERATURE OF THE SHOAH*

INTRODUCTION

The Shoah refuses to disappear. Memories of the monstrous evil un- leashed by this fiery cataclysm of history continue to plague its survivors, to vex the religious imagination, and to defy the notion of innocence. This "wound in the order of being," as Martin Buber termed the Holo- caust, does not heal. Its effects are seen most profoundly in literary re- flections of the Kingdom of Night written by the witnessing generation whose works testify to the sense of cosmic upheaval and covenantal

challenge illuminated by the flames of Auschwitz. Indeed, Elie Wiesel has observed that what the survivors "took away from our tales and from our burning houses in European history was the fire."' This literary "fire" illuminates the witnessing generation's determination to tell the tale and, in so doing, to both educate and warn future generations. Con-

sequently, how, and by whom, the Shoah's legacy is assumed touches a

multiplicity of concerns: covenantal, historical, literary, and psychologi- cal. As the drama of Holocaust literature unfolds, an international literary second generation has begun to transmit the Shoah's memory with a com-

pelling moral, existential, and religious urgency. Unlike the witnessing generation, however, the second generation lacks direct access to the Holocaust. Thus, their writings weave their parent's memories with their own imagination. The resulting tapestry portrays the Holocaust's pro- found effect on questions of post-Auschwitz Jewish identity and authen-

ticity. In what follows I discuss the distinction between witnessing and

bearing witness, and then investigate the relationship of the symbolism of second generation Holocaust literature to what has recently been termed the "Second Life of Holocaust Imagery." Wiesel's novel The Fifth Son is briefly examined as a transitional work between the first and second generations.2 Next, an analysis of selected examples of American second

*An earlier version of this paper was presented at "Remembering for the Future: The Impact of the Holocaust on the Contemporary World." International Scholars' Conference held in Oxford, 10-13 July, 1988.

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generation literature of the Shoah reveals how memory of the catastrophe is preserved by those born after.3 This literature treats the Jewish issues of covenant fidelity and identity as measured against a holocaustal yard- stick. The complex web of family relationships serves as the linchpin for

understanding how to read literature written by those whom the literary critic Alvin Rosenfeld described as the kinds of survivors, "those who were never there but know more than the outlines of the place."4 It is within the family structure that one notes the full dimensions of the con-

temporary problematic of Jewish identity: images of survivors, covenantal

questioning, and the Jewish future. The paper concludes with an attempt to assess the possible theological meaning of these issues as the literary future of the Holocaust in American novels grows in importance.

I. WITNESSING AND BEARING WITNESS

The distinction between a witnessing generation and those who come

after, but are commanded to witness, is firmly rooted in Jewish history and liturgy. Addressing this problematic, the late novelist and theologian Arthur A. Cohen wrote:

The Passover Haggadah commands that every Jew consider himself as

though he has gone forth in exodus from Egypt. The grammatical authority of the Haggadah makes clear that this is no metaphor, what- ever our wish to make apodictic language metaphoric. The authority is clear: I was really, even if not literally, present at Sinai. God contem-

plated my virtual presence then, thirty-odd centuries ago. The fact that

history could not prevision and entail my presence is irrelevant. No less is it the case that the death camps account my presence really, even if not literally: hence my obligation to hear the witnesses as though I were a witness. It is mandatory that this real presence of all Israel in the death

camps, experiencing the tremendum (Shoah), enter the liturgy as surely as it entered the narration of the Exodus.5

Cohen's distinction between those who were literally and those who were

really present at the time of orienting events in the life of the tradition establishes a liturgical and philosophical basis for writings by non-

witnesses. This distinction is refined in the writings of Wiesel. On the one hand,

he insists on the singularity of the victims' experience. Works such as

"A Plea for the Dead" (1967), and "A Plea for the Survivors" (1977) bear

eloquent testimony to this view. Yet, on the other hand, Wiesel asserts the necessity for all Jews to bear witness to the Holocaust. This witness

bearing constitutes, for Wiesel, the touchstone of Jewish and human au-

thenticity. He writes:

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No Jew can be fully Jewish today, can be fully a man today, without being part of the Holocaust. All Jews are survivors. They have all been inside the whirlwind of the Holocaust, even those born afterwards, even those who heard its echoes in distant lands.6

Wiesel's call for bearing witness transcends spatial and temporal borders, suggesting that there are concentric circles of witnesses. Some of them are literal survivors; some of them are their children; others are their friends and family; while still others are members of the House of Israel. But all of them are linked by a common destiny. Just as in the hasidic world which he so admires there were concentric circles of hasidim who formed around their rebbe, some living in the master's house, others who lived in the area, and still others who made only occasional trips to see and hear the rebbe, so, too, after the Holocaust there are circles of wit- nesses; some are closer than others to the Event, but all are capable of being transformed into witnesses by hearing the survivors' tales. In the words of Ellen Fine "... to listen to a witness is to become one."7

The task of bearing witness is a normative element of Jewish ex- istence. Scripturally sanctioned, see especially Joel (1:3), witness bearing has become integral to living one's life as a covenanted Jew. In the case of second generation Holocaust literature, this act becomes a moral and

theological imperative. The survivors are slowly disappearing and the solemn task of transmitting their legacy is being assumed by the second

generation. The literature being written by survivors' children comprises a unique genre in its reaction to their parents' tragedy. This literature is in fact one response to Yehuda Bauer's observation that the "crucial problem is how to anchor the Holocaust in the historical consciousness of the generations that follow it."8

II. SECOND GENERATION SYMBOLISM

Second generation Holocaust writers occupy a distinctive position. Des-

pite their various orientations to Judaism and other differentiating factors, as children they were all "witnesses to their parents' ongoing sur- vival."9 Consequently, while not having personally experienced the Shoah, these "second generation survivors" constitute the group of non- witnessing American Jews most intimately familiar with its continuing effects. Their parents' Holocaust experience indelibly stamped the sur- vivors both with certain assumptions concerning society and with the need to maintain those coping strategies which enabled them to survive the Holocaust.10 Second generation Holocaust writing is simultaneously a recapitulation of the parents' experience and a telling of how the Shoah

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is viewed as an orienting event by the children of survivors. However discrete the stories are, inevitably they become linked. Wiesel has cap- tured the relationship between survivors and their offspring in the utterance of Ariel, a child of survivors and the central character in The Fifth Son. Ariel exclaims that survivors' tales "fuel my imagination." The second generation autobiographies, biographies, novels and short stories of writers such as Carol Ascher, Barry Lane, Barbara Finkelstein, Thomas Friedmann, Michael Kornblit, Sonia Pilcer, David Preston, Lev Raphael, Lore Segal, Julie Salamon, Art Spiegelman, and Ellen Summers all attest to the Shoah's continuing presence.

Collectively, second generation Holocaust literature exemplifies what

Irving Greenberg has termed "new secular liturgical acts" which com- memorate the Shoah while simultaneously revealing that its authors have, despite God's apparent hiddeness and reluctance to act, voluntarily em- braced the covenant." Decoding these writings may provide a partial response to Rosenfeld's call for a "phenomenology of reading Holocaust literature." Second generation literature of the Shoah compels enquiry into the role of Holocaust imagery in literature. Norma Rosen, the novelist and critic, sensitively argues for what she terms "The Second Life of Holocaust Imagery."12 By this she means to suggest that non-Jews may be sensitized and brought into Jewish experience. Specifically, this second life entails what she terms a "double rite of passage"-particular to universal and universal back to particular.13 Rightly warning against the dangers of false universalizing of Holocaust specificity, Rosen none- theless sketches what she deems the proper functioning of Holocaust

imagery in the lives of nonwitnesses; both Jewish and non-Jewish.

But entering into a state of being that for whatever reasons makes porous those membranes through which empathy passes, or deep memory with its particular "thereness," so that we can move, as far as it is given to us to do so, into the pain and hence the meaning of the Holocaust-that, too, is a kind of memorial.'4

Rosen then focuses on three literary examples: one written by a sur- vivor, one a survivor's tale told by a professional novelist, and one by a

nonwitnessing but Jewishly sensitive author. Elie Wiesel's Night has been read by fathers and sons all over the world. "May we not guess," asks Rosen, "that whole generations of fathers and sons see the mirroring of themselves?" A young woman nursing her baby in the safety of America can "experience in her love for her own child the magnitude of the mother's loss in Susan Fromberg Schaeffer's Anya. This same nursing mother "who has read Cynthia Ozick's 'The Shawl,' will feel the pain of that mother's sight of her starved infant in a way that is immediate and profound."15 These examples reflect what Rosen terms an "osmosis of empathy" whereby the nonwitness infuses her/his own experience with

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the terror conveyed in Holocaust stories. This is, contends Rosen, a second life of art. "And," she adds, "since that art is a Holocaust re-crea- tion," the response will be a "Holocaust memory of a sort, and we must let it be." This may, opines Rosen, "be the deepest kind of ongoing Holo- caust memorial we have."16

Rosen's intelligent analysis is richly suggestive insofar as it goes, underscoring the need to continue to read, and be transformed by, tales of the Holocaust. There are, however, also problems. Three concern this paper. If there is indeed a second life, why stop there? Why not look further for signs of a new birth? Jeremiah, after all, foretold of new cove- nants and a new Jerusalem. Rosen's view also, implicitly, forecloses the possibility of recognizing the second generation's role in writing Holo- caust literature. Third, is there not a real danger involved in trying to appropriate for one's self symbols of an experience which the witnesses themselves contend is beyond the imagination? The danger here lies in trivializing the Holocaust. For example, every personal unhappiness or pain might, as in the case of Sylvia Plath's poetry, be viewed as holo- caustal. This is one reason why Cynthia Ozick has warned that the Holo- caust is already "dangerously literary." True, every generation is linked to the past, but in making past messages accessible to the present, change occurs amidst claims of continuity.

Transmission of epoch-making events in Judaism invariably evoked a midrashic tradition as exemplified in the rich literature of rabbinic Judaism. The Talmud provides many clues by which we can understand the principle underlying the relationship between first and second generation literature of the Shoah. To cite but one example, God tells Moses that in the future Akiba ben Joseph, a great interpreter of the Law, will arise in the House of Israel. Expressing a desire to see his successor, Moses is transported into the future where he is an invisible auditor in Akiba's class. Hearing Akiba and his disciples argue, Moses, the text tells us, became despondent because he was unable to understand the discus- sion. At one point, the disciples challenged Akiba: 'Rabbi, whence do you know this?' 'This law,' replied Akiba, 'is a tradition delivered by Moses on Sinai' (Menachot 29b). The text then reports that Moses felt relieved. First generation Holocaust literature is the Torah;17 writings of the second generation may be understood as interpretations of the holy text.

Second generation Holocaust literature, properly focused, utilizes its own frames of reference in reflecting the Shoah's continuing impact. This fact serves to differentiate second generation literature from the types of writings given in Rosen's examples. This writing refrains, for example, from employing images such as mounds of corpses and descriptions of death camp savagery which have become synonymous with writings of the witnessing generation. This approach has the effect of avoiding

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making the Holocaust into a metaphor and hence too "literary" and trivial. In fact, the literary quality of second generation writings is not a primary concern. Rather it is their psychological and theological quests for authentic Jewish identity which make of them crucial barometers of the

post-Auschwitz American Jewish future. These writings reflect constant exposure to various dimensions of

what Robert Jay Lifton terms the "death imprint." This imprint mani- fests itself in psychological states which have significant theological reso- nance. Psychologically, one notes the presence of depression and severe

anxiety, a tendency toward psychosomatic illness, and the long-term effects of torture and starvation on survivor parents. Moreover, survivor

parents' child-raising skills are deeply effected by their own experiences of death and deprivation. Wiesel has underscored one of the many para- doxes engendered by the Shoah in observing that what children of sur- vivors need to understand is "that the real children of the Holocaust are their parents."'8

The theological implication of these works is more subtle, but no less

powerful. Although specifically describing the survivor parents in his observation that this is the generation which knows most intensely that "destruction can take place, that the sea will not be split for them, that the divine has self-limited, and they have additional responsibilities,"19 Irving Greenberg's words apply equally to the second generation. Despite this

knowledge, second generation authors want consciously to be Jews and, by this decision, carry on the messianic task of quarreling with God even while awaiting Messiah. This is a type of practical theology expressed by actions, e.g., living a Jewish life, rather than explicit theological formula- tion. It is, moreover, attests Greenberg, the appropriate "theological lan-

guage for this time, more appropriate than those who go on speaking as if God were visible and fully performing under the previous terms of the covenant."20

Holocaust literature written by children of survivors displays its own

icons; parents' tales of the Kingdom of Night, or, the other side of the same coin, silence about the past, photos of murdered siblings or other

family members, objects which once belonged to a relative consumed by the Shoah's flames, heightened personal awareness of contemporary evil, and the parents' continued forms of suffering. The writings of the second

generation in fact bear witness to Wiesel's observation, made in speaking to now adult children of survivors, that "... the responsibility of your parents was solely towards the dead; yours will be towards us."21 In fact, the effect of the Holocaust on parenting skills is portrayed in many of these works as distorting intergenerational communication; survivor

parents, because of their Holocaust experiences, embrace values which clash with American culture. This frequently results in a "significant contradiction between their (children's) public and private worlds."22 Yet,

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children of Holocaust survivors continue to feel responsible for their parents.

III. PASSING THE TORCH

Wiesel's The Fifth Son boldly departs from his earlier works by imagining how a child of survivors is transformed by tales of the Holocaust. Dedi- cated to his own son, and to all children of survivors, the novel is a dis- tillation of Wiesel's literary theology as it emerges in the Tamiroff family. Rachel and Reuven Tamiroff are survivors living in New York with Ariel, their second born only child. Ariel is enveloped by his father's silence, worries about his mother's increasing withdrawal, and is a fasci- nated auditor of Holocaust tales told by Bontchek, a survivor friend of his father. The novel reverses Wiesel's long held literary pattern by attempting to imagine what it would have been like for a witness to grow up as a child of survivors. Ritually, the tale occurs during Passover, reminding us of Cohen's argument: a time which intensely focuses Jewish identity across the generations by commemorating the orienting event of Exodus, and by its demand that the covenant be renewed. More recently, there has emerged a liturgical addition to the Passover seder. "The Fifth Child," a haunting prayer recited on behalf of the one who cannot ask, represents the million and a half Jewish children murdered in the Shoah.23 Ariel becomes "fully Jewish" by assuming his parents' Holocaust legacy.

Ariel, whose father rarely spoke to him of the Holocaust and whose mother was institutionalized, undergoes several stages in his quest for post-Holocaust Jewish identity. Initially, he hears and is transformed by Bontchek's tales. Subsequently, Ariel spends much time in the library reading about the Shoah. He travels to Germany in order to kill the Nazi responsible for murdering the European Ariel. Once at his destination, however, the American Ariel does not murder, but rather, condemns the Nazi. The novel concludes with the American Ariel, by now a professor, teaching his students of the Shoah.

Wiesel's novel establishes several important principles for second generation literature. First, the novel's appearance legitimizes this genre. Wiesel, the best known and most widely read witnessing writer, now contends that the next generation must bear witness. Next, Wiesel tells not only of the Shoah but of its survivors' continuing survival. Survivors continued to be ignored and humiliated after the war. Yet, these same survivors are shown establishing new lives in a foreign culture. In addi- tion, he casts children of survivors in a pedagogical role despite fully acknowleding the vast gulf separating survivors from their children and both of them from American nonwitnesses. Wiesel's theology is expressed in the novel's argument against vengeance and for bearing witness.

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Memory and not violence will be the Jewish companion and means by which Messiah is awaited.24 Finally, the Holocaust, no less than Passover, becomes the point of entry into Jewish history and identity for Wiesel's child of survivors.

IV. ACCEPTING THE LEGACY

Among the many contemporary examples of second generation wit-

nessing, I have chosen for discussion here Art Spiegelman's Maus,25 Barbara Finkelstein's Summer Long-a-Coming,26 and selected short stories of Lev Raphael. Biographically, these authors represent a diverse group. Spiegelman is a professional cartoonist and the editor of Raw magazine. Finkelstein is a free lance writer, and Raphael is a professor at Michigan State University. Their works illustrate the various ways in which the second generation has accepted the survivors' Holocaust legacy.

Maus is unquestionably the most controversial and bold of the second

generation writings. In terms of genre it is simultaneously autobiography, biography, comic book for adults, documentary, novel, and psychosocial history. The book's novelty is visible in terms of the figures which are drawn as mice (Jews), cats (Nazis), and pigs (Poles). One brief segment, dealing with his mother's suicide, depicts human faces and figures. Spiegelman tells several stories in Maus. On one level it is the tale of his

parents' (Vladek and Anja) pre-war, Holocaust, and post-war lives. The reader is mentally invited to compare the carefree marriage and parent- ing of the pre-war Spiegelmans with their post-war career as parents.27 It

is, however, also the story of Spiegelman's own deeply troubled relation-

ship to himself, to Judaism, and to his father. Spiegelman, born in Stock- holm in 1947, was raised in a home where the Holocaust, while not

openly discussed, was "part of the brooding atmosphere of our house."28 An enlarged photograph of his brother Richieu, a Holocaust victim, was

prominently displayed, although he was rarely spoken of.29 The hovering presence of the Holocaust in the lives of its survivors

is made manifest by the text's interweaving of Holocaust past and Ameri- can present. This motive is underscored from the outset where, in the untitled foreword to Maus, Spiegelman relates the following incident. As a ten-year old boy living in Rego Park, he has been abandoned by friends after a roller skating fall. Crying, he told his father what happened. Vladek

responded saying: "Friends? Your Friends? If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week . . . Then you could see what it is, Friends!" (p. 5). This statement, communicated in Vladek's unmis- takably refugee cadenced English, reveals both his Holocaust experiences and the survivor's continuing mistrust of the social world. The psychic lives of Vladek and Anja have been completely shattered by the Holo-

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caust. In fact, Spiegelman's portrayal of survivors is, similar to that of Isaac Bashevis Singer, an unsentimental one. Very far from Wiesel's notion of the near metaphysical status of survivors, Spiegelman's family is deeply troubled. Anja, as noted, is a suicide. Vladek is distrustful, suffers from psychosomatic illnesses, is manipulative, miserly, and unable to respect boundaries between himself and his son.

The Holocaust is also, however, much in the manner suggested by Wiesel in The Fifth Son, Spiegelman's point of entry into Jewish history. For example, he told an interviewer that his father's story is "my shoehorn with which to squeeze myself back into history."30 Moreover, listening to his father's tales was the only way Spiegelman could relate to Vladek. As the son listens to his father tell the story of the incremental annihilation of the Jews, he hears history, learns geography, and begins to appreciate the complexity of life in those dreadful days. Vladek speaks, for example, about righteous gentiles as well as about Poles and others who betrayed and murdered Jews. The son also learns that there were various types of Jewish response to the situation. There were Jewish police in the ghettos and there were Jewish informers. There were also Jews who risked their lives to help others. Vladek, in fact, was one of them.

Vladek, with his one sightless eye and his heart problems, reminds the reader of Saul Bellow's Artur Sammler, a "one-eyed seer," whose per- ceptions penetrate the pretense of civilization. He embodies the com- plexity of survivors; his very otherness simultaneously evokes both dislike and sympathy. Indeed, Vladek serves as Art's reality instructor. The son is at first incredulous, for example, that one had to pay money to be hidden by the Poles, or to be smuggled out of danger even by relatives. Vladek's stories dispel this naivete while revealing both the enormous gap between survivors and their offspring and the difference between both of them and the nonwitnessing world.

Maus is, above all, the story of Spiegelman's reentry or reconversion to Judaism. Although having become a bar mitzvah, Spiegel told one interviewer that during his mid-teens "I often thought life would be a lot easier if I were not Jewish."3' Yet, later he found himself unable to resist

reading all he could about the Holocaust, even travelling to Auschwitz, the capacity to be addressed by the Shoah, rather than any Traditional ritual, served as Spiegelman's Jewish catalyst. This phenomenon is common in novels and short stories which view Judaism in terms of a secular value system.32

Spiegelman's journey of self-discovery is composed of three distinct phases. Initially, as noted, he had a bar mitzvah. This life-cycle ritual, occurring at thirteen years, takes place at a time prior to full maturity and may be the first conscious step into or the last step out of Judaism. In Spiegelman's case it was the latter. The extent of Spiegelman's abandon- ment of Judaism is seen at his mother's funeral where, instead of reciting

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the kaddish (the traditional mourning ritual), he reads from The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

In the course of telling his story, Vladek reports a strange dream he had while in a German prisoner of war camp. His dead grandfather, a very religious man, appeared ritually garbed in tallis (prayer shawl) and tephillin (phylacteries). The grandfather told Vladek his release from camp would occur during the week when the Torah portion Parsha Truma is read.33 Art did not even know that parsha refers to a weekly Torah reading. In any case, the theological interpretation of this particular parsha refers to the divine presence dwelling among Israel. The reader discovers that significant events in the Spiegelman family occurred at the time of this parsha: Vladek's first marriage, his release from the P.O.W. camp, and Art's birth. Parsha Truma was also Art's bar mitzva parsha. This parsha serves then as a link between the pre-war, war and post-war life of the Spiegelman family.

Vladek is a secularist, although religiously knowledgeable. His son, however, is very far from formal knowledge of the Jewish religious tra- dition. Nevertheless, both the survivor father and his son manifest their Jewish identity through the sharing of the father's Holocaust story. The son's intense desire to learn of the parents' Holocaust experience has made him a witness bearer. The son is very bitter, in fact, upon learning that Vladek, in a fit of rage or despair following Anja's suicide, has de- stroyed his wife's Holocaust diaries. The story ends with the son calling his father a murderer for his act of destruction. The son can, nevertheless, be viewed as having voluntarily entered the covenant tradition and con- fronted his own Jewish identity by immersing himself in the act of

listening to and recording his father's Holocaust stories. Barbara Finkelstein's Summer Long-a-Coming focuses on a different

aspect of holocaustal legacy. The story concerns the Szuster family: sur- vivor parents and three children, the eldest of whom was born in a dis-

placed persons' camp. The parents, Rukhl and Yankl, are orthodox Jews who own a poultry farm in southern New Jersey where, like the Spiegel- mans, they shun unnecessary contact with the outside world. The parents speak Yiddish, observe the Sabbath, and rarely speak to their children about the Holocaust. Their children, Sheiye, Brantzche, and Perel are raised according to standards of a vanished world. Sheiye, the son, sym- bolically associated with Messiah, is constantly in conflict with his two

younger sisters. In terms of structure, the novel has two books consisting of, re-

spectively, twenty-two and four chapters, six of which are historical depo- sitions made by the parents to a researcher at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holo- caust archive, monument, and museum. Yad Vashem contains invaluable documents written by, and artifacts belonging to, the victims. It also serves as an international center for teaching about the catastrophe of European

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Jewry. Finkelstein's use of these depositions and the Yad Vashem context anchor the novel, simultaneously revealing the survivors' experiences while emphasizing the necessity of continuing to learn from them. Finkel- stein wisely refrains from either inventing holocaustal tales or equating survivors and their children. She does, however, emphasize the unique pedagogical role of both survivors and their children by having Brantzche observe of her mother, "I felt as I always did with Mama in public: She and I were in on a secret, but I didn't know what it was" (p. 230).

Finkelstein combines the psychological aspect of holocaustal legacy found in Maus with her own theological questings. Summer Long-a-Coming is narrated by fifteen-year old Brantzche and tells the story of her nine-

year old sister's accidental death at the hands of Sheiye. After her sister's death, which Brantzche called "an extension" of the Holocaust, her father continues to pray. Joined by the shohet (ritual slaughterer) the two men utter, "Eli, Eli, lomo Asawtoni? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (246). Brantzche interprets their prayer as less a "challenge to God's motives" than it was a "comfort to their limited understanding, sorrow waltzing in time to their song" (pp. 246-247). Unable, or unwilling, to accept her father's acceptance, the daughter of survivors has her own quarrel with God.

The father's adherence to traditional beliefs exemplifies the stance adopted by post-Holocaust mainstream Orthodox Judaism. Rabbi Eli- ezer Berkovits, an articulate and erudite nonwitness, is the best known exemplar of this view. He contends, for example, that while the Shoah was an enormous human problem, theologically it remains unexcep- tional.34 Brantzche, the child of survivors, cannot accept this theological exoneration. Her anger calls to mind Hugh Nissenson's short story "The

Blessing."35 There, Yitshaak, an Israeli father whose eight-year old son has died from cancer, is unable to comprehend the continuing faith of his survivor aunt who, upon learning of her nephew's death, recites "Blessed art Thou O Lord our God who art the true judge in Israel," the traditional benediction on hearing evil news. The difference between the Israeli and the European survivor is that her faith had "taken-the condemnation of innocence-into account." The survivor's faith is stronger than the

skeptic's doubt. Brantzche displays the complexities and the uniqueness of holocaustal

legacy in the second generation. Her parents' parenting is flawed owing to their Holocaust experiences. Rukhl and Yankl share with Vladek Spiegelman, for example, highly idiosyncratic behavior: excessive con- cern for their children's health, the near sanctity of food, and an in- tolerance to their children's psychic pain. Brantzche observes that "The Szusters refused nourishment from the outside world, so naturally they began to devour each other" (123). The burden of the Holocaust is too great for a fifteen-year old to bear. Brantzche confesses to the reader that

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her mother "scared" her. The young teenager confides that frequently before falling asleep she mentally "rolled her (mother) into a tiny ball and threw her across time and the ocean into the Poland of 1942 .. ."

(p. 234). She understands neither why her parents spend hours arguing over the chronology of the War, nor why "history wasn't finished abusing" the Szuster family.

Rukhl and Yankl, on the other hand, teach their daughters to daven

(pray), and the parents continue to commemorate the Holocaust by lighting yahrzeit candles (in memory of the dead). Whereas for Spiegel- man, a portrait of his murdered brother became a central Holocaust

icon, for Finkelstein it is the omnipresent yahrzeit candle. She has Brantzche observe:

We had a cabinet full of empty yurtsaht (sic) glasses, enough to hold dozens of drinks at a banquet. To me, yurtsaht (sic) represented yet an- other Jewish holiday whose celebration was whimsical and whose mean-

ing was indecipherable. I would not have been surprised to learn that no one else on earth knew a thing about this candle, and assumed that

my father had designed a new holiday to remind us that we were Jews (p. 133).

The yahrzeit candle is a silent yet omnipresent Holocaust icon. Brantzche also is told things that children of nonwitnesses never hear.

Scraps of conversation reveal the horrors of the past and their continuing hold on the present. In conversation with her father, for example, she

hears the following:

"Twenty-eight years ago today, the Nazis gassed my mother and four sisters," Papa said. He set down the coffee cup. I thought how in a movie

Papa's hands would have trembled, but in real life they were steady. "And?" I asked.

Papa looked me in the eye. "There is no and," he said. He rubbed the

stumpy thumb against his cheek (p. 134).

Finkelstein is telling the reader that literature written by children of

survivors, because of the intensely personal nature of their exposure to

the Holocaust experiences of their parents, makes a unique statement about the Shoah's continuing effects.

The two sisters are consumed by a desire to know how their parents survived. Reluctant to discuss their experiences in any systematic or di-

rect way, the elder Szusters do, nevertheless, provide clues to the ob-

literated past. In addition to the father's laconic comments, Mrs. Szuster

tells the girls a parable, on Shabbat (Saturday) about parents rescuing children who have been eaten by a bear. To appease her daughters' cu-

riosity, however, the mother shows them old photographs. These photos of murdered relatives, along with the endless yahrzeit candles and the

occasional parental references to their own losses, form part of the canon

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of Holocaust images unique to the second generation. That the pictures represent something quite special is underscored by Brantzche's observa- tion that they were kept in a leather bag because they were "too sacred for an ordinary photo album" (p. 30).

The crucial link between survivors and the second generation in Summer Long-a-Coming is, however, provided by survivors' tales. These tales, the Yad Vashem depositions, serve, much in the manner suggested by Wiesel and seen in Spiegelman, to fuel the second generations' imagi- nation. Rukhl and Yankl describe to the interviewer experiences and re- flections which they wished to spare their own children. The mother hid in barns and forests for two years while the father was in a slave labor camp and in hiding. Neither one understands the Shoah or attempts to account for it theologically. Their response is instead, as we have seen, one of faith. Yankl summarizes the belief embraced by him and his wife.

You ask me why I believe in God, how I can still daven to Him three times a day in light of the senseless destruction of my family. You know, you can start out at point "A" and head off in twenty-five different di- rections. You can wander down strange roads for years, but eventually you have to come back to who you were-to who you are. I believe in God because I have no one else to believe in (p. 182).

Yankl concludes this portion of his testimony with the direct assertion that "My mother and father were Jews and I don't know how to be anything else" (p. 182). This assertion bears striking similarity to the epi- graph in Wiesel's A Jew Today where he records the saying of Dodye Feig, his grandfather: "You are Jewish, your task is to remain Jewish. The rest is up to God."36

Brantzche's Jewish identity derives from two sources; her own per- ceptions, and specifically through her status as a daughter of Holocaust survivors. Unlike Spiegelman, she appears firm in her Jewish identity. Secretly following her older brother to a carnival, for example, she sees him posing for a picture together with a member of the local KKK who lets out a rebel yell. Mentally comparing this yell and the carnival to the Szuster farm, Brantzche observes that the yell "balyhoos subjugation of the loser, congratulates foreclosure of conscience, elevates immediate expression, and is a triumph of all that is unsympathetic and godless in a human being" (108). Against the chaos of the carnival, there stands the order and dignity of the Szuster farm where conscience, contemplation, and deliberation are the pillars of Jewish being in the world. Brantzche at this point is obviously Jewish, but has not yet fully assumed her identity as a daughter of survivors.

Finkelstein's Brantzche begins to comprehend her Holocaust legacy when she reflects on her sister's traumatic death. It is only after experi- encing this trauma that Brantzche can begin to fathom the meaning of

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unwarranted suffering. It certainly is no accident, by the way, that a traumatic death, disappearance, or mental breakdown appear in many works by or about the second generation, viz., Maus, Summer Long-a- Coming, Damaged Goods,37 The Fifth Son to mention but a few. In any case, Brantzche offers what may be termed a child of survivors philosophy of survival. Her observation deserves full citation.

Up until that moment, my parents' tales of survival had done little more than fuel my self-emancipation fantasies of entrapment and escape. At best, staying alive was a question of odds, of monitoring the whereabouts of a predator, and side-stepping it in the nick of time. With Perel gone, I had the sickening realization that survival meant coming out the victor

by chance, not by destiny or individual cunning. The Szusters were

merely like the other creatures on the farm-chickens, earthworms, dogs -who, on suspending their vigilance for a second, succumbed to a

greater, more confident power (pp. 203-204).

Brantzche's former innocence, i.e., the feeling that she could escape the tenuousness of the human condition, has begun to be replaced by a sober

maturity. She now realizes the common human vulnerability uniting her with her parents. Her unwitting experience of tragedy sensitizes Brantzche to the depths of holocaustal evil. She begins to understand, for example, that Jews were murdered not for anything they did, but because they had been born. There was, moreover, no escaping the bureaucracy of murder which was everywhere abetted by an omnipresent antisemitism.

Brantzche's mature assumption of her identity as a daughter of survivors is seen in her faithful auditing of the tapes of her parents' depositions, sent her by another survivor. The act of listening is, itself, described in terms befitting a ritual. The careful auditor responds to holo-

caustal tales both affectively and cognitively. Affectively, Brantzche ob- serves that she listens to the tapes "the way observant Jews listen to their

rabbi's sermon on Shabbos (Saturday)." She also attempts to study the

Shoah. "I pore over the stories and their possible interpretations," Brantzche says, "just as yeshiva boys burn their eyes out over Pirke Avot

(Sayings of the Fathers are ethical maxims of the early rabbis, and form

part of the second century Jerusalem Talmud or Mishnah). In any case,

listening to tales of a witness makes of one a witness. Summer Long-a-Coming portrays a variety of survivor images. In ad-

dition to her parents, Brantzche describes Lalke and Mendel Decher, each of whom had lost their first spouse during the Shoah, and Sonia and

Labyl Kicher, with whom she stays after her own parents make aliyah (emigrate) to Israel. Like Spiegelman, Finkelstein presents unsparing portraits. Some survivors are angry at each other, others had been forced

by the Nazis to serve as policemen in the ghettos. Some survivors do not

speak at all of their experiences, while others, especially Sonia, tell endless

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holocaustal tales. Unlike Spiegelman, however, Finkelstein's survivors appear as exalted figures, despite their behavior which clearly dis- tinguished them from the norms of American culture, because of their having survived. Finkelstein's insider vantage point reveals the survivors' continuing survival process. In psychosocial terms, it is significant to note that survivors form their own society in America. They are in, but not of, the United States. Their children tend, moreover, to be friendly with other children of survivors.

By novel's end, Brantzche Szuster is a young adult seeking to formu- late the elements of her identity as a daughter of survivors. Listening to her parents' tapes had compelled Brantzche's realization that the Shoah's meaning would forever elude her. "I was thrown into despair," she confides, "because, I realized I had never understood anything. Certainly, I had never known who Rukhl and Yankl Szuster were." Nevertheless, Brantzche, much in the manner of Wiesel's example, attempts to transform despair into creativity. In an action characteristic of survivors' children, she reads Holocaust literature vociferously. Realizing that she is un- speakably different from her parents, Brantzche nonetheless identifies a crucial link between the first and second generations. She writes:

Like them, I live without hope of settling scores yet love life unreason- ably, and will until the day I die-even though I cannot reclaim what I have lost (p. 262).

This second generation insight, won through the pain of personal ex- perience, distinguishes works written by children of survivors.

Finkelstein's novel appears to hold a dim view of the Jewish future in America. A friend, the son of survivors, marries, divorces, and remarries a non-Jewish woman. Brantzche herself is unmarried. She observes, more- over, that America seems unsuited to the task of preserving memory. "Qualities like moma and papa's fortitude and patience were, contends Brantzche, "dispensable values here, like memory ... outdated and in- effective in an age of time-saving, convenience commodities" (p. 301). Yet, the author herself, as we have seen, counsels not despair but de- termination to keep alive memory of the Holocaust. She does so, more- over, in a manner that is sharply distinguished from Rosen's categories. The appearance of Finkelstein's novel, and others like it, underscores the fact that there is a distinctive second generation Holocaust literature. This literature sensitizes the reader to the fact that with the passage of time, the Holocaust will be remembered in images which, while different from those employed by the witnessing generation, continue to reveal the outrage, the pain, and the hope which comprise post-Auschwitz Jewish authenticity.

Lev Raphael has written a series of short stories which illuminate the Holocaust's second generation legacy. "The Tanteh"38 tells of the trans-

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forming presence of a non-observant survivor living with her American relatives. Raphael's work displays keenly the seriousness of second

generation writers who, unlike many other so-called Jewish writers, wrestle with questions of Jewish identity and covenantal concerns out of their instensely personal relationship to the Shoah's survivors. For ex-

ample, he presents two types of post-Holocaust Jewish authenticity, a

pious American nonwitness and an atheist survivor who observes: "They prayed,... and still they died" (p. 18). Taken by his Aunt Rose's European mannerisms and listening to her holocaustal tales, brief though they were, the young nephew writes a prize-winning story about her for his English class. Insulted, the "Tanteh" (aunt) returns to Europe where she dies. The nephew writes numerous letters of apology all of which go un- answered. Even while regretting his violation of the aunt's experience, the young man knows that it is a story he "would write many times"

(p. 20). Raphael, like Wiesel, implicitly contends both that the Holocaust ex-

perience defies words and that the story must continue to be told. There

is, moreover, an element of sacrality about the Shoah which eludes transla- tion into language. The story also underscores the complexity of the

relationship between witnesses, nonwitnesses, and the second generation. The aunt (European Jewry) is a relative, but not part of the immediate

(American) family. European and American Jews are simultaneously linked and forever separated by the Holocaust. The second generation, for their part, view the covenantal quandary of contemporary Judaism through the prism of Auschwitz.

"Listening to the. Silence"39 is a story about a secular survivor and her American family. Her son recalls his childhood and the fact that his widowed mother said so little about the war. She was distant and "too

magisterial to yell at" (p. 67). The son does, however, recall that both the mother and her American-born husband, although never observing any specifically Judaic rituals, were concerned that their children not inter-

marry. Alone with his mother after his sister went to college, the boy felt

increasingly isolated. It was only after her death that the son found an old date book with a day in late April marked with the words "My libera- tion" (written in German). This discovery led to his recognition of loss, both personal and national. Raphael writes:

The horror had never been so real to me. She was gone and through her, a world I could never know. A world that was rightfully mine, but lost, bulldozed, bombed and burned. It was only then that I cried (p. 68).

Going to stay with his sister and her fiance, a believing Jew, the boy begins to find his own Judaic path.

Raphael's stories underscore the fact that the Holocaust destroyed a

Jewish world whose victims included the pious and the nonbelievers. His

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secular survivors-against all logic-insist upon remaining Jewish and raise their children Jewishly, thereby emphasizing the non-rational com- ponent of Jewish identity. His survivors do not speak directly of their experiences but, rather, reveal many clues from which their children and other relatives must piece together the outlines of the Holocaust. More- over, his survivors are quite critical of American Judaism. His short story "Such a Deal," typifies this attitude. There he describes refugee parents.

Like the first and second violinists of some glorious defunct orchestra forced to attend and applaud a backyard amateur recital, my parents, ... had a dim expression of American Jewish life (p. 15).

Parental disapproval of American Jewish culture is another distinctive feature of second generation literature, being expressed in all the works treated by this paper. Raphael also understands that the Shoah was an attempt to remake the world by destroying the entire House of Israel.

Consequently, all holocaustal loss is both intensely personal yet fraught with historic and national significance.

V. CONCLUSION: THEOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE

The writings of Spiegelman, Finkelstein, Raphael, and other second generation authors, make a distinctive contribution while revealing di- mensions of the Holocaust's continuing legacy. Their parents' parenting was dramatically effected by the war and is reflected in descriptions of flawed parent-child relationships. Each describes a remote parent and the difficulty of intergenerational communication. The norms of survivor parents conflict with American culture. Violence and the continuing presence of antisemitism and other forms of evil (especially in the works of Finkelstein and Raphael) mar the post-Auschwitz landscape. Yet each of these second generation writers has voluntarily embraced, or, in the case of Spiegelman, reembraced, their Jewish identity. Their central char- acters all read constantly about the Shoah. It would, however, be a mistake to assume that the second generation is, collectively, marred by the Holocaust. Not all children of survivors are psychically damaged.40 But all of them have been touched deeply by the Shoah. These second genera- tion writings illustrate, moreover, that Rosen's second life of Holocaust imagery is indeed being supplemented by a new type of Holocaust writing, as it must be for the sake of authenticity.

The Holocaust remains a deep and impenetrable mystery, the source of much pain and uncertainty. But if this brief survey is any guide, suc- ceeding generations will continue to wrestle, much in the manner of Jacob, with the problematic of Jewish identity. The covenantal core as-

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sumptions of Jewish existence have, however, been challenged in an un- precedented way. The theological position of the second generation reflects a chastening, or, more accurately, a recognition that the divine is increasingly concealed. The survivor parents either accept or reject cove- nantal faith, but all have been indelibly seared by the Shoah's flames. There are, moreover, no grandparents to help teach the intricacies of trodding the covenantal path. The second generation's lack of overt reference to God should not, however, be equated with either indifference or rejection. This literature reflects, rather, the wisdom of Greenberg's observation concerning the voluntary covenant. Those who voluntarily embrace the covenant by voluntarily living a Jewish life express an "af- firmation of God's presence."41 This generation's writings constitute a new stage in affirming the divine. These works utilize, although in a

largely unselfconscious way, Greenberg's theological yardstick of the in-

creasing hiddenness of the divine. Consequently, contemporary cove- nantal affirmations must always be made against the ominous background of the Holocaust, and the painful complex of memories of growing up in a home which reflected in a variety of ways the Shoah's continuing im-

pact. Authors of this literature quarrel with, while remaining within, Judaism. Second generation novels are, therefore not merely literature, but comprise a powerful theological statement. They continue to examine

questions of Jewish identity and covenantal concerns at a time when many other allegedly Jewish novels do not. Second generation writings reflect, therefore, not only the fact that the Holocaust happened, but that its effects continue to be felt, and that all subsequent Jewish affirmation must be illumined by the Shoah's flames.

SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY

NOTES

1. Elie Wiesel, "Talking and Writing and Keeping Silent," in The German Church Struggle and the Holocaust, edited by F. H. Littell and H. G. Locke (Detroit, 1974), p. 269.

2. Elie Wiesel, The Fifth Son (New York, 1985). For a full discussion of this text as a Holocaust novel see A. L. Berger, Crisis and Covenant: The Holocaust in American Jewish Fiction (Albany, 1985), pp. 68-79.

3. See my earlier study "Memory and Meaning," in Methodology in the Academic

Teaching of the Holocaust, edited by Z. Garber, A. L. Berger, and R. Libowitz (Lantham [MD], 1988), pp. 171-189. For a penetrating study of this theme in French second generation literature see the work of Ellen S. Fine, "New Kinds of Witnesses: French Post-Holocaust Writers," in Holocaust Studies Annual, Vol- ume III, edited by S. Pinsker and J. Fischel (Greenwood [Florida], 1985), pp. 121-136.

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4. Alvin H. Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature

(Bloomington, 1980), p. 19. Rosenfeld in the same passage also underscores the

regrettable absence of a "phenomenology of reading Holocaust literature." 5. Arthur A. Cohen, The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holo-

caust (New York, 1981), p. 23. 6. Irving Abrahamson (ed.), Against Silence: The Voice and Vision of Elie Wiesel

(New York, 1985), Vol. I, p. 44. 7. Ellen S. Fine, Legacy of Night: The Literary Universe of Elie Wiesel (Albany,

1982), p. 9. 8. Yehuda Bauer, The Holocaust in Historical Perspective (Seattle, 1982), p. 45. 9. See Anna Kolodner's excellent study, "The Socialization of Children of

Concentration Camp Survivors" Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation (Boston Uni-

versity, 1987), pp. 19-20. 10. On this theme see A. L. Berger, "Holocaust Survivors and Children in

Anya and Mr. Sammler's Planet," in Modern Language Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Winter, 1986), pp. 81-87.

11. Irving Greenberg, Voluntary Covenant (New York, 1982), p. 27. Greenberg's notion of voluntary covenant, with its emphasis on the increased responsibility of the human covenantal partner is a richly suggestive one for post-Auschwitz Judaism. For its application to contemporary American Jewish novels see Berger, Crisis and Covenant. Its theological implications are detailed in my study "Cove- nant and Crucible: Jewish Theological Encounters with the Holocaust," in Pro-

ceedings of the Institute for Jewish-Christian Studies (Siena College, Forthcoming). 12. Norma Rosen, "The Second Life of Holocaust Imagery," Midstream,

Vol. 33, No. 4 (April, 1987), pp. 56-59. 13. Ibid., 58. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Primo Levi compares stories of survivors to a new Bible. See his Survival in

Auschwitz, (New York, 1961), p. 59. Elie Wiesel, for his part, insists that the degree of holocaustal assault against the covenant was so great that "We have to write a new Talmud just as we did after the destruction of the Second Temple . . . in order to accentuate the new beginning." Elie Wiesel, "Jewish Values in the Post- Holocaust Future: A Symposium," in Judaism, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Summer, 1967), p. 285. Irving Greenberg goes further in suggesting that "accounts of these events" (what happened to the Jewish people during the Holocaust) "and the lives and the models that grow out of them constitute a new Scripture and a new Talmud."

Greenberg, "The Voluntary Covenant" (New York, 1982), p. 27. Greenberg discerns, moreover, three types'of Scriptures: writings of the victims-both those who survived and those who did not-special films depicting the Shoah, and accounts of lives of survivors. See his "The Third Great Cycle in Jewish History" (New York, 1981), pp. 40-41. The sanctity of the victims' writings is noted even

among orthodox circles. Eliezer Berkovits writes, for example, "When one day the last written messages from the ghettoes and the death camps will be assembled in an edition worthy of the depth of their truth and inspiration, mankind will

possess in them a new collection of holy scriptures." Faith After the Holocaust (New York, 1973), p. 78.

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18. Abrahamson, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 198. 19. Greenberg, op. cit., p. 11. 20. Greenberg, op. cit., p. 21. 21. Abrahamson, op. cit., Vol. III, p. 322. 22. Kolodner, op. cit., pp. 19-20. 23. "The Fifth Child," was composed by The National Jewish Center for

Learning and Leadership, under the guidance of Irving Greenberg, 1988. This

moving piece underscores Greenberg's long held contention that rituals specifi- cally marking the Holocaust need to be incorporated into Jewish liturgical life and utterance.

24. Maurice Friedman terms Wiesel's stance the Messianism of the Unre- deemed. He cites Wiesel's own words in defining this type of messianism. It underscores the need "To remain human in a world that is inhuman." Maurice Friedman, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Elie Wiesel: You Are My Witnesses (New York, 1987), p. 233.

25. Art Spiegelman, Maus (New York, 1986). All citations are from this edition. 26. Barbara Finkelstein, Summer Long-a-Coming (New York, 1987). Citations

are from this edition. A portion of this discussion appears in my essay "Ashes and

Hope: The Holocaust in Second Generation American Literature," in The Holo- caust: Reflections in Art and Literature, edited by Randolph L. Braham (Boulder: Social Science Monographs, scheduled for publication in 1989).

27. On this point see the revealing interview of Spiegelman by Lawrence

Wechsler, "Mighty 'Maus,"' in Rolling Stone (November 20, 1986), p. 106. 28. David A. Gerber, "Of Mice and Jews: Cartoons, Metaphors, and Children

of Holocaust Survivors in Recent Jewish Experience: A Review Essay," in Ameri- can Jewish History, Vol. 77 (September, 1987), p. 167.

29. Ibid. 30. Wechsler, op. cit., p. 148. 31. Interview by Aron Hirt-Manheimer, "The Art of Art Spiegelman," Reform

Judaism (Spring, 1987), p. 23. 32. On this matter see the novels discussed in Berger, Crisis and Covenant,

chapter four. 33. Dreams are frequently seen as decisive meetings with the sacred and have

implications for daily encounters either as warnings or as prophecies. See Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy (Garden City, 1967), p. 43.

34. Berkovits's understanding of the relationship between the Holocaust and Orthodox theology is contained in his book Faith After the Holocaust (New York: KTAV, 1973). For a critique of Berkovits's view see A. L. Berger, "Holocaust and

History: A Theological Reflection," in Journal of Ecumenical Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2

(Fall, 1988), pp. 203-205, and 207-208; and Steven T. Katz, "Eliezer Berkovits's Post-Holocaust Jewish Theodicy," in his Post-Holocaust Dialogues: Critical Studies

in Modern Jewish Thought (New York, 1983), pp. 268-287. 35. This story appears in Nissenson's early collection A Pile of Stones (New

York, 1965). For an analysis of Nissenson's Holocaust stories see Berger, Crisis and Covenant, pp. 59-65, and pp. 137-144.

36. Elie Wiesel, A Jew Today (New York, 1979). 37. Thomas Friedmann, Damaged Goods (New York, 1984). This novel reveals

the complexity of survivor-parent child relationships while simultaneously pro-

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viding an insider's view of the conflict between European Orthodoxy and Ameri- can Judaism. For further analysis of this novel see A. L. Berger, "Memory and

Meaning: The Holocaust in Second Generation Literature," pp. 177-179. 38. Lev Raphael, "The Tanteh," Jewish Currents (March, 1986), pp. 17-20.

Among Raphael's Holocaust writings the following are especially significant in

illuminating the complexity of the second generation's relationship to the Shoah:

"Mysterious Obsession," Baltimore Jewish Times (April 27, 1984), pp. 76-82; "Roy's Jewish Problem," Commentary, Vol. 80, No. 3 (September, 1985), pp. 62-66; "Such a Deal," Midstream, Vol. 33, No. 7 (Aug/Sept., 1987), pp. 15-18; and "Reunion," Hadassah Magazine, (January, 1988), pp. 20-23.

39. Lev Raphael, "Listening to the Silence," Baltimore Jewish Times (February 8, 1975), pp. 66-69.

40. Certain second generation biographies of survivor parents represent the

triumph of hope over despair, while revealing a warm and healthy survivor parent-child relationship. See, for example Michael Kornblit, Until We Meet Again (New York, 1983), and the articles by David Lee Preston, "A Bird in the Wind," The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine (May 8, 1983), pp. 12-16 and 28-30; and "Journey To My Father's Holocaust," The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine (April 21, 1985), pp. 20-27.

41. Greenberg, op. cit., p. 21.

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