MORRIS DICKSTEIN
845
the cultural tradition or the astonishing complexity of Jewish law ,
with its pervasive effects on everyday life . The older generation of
intellectuals was embarrassed by Judaism: they saw it through gen–
tile eyes as a disability, a burden . They knew it in corrupted forms,
robbed of all vitality.
It
reeked of poverty and the ghetto.
It
stank of
provinciality, tribalism. Their very names seemed like impediments
to worldly advancement and cultural universality . The barbarous
anti-Semitism of the Nazis was a perplexing emphasis that few in–
tellectuals in New York, Paris , or Frankfurt were ready to confront.
"Why do you come with your special jewish sorrows?" Rosa Luxem–
burg wrote to a friend in 191 7. "I feel just as sorry for the wretched
Indian victims in Putamayo, the negroes in Africa.... I cannot
find a special corner in my heart for the ghetto ." How typically
Jewish!
As the past recedes it also looms larger, more insistent. We can
never have done with our own origins . Year by year I find myself
becoming more involved with the Holocaust, which was kept from
me when I was growing up. I now read avidly about Weimar, about
Hitler, about the death camps. The horror grows ; the news, it
seems, always gets worse- it can never be fully taken in; the insight
into human nature unsettles all progressive truisms.
Whether out of fear or empathy I find myself brooding about
the yellow star, the knock at the door in the dead of night, the cattle
cars that held no cattle, the precious bowls that served human beings
for both food and excrement. I know it's a weakness, if not actually
ghoulish, for me to think too much about these images and worse. I
sometimes wonder, do I see myself in their place, those victims with
their "special Jewish sorrows"? Try as I may, I can't seem to get my
mind around what happened: I always return to it with the same
sense of disbelief. I now know why the rabbis at the yeshiva,
themselves European, spoke so little of those recently slaughtered.
They must have wondered in dark moments whether any sort of
faith could survive such a catastrophe, as I wonder what moral
calculus can encompass the murder of people just for who they were,
not for anything they did- not even "accused of guilt," like Kafka's
hero.
To maim and destroy people with cold calculation we must first
dehumanize them- turn them into kikes or J aps or living skeletons
who are physically repellent- categories of disposable things. Jews
had already become vermin in the eyes of their exterminators. One
justification for literature, and also an aim of liberal politics, is to
