146
PARTISAN REVIEW
Which seems to remove the premise of the book. The author
had encouraged us to believe, for two hundred and fifty pages, that it
was an attempt, towards which we might safely invest our best
energies, to approach and explore the soul of Lisa. He goes on:
Most of the dead were poor and illiterate . But every single one of
them had dreamed dreams, seen visions, and had amazing
experiences, even the babes in arms (perhaps especially the babes
in arms). Though most of them had never lived ouside the Podol
slum, their lives and histories were as rich and complex as Lisa
Erdman-Berenstein's.
If
a Sigmund Freud had been listening and
taking notes from the time of Adam , he would still not fully have
explored even a single group, even a single person.
The reader may not share Thomas's conviction that Lisa's life
and history is "rich and complex ." Raskalnikov is rich and complex,
Julian Sorel is rich and complex - Lisa is a device. To say that the
paragraph is anticlimactic is not to say enough - it is puerile , and
offensive. Who is it who needs to be reminded that the lives of the
Podol Jews killed at Babi Yar were valuable? Who is it who needs to
relate them to a neurotic opera singer of a higher economic class to
discern that value? For whom is the horror increased by the idea that
Freud might have found them interesting subjects for study?
As if to tie the themes of sex and death together, Thomas has
Lisa die with a bayonet up her vagina. Like others before him,
Thomas uses images of the holocaust in a desperate attempt at
epiphany.
In
a section that fairly drips with false sympathy for man–
kind, Thomas grinds the knife in the cunt and hopes for a thematic
synthesis. His subsequent escape into mysticism is so fast as to
appear furtive.
Lisa's symptoms of 1919, the pains in the left breast and pelvis,
are finally understood as a somatic precognition of her experiences
in the ravine at Babi Yar when an SS man sends his jackboot crash–
ing into her left breast, and then again into her pelvis ("the clean
snap of the bone"). A provocative idea, precognition, but the impli–
cations here are unfortunate. Her symptoms, then, were clearly
beyond Freud's purview. So much for his analysis. By extension, the
holocaust is understood as something fated, inevitable, an inescap–
able kink in the playing out of the great cosmic scheme. The stoicism
is too easy. Repugnant, even.
The last section seems to be an extended fantasy of Lisa's while
she dies. Or perhaps she is dead, and this is after. The reader, in any
