HOW TRUE TO LIFE IS BIOGRAPHY?
27
"racism," "colonialism," etc.-is clearly a modern avatar of classical
anti-Semitism, and its method of turning the Jewish Biography into nar–
ratives of heresy, blood libels, or complots of international conspiracy.
My mother's story was shattered by the Holocaust. Many of my writ–
ings originate from her story.
I'll
only briefly point to some of the ques–
tions the Holocaust poses for the Jewish Biography and to the genre of
biography in general. My father's family chose to be part of the Zionist
story. The Holocaust demonstrates that there is not always a choice.
It
reminds us of the cases when there is no escape from the persecutions
haunting the Jewish Biography; the cases when a Jewish identity is
imposed by what Sartre called
Ie regard de I'autre,
the view of the other.
You can convert, you can assimilate, you can deny any affiliation with
this incredible
meshugenah
story, and then there is an event like the
Holocaust. Three generations who already believed they were out of it,
were caught and pushed back into the confines of the story, to their tor–
ture and death within the imposed ghetto of a "final" plot.
My mother, who lost her first husband and only son, survived the
death camps. After the war she was a volunteer for the Zionist network
working among displaced persons in Europe, and in 1948 she reached
Palestine, accompanying a transport of children. She chose to articulate
her private trauma as part of a national plot, leading from destruction
to reconstruction and revival. On arrival she had cosmetic surgery to
remove the number tattooed on her arm. Soon after she met my father,
and they started a new life. Her decision-at least overtly, and for the
first years-was to extract from her identity any trace of victimhood,
any remnant of a former death camp inmate. Holocaust survivors who
went to America, being out of a national Jewish story, sometimes took
the Holocaust as the main event shaping their lives. Their children
embraced the identity of "second-generation survivors" much earlier
than their peers, of my generation, in Israel.
But the Holocaust raises questions about biographies beyond the
Jewish arena .
It
reminds us of the alluring power of a story to attract,
to seduce, like extraordinary biographies or hagiographies.
It
reminds
us how the readers of such biographies are compelled to identify them–
selves with the protagonists, villains, saints, or martyrs. The fascinating
and obscene spell of the Holocaust can arouse the desire to usurp this
"irresistible" biography, to make it yours, to leave your ordinary life
and to be "elevated" by this life of "saintly suffering." Here I am refer–
ring to the case of Wilkomirski, and his less-known equals. The beatifi–
cation of Edith Stein by the Roman Catholic church basically falls into
the same category as a theological usurpation of the Holocaust story;
