To the Editor:
Cynthia Ozick builds and dwells in a beautiful edifice for most of her essay, “The Rights of History and the Rights of Imagination” [March], only to leave it through a staircase to the basement. She claims that in the novel Sophie’s Choice, “[William] Styron’s Sophie deflects from the total annihilation of Jewish presence in a Poland that continues with its land, language, religion, and institutions intact.” But it is difficult to see how this accusation is warranted given the novel’s intensive and accurate depiction of Jewish suffering in Auschwitz and its modest description of Polish misery in Warsaw and Auschwitz. In addition, as a Jew born in Poland and a survivor of the camps, I do not see how a fictional character can ever displace the reality of the murder of millions of innocent men, women, and children and the wanton destruction of prewar Poland’s vibrant Yiddish life and culture.
More significant is Miss Ozick’s question, “How is it possible for a writer to set forth as a purposeful embodiment of the inmost meaning of the camps, any emblem other than a Jewish emblem?” It is one thing for this question to stand as a challenge to both Jewish and non-Jewish writers; it is quite another matter for it to become a new standard for Holocaust fiction. And based on what Miss Ozick attributes to Sophie’s Choice, it seems that it is the latter that she is proposing. She argues that Sophie is “not so much an individual as she is a counter-individual. She is not so much a character in a novel as she is a softly polemical device to distract us from the epitome.”
Although I had last read this novel more than twenty years ago, out of respect for Miss Ozick’s wisdom I read it once again, keeping in mind her warnings. I totally disagree with her assertions. Sophie is a fully realized character and not a “stalking horse” for any other character or idea. She is necessary for and expresses well the internal logic of Sophie’s Choice—an outstanding Holocaust novel that gives the lie to Miss Ozick’s proposed new standard.
Bernard Otterman
Old Westbury, New York
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To the Editor:
As a student and teacher of Holocaust literature who has taught Sophie’s Choice since 1984, I read Cynthia Ozick’s essay with interest. The historical truth that she expects in Holocaust literature is the “purposeful embodiment of the inmost meaning of the camps.” But “inmost meaning” is not as universally agreed upon as her essay suggests.
In the Holocaust literature that I have read, the complicated varieties of evil are “the inmost meaning.” The essence of the Holocaust experience is evil. It annihilates the soul, destroys beyond the powerful images Miss Ozick uses, beyond “crowns of fire,” “skeletal human corpses,” and the “terror-stricken little boy with his cap askew and his hands in the air.”
Most victims were Jewish, and Styron’s novel acknowledges that historical truth. But Miss Ozick says that historical fact should prevent Styron from creating an “emblem” who is not Jewish and that Sophie is a “softly polemical device to distract us from the epitome.” Readers know that Sophie is not Jewish, but far from “corrupting” history, and even further from “displacing” Anne Frank (as Miss Ozick charges), Sophie’s Choice illumines a truth about evil that is worthy of our closest attention.
If Sophie as a Polish Catholic is an “anomaly” who “displaces history,” as Miss Ozick writes, then her own perspective on history assumes parameters for evil that in historical fact do not exist. Christians slaughtered Christians in the American Civil War; Native American Ojibway wiped out Sioux villages throughout the Midwest; Hutu kill Tutsi. The Balkan tragedy speaks for itself. Evil thrives within as well as between religious, ethnic, and racial walls. Kapos were less than honorable in the concentration camps. And that is the historical truth rendered in Styron’s novel.
The hundreds of students with whom I have studied Sophie’s Choke have never articulated (or felt) any diminishing of Jewish suffering. On the contrary, the depth of Sophie’s anguish intensifies and clarifies the anguish suffered by all of the victims of the Holocaust.
Paul V. Olsen
Augustana College
Rock bland, Illinois
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To the Editor:
Cynthia Ozick is right to reject any attempt to create a general view of moral responsibility based upon an example that is so unlikely as to be bizarre, i.e., a woman who accidentally enlists as a guard in a concentration camp because she is illiterate, as in Bernard Schlink’s The Reader. The tension, of course, is between an accurate account of the Holocaust as we know it and the sympathy that engaging fiction can make us feel for an individual character. The power of literature can make our emotions bend toward an agent who is engaged in the purest of evil.
But perhaps there is a different interpretation of Schlink’s novel that Miss Ozick did not consider: could the illiteracy of the protagonist be a metaphor or allegory for the illiteracy of the German soul? Ironically, in a nation that was a world leader in literacy, the soul had been neglected, and was thus (like the protagonist) able to enlist unwittingly for service in the most evil deed. Thus seen, Schlink’s novel might not be “about” this woman or her illiteracy, but rather about a nation’s failure to educate its soul: her intellect is used as a symbol for the collective spirit.
A.C. Smith
Ann Arbor, Michigan
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To the Editor:
Cynthia Ozick’s observations on recording the Holocaust are timely and to the point. True, it was necessary to make the world aware of the enormity of the crimes committed against the Jewish people. The written word and the media were the proper tools to employ. But storytelling should never have invaded the realm of the historian.
The Holocaust experts lavished praise and laurels on Binjamin Wilkomirski, the author of Fragments. If Holocaust survivors had been asked to give their opinion on the veracity of his story, they would have suggested that the author change the title from Fragments to Figments. The chance that a four-year-old could survive the ordeal of meandering from place to place in Nazi-occupied Poland for the duration of the war is nil. Other children survived, but never under the circumstances described.
Recent inquiries into the author’s post-Holocaust curriculum vitae have revealed inconsistencies that cast considerable doubt on his age and origin. But the narrative sinks into the mire of lies and fabrications on its own merits—or rather demerit.
Herman F. Wolf
Syracuse, New York
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To the Editor:
Cynthia Ozick’s wonderful article helped me to focus on a long-felt feeling of uneasiness. It is a shame that she did not include some recent films in her discussion, since their wide dissemination and broad appeal have greater impact on our cultural “reality.”
My moral outrage is especially reserved for Life Is Beautiful, the movie by Roberto Benigni that has received great praise and awards, including several Oscars. Benigni’s imagination, being freer than that of Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi, is able to create this “wonderful” story of Jewish suffering in an extermination camp. The general health, cleanliness, and ability of inmates to recover from serious injury while surviving in this camp must have required tremendous imagination indeed—or perhaps an ulterior motive.
To a new generation, not steeped in the indelible horror of the Holocaust, revisionists can use this movie to change slowly and subtly the perceptions of this singular event. Is Benigni complicit with others who attempt to distort future understanding of the Holocaust? Has he also come, in Miss Ozick’s words, “not to illumine but to corrupt”?
David Zebelman
Fairport, New York
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Cynthia Ozick writes:
Bernard Ottoman asserts that my essay proposes “a new standard for Holocaust fiction.” I cannot fathom what “new standard” he has in mind. There has always been only one serious historical standard for fiction concerned with the Holocaust: that such fiction should understand precisely what is meant by that term. There were many victims of Nazism, the Poles painfully and prominently among them. Let us make no mistake about this, and let us not minimize a nation’s suffering, and the murder of thousands. But what defines the Holocaust, and distinguishes it from multiple other large-scale victimizations of the Nazi period, is not only the intent to annihilate every last living Jew, from the moribund elderly in nursing homes down to newborn infants, but also, and preeminently, the total erasure of European Jewish civilization—language, culture, institutions.
As “a Jew born in Poland and a survivor of the camps,” Mr. Otterman surely knows the difference between the brutal invasion of a country (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Holland, etc.) and the achieved extirpation of an entire civilization. In the aftermath of the German occupation, Polish land, language, and Church were still extant. Mr. Otterman, in contrast, has fled the land of his birth, has perforce acquired a language other than his native tongue, and is wholly aware that Poland’s (and Europe’s) long-established Jewish academies, libraries, and social and religious bodies are no more. By this criterion—and it is the only historically factual one—he is wrong to style Sophie’s Choice, with its Polish Catholic protagonist, a Holocaust novel. The invasion and occupation of Poland was deeply cruel; but the Holocaust is not about the invasion and occupation of one nation by another. A Holocaust novel, to earn that designation, must touch solely on those who were subject to the Final Solution, which was aimed only at Jews.
“I totally disagree with her assertions,” Mr. Otterman writes of my observations; yet he speaks exactly as I do when he mourns “the wanton destruction of prewar Poland’s Yiddish life and culture.” As to the fictional Sophie, he finds her to be “a fully realized character.” This must mean that for Mr. Otterman she is fully situated in her identity as a Catholic Pole. Accordingly, he concludes that a fully realized fictional Catholic Pole cannot “displace the reality of the murder of millions” of Jews. That is my very point; and it is the source of my dissent from this aspect of Styron’s novel.
It is particularly regrettable—because he is a teacher and influences new generations—that Paul V. Olsen falls identically into the all too common error of blurring distinctions when he states that “most victims were Jewish.” No; all victims of the Holocaust were Jews. The Nuremberg laws and the Final Solution, which are the defining elements of what has come to be known as the Holocaust, were directed at Jews and Jews only (how often must this be emphasized?). In a speech in January 1939, Hitler looked forward to “the annihilation [Vernichtung] of the Jewish race in Europe”; nothing could be more explicit. That is why Mr. Olsen, contrary to his empathic conviction, is not teaching “Holocaust literature” if he is under the impression that the subject of such a literature is the prevalence of evil. The subject of an authentic Holocaust literature is the plan to wipe out the Jews of Europe (how often must this be reiterated?). That is the “inmost meaning” of the Holocaust; nothing else. Why is there so much resistance to (I will not say denial of) this self-evident historical datum?
Evil manifests itself in this and that population, yes, and too frequently in the form of genocide or attempted genocide. These distinct events deserve their own definitions and commemorations. But the Holocaust cannot be generalized into abstract Evil, or handled as a kind of template to be laid over every atrocity in the record of man’s inhumanity to man. To generalize is to expunge. The Holocaust is recognizable only in its own terms; it signifies what was done to the Jews of Europe at a specific time by a specific regime and its specific supporters. To use the Holocaust to symbolize, typify, exemplify, or allegorize is to dilute and obscure, even to crush, its historicity. If Mr. Olsen is moved to teach Holocaust literature, he would do better to assign the reading of Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved, or Lawrence Langer’s excellent anthology, Art from the Ashes. And for the sake of his students’ clarity he should not confuse the Holocaust—wherein hatred went in one direction only and a nation murdered its own unarmed and passionately loyal citizens—with the American Civil War, or with Native American or African tribal conflicts, in which two sides, both well equipped with weapons and reciprocal enmity, clashed in mutual fury.
A.C. Smith’s metaphorical version of The Reader—illiteracy standing for moral illiteracy—would certainly save Bernhard Schlink’s novel, if only there were internal evidence for it. On the contrary, Mr. Schlink’s unlettered protagonist is depicted throughout as yearning for the bookish world of moral intellect; how can this be a metaphor for blindness to it?
To Herman F. Wolfs discussion of the Wilkomirski controversy, one might add a bit of updating. Defending an award recently bestowed on Wilkomirski’s Fragments by the American Orthopsychiatric Association (many members of which are Jews), one psychologist stated: “We are honoring Mr. Wilkomirski not as historians or politicians, but as mental-health professionals. What he has written is important clinically.” From this it would be fair to conclude that “mental-health professionals” care nothing for historical evidence, and do not recognize when they are, in fact, acting politically. If Mr. Wilkomirski is indeed a fabricator, then to laud him is to take a stand—politically—on the side of those who insist that the Holocaust is fabrication. In any case, how does it advance the public cause of mental health to encourage a possible public liar who is possibly an opportunist and possibly a madman?
David Zebelman, while he is right on target otherwise, overlooks the most insidious threat to what has been called “the future of the Holocaust”—and that is Roberto Benigni’s open and obvious and exuberant good will. Unfortunately, when a benevolent intent accompanies an outrageous distortion of documented truth, a precedent is set for the gradual erosion of an honest and honorable historical perspective. It was Benigni’s film that inspired the Public Theater’s Community Affairs Department to sponsor a panel discussion on “Humor and the Holocaust.” This event was designed to promote Lisa Kron’s “solo show,” 2.5 Minute Ride, which juxtaposes a visit to an Ohio amusement park with a visit to Auschwitz. A letter from the Public Theater describes the show as “by turns audacious, moving, and very funny.” As for the panel itself, its purpose was to “address an issue that is central to Lisa’s work and to films like Life is Beautiful—namely, how contemporary artists are using humor and comedy as a context through which audiences can bear witness to the Holocaust more than 50 years later.”
So here we are, more than 50 years later. On the one hand, evil is (as Allen Ginsberg once described the world’s religions) alleesamee. And on the other hand: ha ha ha.
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