BOOKS
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we make heroic passes at the Holocaust with high-colored language, the
more we resemble the matador flirting his bright cape before the bull? The
bull grows more dangerous, and the Holocaust as writer's subject charges up
more ferociously. The beast roars on past us, if it does not trample us entire–
ly. Is it ungrateful of me to ask if one can imagine a real-life
Holocaust-survivor-even, or especially, of a poetic nature--being healed of
his trauma by reading,. say, the Holocaust-survivor poet, Paul Celan?
It
was
Celan who wrote, in "Death Fugue": "Black
milk
of dawn we drink it at
dusk! we drink it at noon and ·at daybreak we drink it at night / we drink it
and drink it / we are digging a grave in the air there's room for us all. . . ."
Celan was so little healed by his own poetry that at the height of his pow–
ers he took his life.What is the pleasure for us
in
reading Celan? Maybe only
Kafka's answer: "A book should be an axe to break up the frozen seas within."
Why should we want these numb seas broken up? To be alive, since life
means feeling pain. How much pain? Where do our natures draw the line
between pain that gives life and pain that kills spirit?
"Anyone who has been tortured remains tortured," said the survivor–
poet-chemist Primo Levi who, in
lfThis
Be a Man,
tried with elegant and
precise prose to illuminate the black night of Auschwitz and then in black
despair ended his life a suicide.
But this small, brilliant book is intent on healing. And so-would that
it were so-let it be.
NORMA ROSEN
U sing a Knife Ins tead of a Fine Pencil
AMERICAN SPHINX: T HE CHARACTER OF THOMAS JEFFERSON.
By
Joseph J.
Ellis. Alfred
A.
Knopf. $26.00
"In the beginning was the word," as Ralph Ellison said, "and the con–
tradiction of the word." This paradox was the personal fate of the aristocratic
democrat, Thomas Jefferson. Recently, however, revisionist historians have
nailed him to it in order to dissect
him.
At the Jeffersonian Legacies
Conference in 1993 Paul Finkelman reduced Jefferson to a "self-indulgent
negrophobic Virginia planter"; and Conor Cruise O'Brien was recently
