EDITH KURZWEIL
73
Most of the writers in
Testimony
manage to surmount the limits of
what is essentially a navel-gazing exercise. Leslie Epstein, by telling of his
affiuent Hollywood childhood, as the son of a successful screenwriter,
holds the reader's attention with an account of his early life. To me, this
past explains the exaggerations that disturbed me when I read his
King
if
the Jews.
Epstein, immersed in the Hollywood hype of his childhood and
in the conviction that "nothing was real," tells us that the new house
with the swimming pool (around the corner from Joseph Cotton, Linda
Darnell and Gregory Peck ), all sorts of movie stories, and the war in the
Pacific, were far more tangible to him than the Holocaust. Nothing
wrong with that, except that Epstein's story would be more suitable for
The
New Yorker
or
Vogue
than for this volume.
A number of these authors in one way or another attest to their
generational, political beliefs . According to David Shapiro, they are
"peace babies," whose lives were "to be all too stabilized and haunted by
the twin horrors of the Hitlerian past and the nuclear future," and into
whose sheltered existence an occasional anti-Semitic slur would intrude.
Nevertheless, Shapiro says that he always thought of the Holocaust as
more than parable or metaphor, that he does not feel adequate even
writing of the taboos, but "celebrates each victim's desire for witness."
And he (correctly) denounces Bruno Bettelheim's assumptions, and his
arrogance of judgment when remonstrating
ex post facto
that European
Jews should have forseen Hitler's "final solution" and left sooner - for–
getting that quotas severely limited the number of emigres. Ultimately,
Shapiro recalls, the image of his grandfather's flight from Russia formed
his own earliest conception of the survivor. And he concludes, with
much sensitivity, that it is almost obscene
to
ask the "absurd aesthetic
que tion of what kind of art must emerge after the Holocaust."
Abraham Peck's witnesses - historians, political scientists, writers and
sociologists - resurrect the memories and contributions of this wave of
emigrants which by now has been thoroughly absorbed into American
and Jewish life. Their unique history, and their diversity as well, soon will
be forgotten. In fact, they brought with them the spirit of German and
Austrian Jewry, which was centered on the concept of
Bi/dung
-
a secular
belief in the new German Jew who would be accepted by his Christian
neighbors, who would contribute to German art, culture, and human–
ism. In his introduction, Peck describes their Enlightenment legacy and
the contradictions this legacy had created in relation to German nation–
alism.
George Mosse refers to the "inner-Jewish dialogue to which few
gentiles in Weimar Germany listened." In exile, this legacy of
Bildung
was
demonstrated in the form of self-cultivation, cosmopolitanism and a ra-
