EDITH KURZWEIL
71
mandant of Buchenwald?"
These three authors, too young to comprehend or miss grandpar–
ents and relatives they had never met, yet sensitive to the malaise of their
parents, gave vent to their vivid imaginations. (We'll never know the
extent to which the elusive burden of their childhoods turned them into
talented writers.) Sooner or later, they connected the Holocaust to be–
ing Jewish, to denials or practices of religion (by themselves and others),
to anti-Semitism and attitudes towards Israel.
For Geoffrey Hartman, who escaped as a child, memory is more
vivid than imagination. After leaving Frankfurt on a children's transport
when he was nine, feelings of homelessness alternated with the joy at be–
ing alive. In his neo-orphanage in England, he immersed himself in books
to escape from reality. (I had the same reactions in my Belgian home
d'ellfal1ts.)
Seven years later, Hartman states, he rejoined his mother. By
then, "I was an adolescent, she a stranger." He believes that the Holo–
caust informed his subsequent studies of literature and judaica, his concern
with Israel, and finally his need to counteract the malicious denial of the
organized slaughter by revisionists. To compensate for the proliferation
of media images glorifying the Nazis and degrading their victims, he
helped in videotaping some of the witnesses to the genocide: they do
not, as pop psychology has it, take on the features of the perpetrators. In
each of their stories, "there comes a moment when their loneliness is
brought home ... at family celebrations ... [when] among so many
guests the family from which he comes - all those aunts, uncles, cousins -
is
represented by no one except himself" Max Apple reached a similar
conclu ion as he envied the rowdy (and otherwise unenviable) boys in his
neighborhood for their cousins. Years later, he wrote a lively story that
was inspired by his attempt to locate a long forgotten uncle whom he
had tried to trace while on a visit in Argentina.
For eight years after Lore Segal arrived in England she "lived with
five different [foster] families up and down England's class system and
across its geography." She was fortunate that an English family eventually
hired her Viennese middle-class parents as servants - her mother as a live–
in
cook and maid, her father as butler and gardner Gobs that ended up
killing him.) Her loneliness is palpable as she describes living from one
calamity to another and how, after
Kristallnacht,
she learned to detach
herself from her feelings and became a "prickly" and "critical" child. Se–
gal
does not go into the pain she must have suffered "during the decades
it took to become reattached." To convey the magnitude of these
experiences without turning them into personal misfortune or cliche, she
now makes sure not to dramatize, not to produce "a good read."
Thereby, Segal does succeed in conveying much of the malaise by both
