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six million of them to death, has triumphed even over those who sur–
vived him. Here I want to make a personal statement: I always
thought after the establishment of Israel that we Jews had indeed
had "the last word" in the argument with Hitler, and so much so that
at some point in the future the Fuehrer might even become aJewish
holiday, on which we would eat a particular pastry named for him,
as on Purim we eat prune tarts named for Haman.
But the state of Israel was not provided by the Holocaust. It
was provided by Jews responding to the Holocaust, and if they had
not provided themselves and their descendants with the state of
Israel, they would indeed have been totally defeated by the Fuehrer.
He would indeed have had "the last word." And I must make a fur–
ther point.
If
the establishment of Israel is in any sense unreal, or
just temporary, if it can be truly said to be spurious, then too I think
that Hitler has had "the last word" against us. Now Steiner, since
publishing
The Portage,
has expressed the view that the reestablish–
ment of Israel in Palestine was "spurious ." This is the very word he
has chosen to describe the reality of Israel, which is for Steiner a
"spurious" reality. No matter the why of this judgement. I do not feel
I have to argue against it here. I have left that for a postscript. All I
want to establish now is that this is the judgement of Israel Steiner
has made. It appears in an article of his, "Our Homeland, the Text,"
in the 1985 Winter-Spring issue of
Salmagundi.
But if Israel is indeed
spurious, if it is indeed as Steiner has intimated a "fake Zion," then
how can one object to his having given Hitler the final speech in a
Holocaust fiction?
If
I thought of Israel as Steiner evidently does,
then I would praise rather than fault his narrative strategy, and I
would say openly what Steiner is saying more circumspectly, per–
haps not without pain, that in his quarrel with theJews, Hitler in ac–
tual and final fact has had, everything considered, "the last word."
I believe that when a responsible writer takes up a subject he
must consider what attitude he has to take up to treat that subject
fairly. I think that George Steiner should have understood that the
"good European" stress on continuity and harmony, which proved
useful in relating Greek to Renaissance and even modern drama,
becomes perverse when focused on events of the Holocaust, an area
of history marked by the most violent disruptions . I find some sup–
port for this view in Jorge Semprun's excellent memoir-fiction about
the Holocaust,
What A Beautiful Sunday!
Here Semprun subjects
those eminently "good Europeans" Goethe and his famous inter-
