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1THE HOLOCAUST IS DYING

When I consider the mass murder of Europe’s Jews, the words I findforming in my mind seem ominous, yet self-evident; alarming, but true: theHolocaust is dying. How can this be? How can one of the most catastrophicevents in modern times—if not the most catastrophic event in modern times—be dying? What does it mean to say we turn to the disaster now withheightened awareness that it is dying? Most dramatically, of course, thoseindividuals who personally survived the Shoah are dying out; their painfulyet requisite testimonies are drawing to a close. At the start of the twenty-firstcentury, all but the youngest to live through the wholesale expulsions, theghettos, the mass executions, the deportation centers and transports, thecattle cars, the concentration camps, the death pits have been buried inother countries, given the rituals and markers denied so many of their lostfamilies and friends. I will return to this important shift in post-Holocausttime, but first I want to underline a point many others have intuited, a pointmore disturbing in its way: namely that the Shoah has always been dying. Tosome degree, it has always been closed or forbidden to memory.∞

Throughout the late forties, the fifties, and the sixties, the Holocaust wasdying. After the war, the French government’s obstruction of the trials of

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Vichy officials, the removal of Jews from civic positions in Poland, the liqui-dation of Jewish cultural organizations within the USSR, the proclamationat the German Evangelical Conference that the genocide was a spiritual callon Jews to accept the divinity of Christ—all these events bespoke a dismissalor denial of the disaster (Cohn-Sherbok 209–21). Neither the social scien-tists nor the psychologists or theologians of these countries broached thesubject matter of the Shoah in a sustained intellectual enterprise. Both onthe Continent and in the United States, prominent philosophers avoidedthe topic as assiduously as did leading literary and historical writers.≤ Givenincredulity about or indifference to earlier reports of the calamity, guiltengulfing viewers of newsreels and photographs about the liberation of thecamps may have contributed to the idea that humanists needed to considerthe universal condition, that any scrutiny of the particular ( Jewish) expe-rience would be construed as parochial or self-incriminating. Hollywoodmovie producers eschewed the subject altogether, while the only Europeanfilm documentary about the genocide avoided mentioning the Jews.≥ InLondon, the Imperial War Museum’s growing installations about the Sec-ond World War made hardly any reference to the murder of the six million.Swiss bankers continued to invest Jewish moneys, and Polish landlords con-tinued to own Jewish properties. The German company Topf of Wiesbaden,which had designed and assembled the Nazi ovens, operated under its origi-nal name, building crematoria for civilian use until the mid-1970s, thedecade when Kurt Waldheim, a former soldier in the Waffen SS, served assecretary-general of the United Nations. In the 1980s, Austrians electedhim their president.

Just as distressing, the children of survivors scattered around the globesuffered the anguish of parents whose ‘‘horror . . . prevented them fromtalking either about the dead, or of anything but the dead—as if life itself hadbeen confiscated by those disappearances.’’ What in a later study the Frenchpsychologist Nadine Fresco would consider the raw edges of ‘‘wounds ofmemory’’ pained parents and their offspring, plunging them into ‘‘the voidof the unspeakable’’ (419). In his influential work on catastrophic experi-ences, Robert Jay Lifton documented ‘‘decreased or absent feeling eitherduring or after trauma,’’ a protective ‘‘numbing’’ that sealed survivors inspeechlessness (interview by Caruth, 134). According to Aharon Appelfeld,what had happened ‘‘was so gigantic, so inconceivable, that the witness evenseemed like a fabricator to himself’’ (86). Michael Berenbaum, a director ofthe U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, used the fate of Lot’s wife to explainthe survivors’ antipathy to introspection: ‘‘a person cannot afford to lookback while fleeing’’ (qtd. in J. Miller 15). Anguish, traumatic numbing,uncomprehending shock at the surreal proportions of the horror, and aheroic resolve to rebuild a fractured life beyond the shadow of death’skingdom may have contributed to the dying of the Holocaust in the fortiesand fifties. But the Shoah was also being killed by anti-Semites, who dis-

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avowed the atrocities or blamed them on the victims; and by a number ofassimilated American Jews as well as some Israelis who sought to craft anidentity outside of bigotry, worrying that any attention to the disaster wouldbring further harm to Jewish people.∂

Highly effective if only because of the multiple motivations of diversepopulations, the conspiracy in the forties and fifties to nullify the Holocaustwas brought to public attention and defeated by the first generation ofHolocaust studies advocates. The period between 1959 and 1963 serves asone signpost for this transition because in those years The Diary of Anne Frank

premiered as a movie, Elie Wiesel’s Night appeared in translation, and theEichmann trial was reported around the world from Jerusalem; 1967 isanother because the victory of the Six Day War ‘‘miraculously’’ unburdenedthe American Jewish community ‘‘of its commitment to subordinate, evento repress the death camps’’ (Morgan 158). From the seventies on, the pi-oneers of this field—Elie Wiesel and Saul Friedlander, Lawrence Langerand Alvin Rosenfeld, Raul Hilberg and Yehuda Bauer, Terrence Des Presand Emil Fackenheim—explored the significance of those voices we nowassociate with the Holocaust canon: Charlotte Delbo, Primo Levi, AnneFrank, Jean Améry, Tadeusz Borowski, Dan Pagis, Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs.Just as important, the emphasis first-generation scholars placed on the valueof remembering led to the establishment of archives, memorials, and mu-seums around the world.

Yet as these learned thinkers themselves at times intuited, the Holocaustwas still dying throughout the seventies, eighties, and nineties. Was it para-doxically imperiled by their very insistence on keeping it alive as a singularevent in history—not merely unprecedented but inexplicable and unrepre-sentable? For if the earlier period threatened to erase the Shoah in a killingsilence, the first generation of Holocaust historians buried it in the Euro-pean past by claiming it could not be compared to any other phenomenonor should be approached only by those personally involved. Primo Leviemphasized the uniqueness of a Nazi system that he called ‘‘a unicum ’’ (DS

21), that Zygmunt Bauman believed ‘‘stands alone, [bearing] no meaning-ful comparison with other massacres’’ (32): ‘‘To generalize or universalizethe victims of the Holocaust is not only to profane their memories,’’ myfriend and colleague Alvin Rosenfeld has argued, ‘‘but to exonerate theirexecutioners’’ (DD 160). For Saul Friedlander, ‘‘the ‘Final Solution,’ as aresult of its apparent historical exceptionality, could well be inaccessible toall attempts at a significant representation and interpretation’’ (MHE 113).According to Claude Lanzmann, too, ‘‘the absolute horror’’ of Auschwitzand Treblinka ‘‘cannot be compared to anything’’ and ‘‘is not transmissible’’(‘‘HH’’ 307, 310). Berel Lang made the most absolute declaration when heclaimed that all ‘‘figurative representation’’ of genocide ‘‘will diminish themoral understanding’’ of it (AING 150). About the composition of litera-ture and in particular the production of verse, which is the subject of this

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book, the 1949 judgment of Theodor Adorno was taken to be as axiomaticas the biblical commandment against graven images: ‘‘To write poetry afterAuschwitz is barbaric’’ (‘‘CCS’’ 34). Even as the word ‘‘poetry’’ expandedand contracted in meaning—it was understood to signify any and all formsof representation, poetry as a genre, or aesthetic work about the Shoah—the sentence sometimes was taken to be an admonition (beware of writingpoetry), sometimes a directive (poetry ought not be written), sometimessimply a diagnosis (poetry cannot be written).∑

The fundamental logic that seems to encase the Holocaust in silence orsingularity and that prompted Adorno’s renowned dictum cannot be dis-missed as draconian, for art itself—once manipulated by the Nazis as anaccoutrement of torture—proved to be implicated in the problem of the‘‘Final Solution.’’∏ That Germany’s extraordinary cultural capital had madeit centrally representative of Western civilization hardly inspired confidencein the ethical power of creativity or the moral influence of those monumentsof unaging intellect many of its citizens so venerated. Literary responses tothe Holocaust might seem particularly preposterous after the contamina-tion of German signaled the failure of language, indeed the spoiling of thevery concept of language. Even the best-intentioned aesthetic and pedagog-ic presentations would fail to convey the full horror or might anaesthetizeaudiences grown callous about a closed set of recycled artifacts that could besaid to reap their own commercial gains from grievous losses. Indeed, any-one who participates in the academic field of Holocaust studies inevitablyconfronts the danger of ‘‘consuming trauma’’ (the phrase is Patricia Yae-ger’s), converting grievous suffering into rhetorical pleasure or professionalprofit in much the manner of those creative writers faulted for finding artis-tic gratification in imaginative responses to the Shoah.

But if only the reports of those who personally witnessed the destructionof the Jewish people can be judged meaningful, if efforts to make the eventconsequential by and for those born after it are deemed a profanation of thedead or an exoneration of their murderers, then the Holocaust is doomedto expire. ‘‘Even our insistence on the exceptionality of the Shoah maybecome an isolating maneuver,’’ Geoffrey Hartman has warned, ‘‘ratherthan purely and strongly an acknowledgment’’ (‘‘BD’’ 331). The argumentfor singularity could easily ‘‘become diversionary,’’ Dominick LaCapra ex-plains, ‘‘in that all events are both comparable and singular or unique, andthe historical question concerns the nature and function . . . of comparisonsthat delineate a specific configuration of similarities and differences’’ (HMA

55). According to Naomi Mandel, a self-congratulatory ‘‘rhetoric of un-speakability explicitly effaces the ‘drastic guilt’ of post-Holocaust culture, aculture that must confront its identity as the product of the presence of theHolocaust in its history’’ (223). No matter how well-intentioned, the firstgeneration of Holocaust scholars threatened to eradicate the Shoah by stip-

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ulating that the bankruptcy of analogizing or generalizing meant only thosepersonally victimized could speak for or about the event.

Acceptable genres included documentaries, testimonials, diaries, andhistories—eyewitness accounts—but not poetry, fiction, drama, or visualworks composed by those who had watched documentaries, heard testi-monials, and read diaries or histories. A number of artists and critics felt thatan ‘‘avid policing of representation’’ overvalued verisimilitude and authen-ticity (Flanzbaum, ‘‘BWIT’’ 273) or that survivors sometimes too jealouslyinsisted ‘‘on their exclusive rights to the Holocaust’’ (Kertész 267). Identitypolitics kept too tight a rein within Jewish studies on who could address thedisaster and how they should do so. (Might this emphasis on authenticityhave contributed to what Philip Gourevitch decried in the New Yorker as ‘‘thestealing of the Holocaust,’’ efforts of an imposter like Binjamin Wilkomirskito produce counterfeit testimonies and in the process become ‘‘memorythieves’’?)π To the extent that assaults were mounted against those whodeviated from the standard line, critical responses felt somehow prescribedor programmed. In particular, the concerted effort to bring gender intoHolocaust studies has met with considerable opposition, springing frommany people’s wariness about deflecting attention away from the Nazis’determination to exterminate all of Europe’s Jews and thus obfuscating thevulnerability Jewish men and women shared.∫ Faulted for serving ‘‘pro-pagandistic’’ purposes, feminists came under attack for analyses of women’sexperiences in the ghettoes and camps, studies that were said to insist ‘‘on amacabre sisterhood with the dead Jewish women of Europe’’ (Schoenfeld45, 46).

Initially scholarship probably had to make the claim of singularity tocounter a grotesquely willed obliviousness. We owe to the first generation’smeticulous exertions the deliverance of the Shoah from its imminent ex-tinction. That many of the forms created retrospectively did fail to honor thedead or blame their murderers by glossing over the particularity and opacityof the evil unfortunately substantiated the claim that the Shoah is not trans-missible. Whereas silence first threatened to eradicate memory, whereasnext an insistence on singularity censored who could speak and in whatcadences, a third method of killing the Holocaust surfaced during thesesame years in a proliferation of sometimes facile or banal reconstructionsthat fashioned the past to suit ideological and economic agendas of thepresent. Just as the memory of the Holocaust was being interred with theaging generation who were its immediate witness, TV programs and best-selling novels, fictionalized biographies and popular films jeopardized thathistory by commodifying or fetishizing events that continued to recedefurther from view.

After the movie version of Anne Frank, 1979 serves as a punctuation markfor this third phase of shrouding the Shoah in a blanket of media images,

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because in that year the television series Holocaust appeared; some wouldview 2001 as another because in that year Mel Brooks reinvented his 1968film The Producers for the Broadway stage. In her review of Schindler’s List

(1993), the New York Times film critic Janet Maslin worried that the ‘‘Holo-caust threatens to become unimaginable because it has been imagined sofully.’’ (Might this commercialization have contributed to the ‘‘consuming[of] trauma,’’ to ‘‘the stealing of the Holocaust’’ by ‘‘memory thieves,’’ or toa related phenomenon Geoffrey Hartman calls ‘‘memory envy’’—that is,one generation’s jealousy of an earlier generation’s recollections [‘‘WVT’’230]?) Regardless of how they are judged on their individual merits, therecan be no question about the public attention garnered by award-winningproductions from Sophie’s Choice (1982) to Life Is Beautiful (1998).

At the turn of the twentieth century, some feared that the multiplicationof images in popular culture threatened to turn what originally shockedinto schlock, or so warned an unsettling recycled jingle: ‘‘There’s no busi-ness like Shoah business.’’ A host of books argued that Holocaust memorydeformed Jewish religious identity, truncated Jewish sympathy for othervictimized groups, justified Israeli military aggression, or milked Germanguilt for materialistic gains.Ω Although the injunctions ‘‘never forget’’ and‘‘never again’’ continue to prompt the documentary excavations of archi-vists and curators, whose work presents artifacts not invented so much asrescued from the ruins, many of these same people worry that imaginativeaccounts of the atrocity by people personally uninvolved in it would exploitthe Shoah for sensational or self-interested purposes and thus reduce it toan assimilable and frightfully admissible (or repeatable) phenomenon. AHolocaust industry desecrates the dead.

Still, if the Shoah expires with those whose living it endangered, if mem-ory is interred with the eyewitnesses, many of these same people dread thatit will be reborn at some sinister future time, in some unforeseeably repul-sive place. Despite the difficulties of knowing how to speak of the dead, howto speak to the dead, how to speak for the dead, what the dying of the lastHolocaust survivors at the turn of the century teaches us is the necessityof keeping the Holocaust alive—now through the exertions of those whonever struggled within its ghastly regimes. Not that one can construct aclean, complete break between the generations affected by the Holocaustor, for that matter, between factual and fictive responses to it, since themessiness of history and literature blurs all such hard-and-fast distinctions.∞≠

In any case, though, ‘‘the criterion for representing the Holocaust cannotjust be propriety or awe as would be appropriate in the face of a cult object,’’Andreas Huyssen has declared, adding that given its ubiquity as a trope inWestern culture as well as its multiple representations, ‘‘there cannot beonly one way of representing it’’ (256–57). In addition, the argument ofradical singularity or uniqueness will not sustain the exertions of thosesecond-generation artists and scholars who feel they have to create analo-

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gies, installations, metaphors, performances, and portraits to evoke an evermore distant atrocity that occurred before some of them were born. Turn-of-the-century belatedness means that these figures and symbols mustpowerfully resist not only pervasive forces of cultural amnesia but also thosewho would capitalize on the calamity. ‘‘The past can be seized only as animage which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is neverseen again,’’ Walter Benjamin has explained; ‘‘every image of the past that isnot recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disap-pear irretrievably’’ (I 255).

why poetry matters

Twenty-first-century artists and scholars who address the Holocaust willbe more diverse than their predecessors in regional, ethnic, and religiousaffiliation and in the media as well as the methodologies they utilize. Under-standing that their work occurs during the inexorable dying of the Holo-caust, such thinkers will nevertheless strive to make the present see the pastas one of its crucial, ongoing concerns so as to ensure it will not disappearirretrievably. Those of us who know that the Holocaust is dying shoulddiscern the ways it can be recognized and felt in the present; we must keep italive as dying. Since not-writing about the Shoah would constitute a Nazivictory, one way to evade indulging in self-serving forms of recollectioninvolves taking seriously the idea that our stake in the fates of the murderedmust be considered along with the stake they have in us.∞∞ Because fascistrhetoric turned Jews into parasites, vermin or germs or poisoners to beexterminated, perhaps we will evade too vacuous or too lurid, too theatricalor too theoretical, too glib or too sanctimonious a tone by keeping steadilybefore our eyes the sinister potential of our own rhetoric to imperil thehumanity of its subjects.

Oddly enough, given Adorno’s injunction against it, poetry serves animportant function here, for it abrogates narrative coherence and therebymarks discontinuity. By so doing, it facilitates modes of discourse that de-note the psychological and political, ethical and aesthetic consequences ofthe calamity without laying claim to experiencing or comprehending it in itstotality. In an effort to signal the impossibility of a sensible story, the poetprovides spurts of vision, moments of truth, baffling but nevertheless power-ful pictures of scenes unassimilated into an explanatory plot and thus seizesthe past ‘‘as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recog-nized and is never seen again.’’ According to Benjamin, images (not stories,which tend to recount the past so as to account for it) put the ‘‘then’’ of thepast into a dialectical relationship with the ‘‘now’’ of the present, constitutea critique of the myth of progress, and promote mindfulness about how thepast continues to exist as an outrage in the present.∞≤ More recently, Saul

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Friedlander has worried whether ‘‘an event like the ‘Final Solution’ allow[s]for any kind of narrative, or does it foreclose certain narrative modalities?Does it perhaps escape the grasp of a plausible narrative altogether?’’ (‘‘FS’’18). That the Nazis set out to murder not individual Jewish people (chargedwith specific beliefs or acts) but a corporate collectivity (any and all Jewseverywhere) abrogates the individualized ‘‘agency that shapes literary plot,’’Berel Lang believes (AING 147). In search of an alternative to a silence thatwould breed amnesia, Rachel Adler has pointed to ‘‘Lament’s capacity torepresent a pre-narrative or non-narrative state [which] gives it a uniquecapability to preserve what is irreducible and inexplicable about evil, curb-ing narrative’s tendency to assign causes and meanings, to use storytelling tomend the unmendable’’ (167).

Verse can violate narrative logic as completely as does trauma itself. Whenpsychologists of trauma explain the significance of the flashback in the laterlives of the injured, they view it as a form of recall that recovers a past sohorrific at the time that it cannot be fully taken into consciousness. Whatsubsequently return, years after the distress, are excruciating experiences soagonizing that they could not be integrated into what the psychologist PierreJanet called ‘‘narrative memory’’ (Van der Kolk and Van der Hart 160).∞≥

Like the flashback unassimilated into a story about the past (and like aphotograph from the past), poetry can present images that testify to thetruth of an event as well as its incomprehensibility—or its limited com-prehensibility as a piece of a larger phenomenon that itself still defies under-standing.∞∂ Like symptoms in the aftermath of trauma, lyrical utterance oftenannounces itself as an involuntary return to intense feelings about an incom-prehensible moment. But recollected in relative safety, if not tranquillity,such a moment rendered in writing allows authors and readers to grapplewith the consequences of traumatic pain without being silenced by it.

Not plausible reparation, explanation, or closure, but the fracturing of apresent understood to be shot through with haunting chips of the ‘‘wreck-age upon wreckage’’ that still is the past (Benjamin, I 257): politically in-spired lyricists aspire to this historical work in their attentiveness to theHolocaust. Maybe this is why Seamus Heaney has argued that ‘‘The redress-ing effect of poetry comes from its being a glimpsed alternative, a revelationof potential that is denied or constantly threatened by circumstances’’ (RP

4). The concept of revelation surfaces in Joseph Brodsky’s view about whatdistinguishes poetry from other forms of literature as well, for he believesverse taps three kinds of cognition—analytical, intuitive, and the ‘‘pro-phetic mode’’ of revelation—while ‘‘gravitating primarily toward the secondand third’’ (58). In this perhaps mystic manner, Heaney (considering theimagination as an agent that puts us in touch with what has not but couldhave happened) and Brodsky (viewing the imagination as an instrument ofalternative forms of thinking about what happened) appear to feel that thebest poets fulfill Benjamin’s definition of the most adroit historian: ‘‘Only

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that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past whois firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if hewins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious’’ (I 255).

However, poetry about the European cataclysm has gone largely ignored.Books of testimonials (and scholarly assessments of eyewitness accounts)abound, as do novels (and critical books about fiction). Not only films butalso commentaries on them have proliferated. In addition, histories, pho-tographic collections, philosophical treatises, and theological tracts havemultiplied. Why no appraisals of verse—particularly verse composed in theEnglish language?∞∑ The recent publication of a number of anthologies thatinclude poetry—Ghosts of the Holocaust, Blood to Remember, Truth and Lamenta-

tion, Holocaust Poetry, Art from the Ashes, Telling and Remembering, and Beyond

Lament—has now facilitated a possible critical assessment.∞∏ But none hasbeen forthcoming, possibly because of widespread academic disregard ofverse; probably because the reasoning behind Adorno’s injunction under-mined the reputation of poetry about Auschwitz, making it taboo; perhapsbecause of the other issue I am raising, namely that such verse has beencomposed predominately by nonparticipants.

‘‘Elie Wiesel, Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs can touch the horror with author-ity,’’ Harold Bloom has averred, ‘‘but British and American writers need toavoid it, as we have no warrant for imagination in that most terrible of areas’’(257). Although in the next chapter we will see exactly how difficult it is tolocate a distinct line demarcating Wiesel, Celan, and Sachs from British andNorth American writers, scholarly study, thus far primarily devoted to theevents of 1933 to 1945, has quite rightly concentrated on the creative worksproduced by those who lived through them. Yet despite Bloom’s caveats, theproliferation of Holocaust poems in English turns our attention not awayfrom those events but toward their reverberations as they affect a series ofgenerations searching for a means to keep alive the urgency of continuingto confront a past as it passes out of personal recollection. The ‘‘warrant forimagination’’ consists, then, in a psychological, ethical, and historical needto remember what one never knew.

Faced with the brutalities of history, of course, literature has rarely beeneffectual. In his elegy ‘‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats,’’ W. H. Auden put it thisway: ‘‘poetry makes nothing happen’’ (SP 80). The ‘‘efficacy of poetry isnil—no lyric has ever stopped a tank,’’ Seamus Heaney agreed (GT 107).Earlier, in one of the first protests against fascism by a non-Jew in Englishpoetry, Ada Jackson drew attention to the futility of her own verse about thegenocide of the Jews in a line she placed in the middle of her page withoutfinal punctuation: ‘‘While you read they die’’ (22).∞π Exactly this revulsionagainst the frivolity of verse infused the Columbia University literature stu-dent Lucy Dawidowicz when she heard a professor droning on about thepoetry of William Wordsworth in 1937, as the European Jewish world wasbeing decimated: ‘‘What is Wordsworth to me at this time?’’ the future histo-

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rian of The War against the Jews wondered, determining to visit the imperiledcenters of Yiddish culture in Poland (qtd. in Rosenbaum 374–75). Still, asHeaney explained decades after the war, within the rift between the horrorof the killings that occurred and what we would have hoped or assumedmight have happened, even self-confessedly impotent poetry (like that byAda Jackson) manages to hold ‘‘attention for a space, functions not as dis-traction but as pure concentration, a focus where our power to concentrateis concentrated back on ourselves’’ (GT 108).

And, as Ron Rosenbaum has shown, Dawidowicz’s literary critical trainingin the ‘‘subtextual ambiguities’’ of Wordsworth shaped her brilliant insightsinto Hitler’s use of ‘‘ ‘esoteric language’ and euphemism to create the false

impression of hesitation and calculation, a false impression that concealedan unswerving, relentless, decades-long determination to exterminate theJews’’ (380, 373). Obviously, the point here is not that Hitler was like Words-worth, but that Hitler’s regime depended on the deployment of elaboraterhetorical conceits and deceits (in rallies, speeches, songs, governmentaldocuments and programs) about which artists have always been supremelyconscious. Whether or not one agrees with Joseph Brodsky that a personwith literary taste is ‘‘less susceptible to the refrains and the rhythmicalincantations peculiar to any version of political demagogy,’’ the effort ofcontemporary poets to tap the ‘‘colossal centrifugal energy’’ of languagecan instruct readers about what is wrong with our ordinary everyday lan-guages and with demagogic discourses: namely ‘‘that they corrupt con-sciousness with their easiness, with the speed with which they provide onewith moral comfort, with the sensation of being right’’ (49, 57, 54).

Because it discloses the linguistic crisis inaugurated by the Third Reich butalso because it marks time as ‘‘the imagination press[es] back against thepressure of reality’’ (Heaney, RP 1), verse as a genre plays an important rolein demarcating the consequences of the phenomenon Geoffrey Hartmaneloquently noted when, shifting his critical gaze from Wordsworth to theHolocaust, he described how the passage of years renders forgetting andremembering equally difficult, even for those personally embroiled in thepast: ‘‘An event like the Shoah, a political mass murder targeting for extinc-tion an entire ‘race’ of defenseless non-combatants, . . . cannot now, after theevent, be taken into mind without a severe disturbance. . . . I cannot forget any

more than I can truly remember’’ (‘‘IDV’’ 17, 22). The ‘‘precision with whichpoems deal with time,’’ according to C. K. Williams, can provide access to acalamity that can neither be forgotten nor remembered, for the ‘‘momentsof a poem are very intense, very discrete and vivid; you’re moved throughthem, and through time, in a formal way, with a kind of double consciousnessthat makes you very aware of other realms, the moral, the ethical and politi-cal.’’ No doubt aware that poetry has often taken as its inspiration the motherof the Muses, Mnemosyne (Memory, whose ancestor is Forgetting), he goes

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on to describe the mental state that verse evokes: ‘‘It’s like being in a church,or in prayer. . . . you’re attentive to your consciousness’’ (‘‘I’’ 130). Like thesongs inserted into biblical narratives, twentieth-century poems about theShoah use a kind of interpretive insistence, a sustained ‘‘act of attention,’’ torespond to or analyze preexistent literature; to fill in lacunae in the historicalrecord; to curse evil or praise good; to witness against wrongdoing; to cautionagainst ignorance and amnesia, which result in unteachability; and to under-score the central significance of what is deemed to be a decisive convulsion inculture.∞∫

The resistance of verse to narrative closure and the prayerlike attentive-ness it fosters enhance its ability to ‘‘engage with states that themselveswould deprive us of language and reduce us to passive sufferers,’’ as Adri-enne Rich has suggested (WIFT 10). A commitment to poetry’s ability to‘‘break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones of feel-ing’’ (xiv), informs Rich’s attempt to ‘‘severely parse’’ Adorno’s drastic state-ment against poetry after Auschwitz:

Adorno, a German Jew who lived for many years as a refugee in the UnitedStates, may have forgotten the ancient role of poetry in keeping memoryand spiritual community alive. On the other hand, his remark might bepondered by all poets who too fluently find language for what they have notyet absorbed, who see human suffering as ‘‘material.’’ (141)

Charles Bernstein agrees with Rich: ‘‘In contrast to—or is it an extensionof?—Adorno’s famous remarks about the impossibility of (lyric?) poetryafter Auschwitz, I would say poetry is a necessary way to register the unrepre-sentable loss of the Second World War’’ (217). In a 1987 Nobel lecture towhich the poet Irving Feldman would return, Joseph Brodsky added hisassent: ‘‘ ‘How can one write poetry after Auschwitz?’ inquired Adorno. . . .‘And how can one eat lunch?’ the American poet Mark Strand once retorted.In any case, the generation to which I belong has proven capable of writingthat poetry’’ (55). Even after devastation, Brodsky and Strand remind us, thehuman activities (of eating lunch, of writing poetry) necessarily go on.Brodsky, who views the analytic, intuitive, and revelatory modes of cognitionat work in verse writing as ‘‘an extraordinary accelerator of consciousness,’’believes that ‘‘the generation born precisely at the time when the Auschwitzcrematoria were working full blast, when Stalin was at the zenith of hisgodlike, absolute power, . . . came into the world’’ to ‘‘continue what, theoret-ically, was supposed to be interrupted in those crematoria and in the anony-mous common graves of Stalin’s archipelago’’ (56, 55).

Prefaced through its epigraph by Brodsky’s quotation of Strand, theopening of Feldman’s poem ‘‘Outrage Is Anointed by Levity, or Two Laure-ates A-Lunching’’ takes issue with the idea that it is absurd to worry abouteither writing poetry or eating lunch after Auschwitz, making it clear that

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the Nobel laureate’s assertion—‘‘In any case, the generation to which Ibelong has proven capable of writing that poetry’’—depends on verse inex-orably, obsessively haunted by the legitimacy of Adorno’s logic:

In any case, (or, as our comedians say,‘‘But seriously, folks’’), has Adorno’s questionbeen disposed of, interred beneath the poemswritten since Auschwitz?—rather than raised againand again like a ghost by each of them? (48)

Feldman, angered by Mark Strand’s levity and resorting to the self-mockeryof a stand-up comedian like Lenny Bruce or Mort Sahl, goes on to lambastegodlike bards spewing pearls of wisdom about Auschwitz, even as he insiststhat poets tap an outrage anointed by levity to keep the significance of‘‘Adorno’s question’’ alive. Beyond poetry’s ability to draw attention to theinanity of the poetic—and by extension, literary culture’s—enterprise, thefact that verse is read only by a small audience has paradoxically liberatedsome writers to use it for their most private, self-incriminating thoughts.

Does the societal marginality of poetry—how often does it pay for lunchby getting bought by Hollywood directors or staged on Broadway?—set itsaesthetic attentiveness beyond commercialized ventures that merely exacer-bate efforts to eliminate the Shoah from public consciousness or, for thatmatter, to retain it there in debased, melodramatic formats? Because, asJahan Ramazani puts it, the ‘‘exceptional figural and formal density’’ ofverse mediates experience in ‘‘a less transparent medium’’ than that ofprose; the opacity of its allusions and figurative devices, rhythmic and stan-zaic patterns, symbols and paradoxes allows poets to manifest aestheticallythe representational crisis all artists, teachers, and scholars face in theirapproach to the Shoah (HM 4). Even though lyric poetry itself can bemelodramatic and debased, what Ramazani calls the ‘‘richly conflictual rela-tion between postcolonial poets and the English language’’ remains reso-nant for authors dealing with both the incongruity of the English languagein foreign, European contexts and the jarring dissonance between, on theone hand, lyrical forms expressive of personal feelings and, on the other,events never personally experienced (HM 13). Just as important, poetryafter Auschwitz displays the ironic friction between the lyric’s traditionalinvestment in voicing subjectivity and a history that assaulted not only innu-merable sovereign subjects but indeed the very idea of sovereign selfhood.

Finally, the rigorous linguistic vigilance and originality of poetry enable itto step into the cognitive crisis inaugurated by the Shoah. Because the factsbearing the traces of Auschwitz were destroyed ‘‘as much as possible,’’ ac-cording to Jean-François Lyotard, ‘‘Its name marks the confines whereinhistorical knowledge sees its competence impugned’’ (D 57–58). Lyotard,whose speculations uncover the grim interface between the reasoning ofthose who insist on the Shoah’s inaccessibility to representation and those

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who deny its ever having occurred, crystallizes the denier’s logic this way: ‘‘inorder for a place to be identified as a gas chamber, the only eyewitness I willaccept would be a victim of this gas chamber; now . . . there is no victim thatis not dead; otherwise, this gas chamber would not be what he or she claimsit to be. There is, therefore, no gas chamber’’ (3–4).∞Ω When the wrongsuffered cannot be signified in accepted or extant idioms, new idioms mustbe found to express how what remains to be said exceeds what can presentlybe articulated. By providing ‘‘idioms which do not yet exist,’’ poets of thedisaster prove that ‘‘the silence imposed on knowledge does not impose thesilence of forgetting, it imposes a feeling’’ or a constellation of feelings (13,56). Sometimes through the originality of their thinking or the veracity oftheir truth-claims about history, more often through stylistic decisions thataffect tone and stance, writers who deploy the more expressive, less repre-sentational forms of verse convey a range of feelings that forestall ‘‘thesilence of forgetting.’’≤≠

In my original title for this book—‘‘Poetry Nach Auschwitz’’—I plannedto use the interruption of a foreign word to signal the struggle of presentingwhat has not been, could not have been seen by British and North Americanwriters determined to find sufficient authority to prove that the Holocaustexisted and inflicted grievous harm. Indeed, at their most audacious, someof these literary men and women invent the voices of eyewitnesses of the gaschamber at the very moment their speakers understand it to be what theyclaim it to be. Yet the decided gap between the ghastly ‘‘then’’ of genocideand the safe ‘‘now’’ of retrospection, the frightful ‘‘there’’ of atrocity andthe secure ‘‘here’’ of reflection made the English word ‘‘after’’ a more ap-propriate sign of the repercussions of composing at a geographic and tem-poral removal from the calamity. The phrase ‘‘after Auschwitz’’ in my title ismeant to redirect Adorno’s prohibition—usually interpreted as a warningagainst or forbidding of imaginative representation in general—back to theramifications of his specification of poetry, in particular poetry aboutAuschwitz. In addition, my title’s translation of Adorno is meant to indicatethat the verse about Auschwitz I study is as much inflected by American andBritish literary history as it is by the Bible or by Yiddish, Polish, German,Romanian, French, and Hebrew responses to the Shoah.

two illustrative poets

Mobilized against the forces of fascism, the contemporary verse to which Iwill turn in subsequent pages—dedicated, as it is, to the local, the particular,the specific—resists the tendency to trivialize the Shoah by drawing from itbanal, complacent, or palliative lessons. To the objection that such provi-sional or exact words could not possibly attain the aesthetic grandeur ofworks from earlier times, it is instructive to remember the ideological under-