602
PARTISAN REVIEW
Bialik's poem and those remembered from the Holocaust die again
and again in every subsequent child's murder.
Occasionally, references seem to come only in the reader's own
specific knowledge of events, in projections of Holocaust memory
onto more general suffering. But in fact, it is partly in memory of
events that analogy and metaphor are created in the first place; an
expression like "we didn't see and we didn't know" is so burdened
with past violence, for example, that it becomes impossible to recite
it innocently in Israel: it can only be repeated ironically.
To this day, it seems that the rest of the world has confused gen–
uine Israeli empathy for the victims of the Sabra and Shatilla
massacres with culpability in the killing itself. When 400,000 Israelis
marched in Tel Aviv to protest the killings, the world mistook a pro–
found expression of sympathy for the victims and outrage at the
killers for a demonstration of guilt.
In
its craving for the facile sym–
metry of persecuted turned persecutor, the world seems to have ig–
nored the capacity of one people to feel- if only figuratively - the
pain of another. The world has not understood that an outpouring of
grief like this might have been spawned as much by the memory of
past Jewish suffering as it was by the massacre itself of Palestinians
by Christians.
For memory of the past is not merely passed down
mi dor ie dor–
from generation to generation - but it is necessarily regenerated in
the images that transport it from one era to the next. The past is thus
recalled in present figures no less than contemporary events are ex–
perienced in light of past events .
In
this exchange between past and
present, every generation simultaneously inherits and transmits
memory - which now becomes in itself a series of analogues linking
events to one another. Rather than attempting to legislate the in–
evitable framing of present crises in the figures of the past , we might
recognize that historical memory itself may be invigorated by this
framing. Reimagining contemporary and past historical
crises-each in terms of the other-may ultimately be the only way
we remember them.
