Holocaust studies / Inevitable fragments of nostalgia - Haaretz Daily Newspaper
http://www.ghostsofhome.com/blog/2010/07/haaretz-review-by-leon-botstein.html
Ghosts of Home:
The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory
by Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer
University of California Press, 392 pages, $39.95
As time goes by, the Holocaust and the ordinary lives lived by Jews throughout Central Europe before the 1930s recede as experience remembered. The witnesses and survivors diminish in number dramatically each year. But even for survivors who were young when the war ended in 1945, the trauma of expulsion, flight and brutalization was compounded by the exceptional fate of survival in the face of mass terror and murder. This made recollection and storytelling about the war and the world that it destroyed more complicated, selective and unreliable than retelling generally is.
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A synagogue in Czernowitz in the 1920s |
| Photo by: "Ghosts of Home," courtesy of the authors |
Talking about the past among the families of
survivors was particularly difficult. Why did some make it when most
did not? No matter how witnesses dealt with the past, whether in
silence and secrecy or through obsessive engagement and idealization,
the generation that followed, the children, felt overwhelmed as much by
what was left unexplained, by the gaps and contradictions, as much as
by what was said.
For children born during the war and shortly
thereafter, the challenge was to construct a coherent history that
approximated the verifiable and simplistic sense of the past shared by
children with families and homes that were comparatively intact.
Delving into the past became imperative, if only to reject it. This
predicament led the authors of this book, distinguished scholars who
have spent much of their lives dealing with memory and history, and
both of whom are themselves children of survivors, to write about
Czernowitz, the place from which their parents, and their parents’
closest friends, came and about which their parents spoke constantly.
The authors brought their aged parents back to
Czernowitz, today a city called Chernivtsi, in Ukraine, after the fall
of the Soviet Union. They returned without them several times as they
gathered material for a book, researched the Jewish history of the
city, joined other survivors and children of survivors in a group
“roots” trip, participated in the burgeoning online community of
descendants, and worked to establish a museum that would document
prewar Jewish life in Czernowitz.
One particularly compelling part of the book
describes how the authors, after completing their initial visits and
research, then re-examined prewar and wartime family photographs in an
effort to better understand the predicaments their parents faced and
how they responded.
At the core of the book is a familiar paradox.
Czernowitz was a thriving center of Jewish life and culture from the
mid-19th century until World War II. The Jews in the city and its
immediate environs, in the region of Bukowina, included traditional and
religious Jews, activists and pioneers in the world of Yiddish culture
and politics, all manner of Zionist organizations and proponents of the
Hebrew language, acculturated German-speaking citizens loyal (in the
spirit of Joseph Roth) to the Habsburg monarchy, Jews who were
communists, and to a far lesser degree, Jews who embraced the Romanian
culture rather than the German. The astonishing variety and vitality in
Jewish life before 1939 speak to the multi-generational stability and
health of the community, notwithstanding the ever-present anti-Semitism
among aristocrats and peasants of all ethnicities, notably Ukrainian
and Romanian.
One of the most difficult things for any Jew
alive today is to understand and accept with empathy how normal and how
rooted Jews were in Eastern and Central Europe, particularly under
Habsburg rule, in the era before Hitler. Those who immigrated to
America and Palestine between 1880 and 1938 were a minority. For most
of the Jews living in Czernowitz − and indeed all over Europe − the
Holocaust, despite Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s prophetic warnings, was not a
predictable historical inevitability, a catastrophe that could have
been foreseen if only Jews, particularly those comfortably integrated
into the middle-class culture of educated German-speaking urban elites,
had possessed a more candid and pessimistic understanding of the
radical implications of late 19th-century European anti-Semitism.
The variety of Jewish reactions − first to the
rise of fascism, particularly Nazism, and then to the threat and
reality of war − correlated with differences in class and geographical
location, and with the ways Jews defined themselves culturally and
politically. The way the victims thought about what was happening and
what might happen − the choices individuals believed they faced − in
turn mirrored expectations drawn from different constructs of the
history and place of the Jews. Zionists and Communists reacted
differently from each other, and those with allegiances to the legacy
of a more benign Habsburg dynastic politics had yet another response.
A lost, almost mythic home
But
Hirsch and Spitzer’s book is not about what happened and why. Rather,
it is an effort to reconstruct the world before the destruction, more
through the prism of survivor recollection than through historical
research. The book does offer some straight history as well, such as a
long overdue account of the brutality of the Romanian participation in
the persecution and extermination of Jews. Written by authors born
during the war years who have no direct memories of that period,
“Ghosts of Home” seeks to paint a picture by negotiating memory as
distorted by nostalgia, denial, shame and fear. The authors’ goal was
to gain an image for themselves of a lost, almost mythic home and
heritage.
As someone born after the war in Europe of
Eastern European Jewish parents, I empathize with the impulse
eloquently and unabashedly put forth by the authors, a husband-and-wife
team. They were both brought up with a language from a home they never
knew. They heard endless tales of a place they could only conjure in
their imaginations, constructed at best with the help of a few
photographs that chronicled individuals who, for the most part, did not
survive. They tasted the food and absorbed the habits and prejudices of
a world at once sentimentalized and reviled. Much as the authors would
like to resist the temptation to become sentimental and selective, by
taking as a starting point the process of survival, the extension of
memory and the return of their parents to the place they once called
home and in which they had been young, they cannot help but leave
readers with an image of Czernowitz that raises more questions than it
answers.
For all the authors’ effort to interpolate a
more comprehensive and less blatantly subjective account of the past,
the personal is not transcended, neither by attempts at theoretical
musings on the nature of memory nor by close critical readings of the
tales of survivors themselves. But this is not a criticism, for the
book is about the present and our struggle with defining the past. To
deconstruct the personal would have demanded a heartlessness and
distance Hirsch and Spitzer thankfully lack.
By now the children of survivors are themselves
quite advanced in years. Most members of this second generation live in
the United States, Israel, Canada or Australia. What they have in
common is the experience of unanswered questions and extreme
contradictions. How can the violent destruction of Jews and Jewish life
between 1933 and 1945 be reconciled with the inevitable fragments of
nostalgia and the sense of loss that emerge from the idealization of a
pre-war culture, language and community life whose history extends back
to the late 19th century? And how can one describe the experience of
families before the restoration of ghettos, and the creation of
concentration camps, that does not conform to a reductive picture of
European Jewry?
That simplified account portrays Jews as either
deluded by the promise and reality of acculturation (notwithstanding
Gershom Scholem, the actual functioning symbiosis of middle-class Jews
and German culture), or as paralyzed, poor, provincial and profoundly
traditional (whether or not they are Hasidic) – the sort of Jews S.
Y. Agnon so brilliantly brought to life in his novels. How does one
reconcile the murder of family members and the loss of all worldly
possessions with fond memories of cafes, pastries and cute idioms that
evoke the use of German as the language of intimacy?
These questions led the authors to write an
unusual book, organized by a mix of past and present. Much of the
narrative is in the first person, structured by their visits to
Czernowitz, the first of which took place in the 1990s. Their subject
was once a multilingual city, many of whose Jewish inhabitants were
middle class and German-speaking. The city itself was, until 1918, an
important but provincial outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
In that period, Czernowitz saw itself as a
diminutive Vienna. Some Jews remember it as having a sense of grandeur,
while others saw it as limited, its aspirations notwithstanding. After
1918, the city became part of Romania; the Soviet Union took control of
it briefly, in 1941; and then it again became part of Romania.
Ultimately, it fell under Nazi occupation and became part of the Soviet
Union until the establishment of an independent Ukraine.
Appelfeld, Celan
What
justifies wider interest in Czernowitz and Bukowina is the remarkable
contribution to literature made by writers from the region, not only in
German but in Romanian and, in the case of Aharon Appelfeld, in Hebrew.
The most famous of these writers was Paul Celan, arguably the greatest
German poet of the second half of the 20th century. If Franz Kafka − a
Jew from Prague, a city distant from the center of German-speaking
Europe − has sparked interest in the social and cultural history of
that city’s Jewry, Celan has drawn attention to Czernowitz and the
history and culture of its Jews, if for no other reason than to shed
light on his origins and influences. This book makes clear how much any
language can gain from being used by people living far from a major
city and who are surrounded by many different languages, all used
interchangeably. This point was made powerfully by the young Fritz
Mauthner in the philosopher’s memoir of his own childhood in Prague.
To the authors’ credit, they are explicit in
warning the reader that their intent is not actually to find answers to
the nagging and impossible questions about the process of destruction
itself, or even about what was destroyed. What lends the book its
coherence is an attempt to probe the process of memory and, more
significantly, the logic of recollection. The Czernowitz that Hirsch
and Spitzer seek to recover through memory was largely defined by
language and the middle-class Jewish allegiance to all things German.
The city was defined by its role as a distant outpost of Habsburg
culture and its architectural and culinary evocations of Vienna. By
following the fate of a few families, the authors reveal the
self-appointed role assumed by many Jews as defenders of that Habsburg
identity. Hirsch and Spitzer communicate the shocking realization of
powerlessness brought to the Jews of Czernowitz through their
persecution by the Nazis, Romanians and Soviets.
This book is more about how we have chosen to
remember the Jewish experience in the past than it is about what that
past might actually have been like. But it is well worth reading as a
powerful account of survival and exile, and of the impact those
phenomena can have on children.
One learns more about Czernowitz the legend than
about the real people, politics and culture of the prewar city. For
that, those fluent in German should read Ilana Shmueli’s fine 2006
book, “Ein Kind aus guter Familie: Czernowitz 1924-1944.” But it is
precisely the gaps between contemporary fragments and fictions and past
realities that make this book fascinating and poignant. After all, the
way modern Jewry in America and Israel construes the 20th-century
European Jewish experience will continue to affect Jews’ image of
themselves, and therefore their politics.
Prof. Leon Botstein is the president of Bard College and the music director of the American Symphony Orchestra and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra.
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