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PARTISAN REVIEW
over moral drives, and thereby legitimates immoral behavior. Bauman's
argument does hold water. But he does not emphasize enough that
Milgram's experiments began and ended in the laboratory, and that
pluralistic societies have mechanisms to stop behavior which may result in
a "Final Solution." Bauman, a Pole, wrote this book before the Iron
Curtain came down. This may explain why he concludes that "we no
longer dare to exclude the unimaginable." Unfortunately, he never says
that he is alluding to the
Gulag,
or that his sociological theory of
modernity intimates practices he does not mention in his book.
David Rosenberg invited "imaginative writers to reexamine Ameri–
can lives in the wake of the Holocaust ... [in] its unending trail of ab–
sence." Inevitably, a number of contributors focussed on "absence" - one
of the current postmodernists' concerns - and talked almost exclusively
about themselves; others, among them Marge Piercy, recounted the tra–
vail it had entailed
to
understand the victims of Auschwitz before
recreating them as fictional characters; yet others remembered that hear–
ing about the Holocaust had made them realize they were Jewish. But
those who had escaped as children or had watched their parents' agonies
relied more on experience than imagination.
Leonard Michels, Daphne Merkin and David Lehman, in the lead
essays, recall growing up with such parents - refugees who barely man–
aged to escape, but whose own parents and other relatives were
doomed. Lehman, for instance, depicts how his mother's thoughts were
dominated by Hitler's hell rather than by the tribulations all grenhorns
experience in America . As a little boy born after the war, he frequently
responded to her helplessness, depressions and silent tears by retreating
into "imagining things" - about Hitler, B-17 bombers and World War
II.
He often felt alone, "trangely invisible. " His mother apparently told
him that she had done "everything she could to save her parents after the
Anschluss
...
until long after [they] were deported from Vienna in 1941
and killed in Riga on 12 March 1942." (Two of my grandparents, an
aunt and a cousin were on the same transport, and my mother also kept
concocting schemes to save them after they had died.) Merkin, a most
protected child, first experienced the Holocaust as "a natural extension
of the hostility [she] felt directed at her by her parents, siblings and
schoolmates," and then was fascinated by the numbered tatoo she kept
examining on the arm of an older cousin who came to visit. She specu–
lated, for example, about her parents' Germanness, because they spoke
German to each other, and often were nostalgic for their former life in
Frankfurt. And why did her mother, when faced with the (inevitable)
complaints by her six children tell them to
'Just imagine you're in a con–
centration camp,"
unless she was as cruel as "lise Koch, wife of the com-
