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PARTISAN REVIEW
of "bitter a lmonds" with the subtitle's "selected fictions," since his real
interest is the "selected truths" that this aura of death has bequeathed
to his artistic endeavors.
Space does not allow detailed responses to this recent sampling of
Lustig's works, originally published between
1962
and
L990.
Through–
out his career he has wrestled with the problem of rescuing from the
void of oblivion the obscure anguish of tormented hearts that continue
to beat on the margin between survival and loss. Like one of his charac–
ters, he confronts the paradox that "those who were together remained
alone." He invites us into a world where, as the still-young Dita Saxova
cannot forget, something inside you remains crippled even as you enjoy
the relief of having escaped the inferno of mass murder. His characters
carry within them a profoundly troubling insight, not designed to
reunite them easily with the life of the spirit:
"It
had been blind fate, an
accident, very rarely any personal quality or service that preserved them
from catastrophe."
If
the legacy of the Holocaust is nothing more than
that life is only a matter of sheer luck, and death too, then what moral
foundation does one use in order to rebuild a secure future?
Lustig'S principal contribution to the literature of the Holocaust is a
willingness to enter the minds of those engu lfed by the disaster and to
animate their interior mental landscapes. Confusion, uncertainty, and
dread have forced us to linger on the borders of this terrain, wary of
intruding on a realm for whose existential codes we lack an experiential
basis. In Lustig's fictional world these codes burst through those bor–
ders, disrupting the settled premises of our comfortable lives. In his
artistic universe the memory of mass murder and the celebration of love
are not polar opposites but participants in each other's reality. It can be
no accident that suicide forms the climax of many of Lustig'S tales, a
logical if grim tacit gesture of respect to the illegitimate death that con–
sumed millions of his fellow Jews. Fortunately, the "fictive picture"
gives us imaginative access to this haunted world without making such
stringent demands on our physical selves, adding a mournful human
dimension to the historical narrative of Holocaust atrocity that is an
indispensable part of the story.
Lawrence
L.
Langer
