492
PARTISAN REVIEW
and Knut Hamsun, all of Edgar Allen Poe, whom 1 admired, all of
Oscar Wilde, who filled me with enthusiasm, and a great deal of
Maupassant, who amused and stimulated me.
Although impressed by Marcel's brilliance and insatiable curiosity,
the reader may be uneasy at the author's literary musings, in light of the
horrors that were occurring around him. Was this merely the narcissism
of a bright young boy who refused to believe in a future that looked so
bleak? Or have the passing decades allowed Marcel to erase from his
mind the helplessness he surely must have felt at that time? By
I938,
Marcel Reich-Ranicki was deported to the Warsaw Ghetto, carrying
only the Balzac novel he was reading at the time.
Marcel remembers the brutality of life inside the Warsaw Ghetto:
Any German who wore a uniform and had a weapon could do
whatever he wished with a Jew in Warsaw. He could compel him
to sing or to dance or to shit in his trousers, or go down on his
knees and beg for his life. He could suddenly shoot him dead or kill
him in a slow torturous manner. He could order a Jewish woman
to undress, then clean the street with her underwear and then, in
front of everybody, to urinate. There was no one to spoil the fun of
those German troops, no one to stop them from maltreating the
Jews, no one to make them answerable for what they did.
It
revealed what human beings are capable of when they are granted
unlimited power over other human beings.
Yet, Marcel seems reluctant to think about why this particular group
of people did what they did, and why so few among them tried to stop
it. Nor does he examine the possible role his beloved German literature
may have played in fueling this madness. These blind spots would be
easier to excuse if they were written by the young boy caught in the
ghetto, but seem baffling now, when one remembers that they are the
reflections of an old man.
Still, we need to remember that Jews, especially those born after the
Holocaust, seem too eager to criticize other Jews, their religiosity or
lack of it, the language they speak, or the way they make their way in
the world, forgetting that each one of us must determine how much we
can bear to remember. We all filter our experiences through layers of
distortion and repackage it for mass consumption.
It
is important to
remember that it was Marcel who found himself sentenced to obscurity.
His parents had been murdered; his own death was imminent.
