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PARTISAN REVIEW
child and adult Holocaust surviviors which, as other contributors to this
volume imply or state, are universal. But unlike some of them, she avoids
facile conclusions and superficial parallels between her own past and fears
of possible nuclear destruction.
Alan Lelchuk started to ask questions about the death camps when
he was eight years old, in 1948 - because he wanted to know about the
numbers on his teacher's wrist. From his father's tales about the Cossacks,
anti-Semitic Russians and Nazis, he concluded that in Europe they play
at killing Jews, while in America boys play boxball and watch baseball.
Twenty years later, he (unsuccessfully) tried his hand at Holocaust fiction.
But the Holocaust came alive for him when he met a camp survivor
who, over tea in Cambridge, told him of the grisly routines of everyday
life in Majdanek and Auschwitz, when he read the diaries of Etty Hille–
sum who died in Auschwitz, and books by Primo Levi, Aaron Appelfeld,
Raoul Hilberg and Saul Friedlander.
Mark Mirsky vaguely knew of the Holocaust during the war, and
was afraid that "if the Germans win, I, my little sister, cousins, playmates
would be killed," but then "tried not to think" of it and, instead, lis–
tened avidly to stories about the pogroms against the Jews in Russia. Did
Mirsky's memories lead him to Judaic studies, and to his quest to under–
stand the Holocaust? "What did it mean," he now wonders, since "the
survivors cannot tell us anything [except to] ask us to remember what
they suffered in our dreams."
Norma Rosen "experienced" the Holocaust when she accompanied
her Viennese-born husband on his first return to Vienna more than four
decades after having left with a children's transport. His parents perished.
She is sensitive to this past, to the inability to forget it, because even "so
simple a thing as a fork knocking against a fish bone may remind us." I
first went back in 1956 and many times since then. Like Rosen's husband,
I keep coming up against yet another place that reminds me of an uncle's
store, an encounter with a schoolmate, sneaking away from a crowd
watching a Jewish man scrub the sidewalk with a toothbrush, or running
towards my grandmother to show her that my chafed knee was healing.
Rosen evokes the past by intermingling her husband's realities and
memories with her own fictions, and thereby shows "how, after the
Holocaust, we can live," and "gain distance" or even hope. Unlike
Gordon Lish, who brags that he "does not have one useful thought
about the Holocaust," and whose provocative and sardonic tone, I as–
sume, is supposed to exemplify avant-garde writing and the conviciton
that nothing, not even the Holocaust, is inaccessible to the writer who
writes for money, Rosen has managed to evoke the complexity of the
post-Holocaust horror.
