Passing and other Paradoxes of Holocaust Survival. . - Reviews - Escape through the Balkans: The Autobiography of Irene Grunbaum - My Father's Testament: Memoir of a Jewish Teenager, 1938-1945 - book review

Judaism, Fall, 2001 by Brett Ashley Kaplan

While Escape through the Balkans discusses gender roles in stark, direct prose, My Father's Testament uses a sophisticated and psychoanalytically inflected language to analyze both the relationship between father and son among observant Jews and the emotions of survivors. For example, Gastfriend notices the change in his ability to control his facial expressions: "Eventually I learned to mask and internalize my feelings" (82). This psychoanalytically inflected language may stem from the advice of Gastfriend's son, David R. Gastfriend, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School who wrote the foreword and disclosed the fact that his father had discussed his wartime experiences with his children, but always with an eye towards "figure[ing] out how not to hate and yearn for revenge" (vii). Thus, while the metacommentary provided by the editor, Bjorn Krondorfer, vis-a-vis his experiences with his German, ex-Nazi father, provides one level of forgiveness and reconciliation, the survival narrative as told to the survivor's children already contained a message of not replicating the horror meted out to Jews. Gastfriend strikingly introduces this theme towards the end of the narrative when he describes a moment in post-liberation Germany where he saves a young German girl from being raped by Russian soldiers out to take vengeance on Germans of all stripes who invaded their nation and dragged them unwillingly into a war they did not want to fight. Gastfriend asks: "Why did I, a concentration camp inmate just liberated, protect a young German teenager from being raped by his liberators? Scholars and experts may advance different explanations for my behavior. For me, however, there was a simple reason: I was raised and educated in a Hasidic Jewish home, inculcated with a belief that God's children are all created in God's image and that all of God's living creatures are sacred." (171).

This message of forgiveness is complicated by an equally clear strand of anger that comes to the fore when Gastfriend notes: "I became obsessed with hate and anger. It was hate that fueled me with energy, and it was anger that gave me strength to survive from one day to the next" (138). My Father's Testament, then, offers a sophisticated analysis of the dialectic between forgiveness and vengeance, reconciliation and hate, as well as an analysis of the divergent roles that faith can play in the quest for survival.

BRETT ASHLEY KAPLAN is a Ph.D. candidate in the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation, entitled 'The Aesthetics of the Worst: Remembering and Forgetting in French, Yiddish, and Architectural Holoca art Representations," focuses on literary and architectural representations of the Shoah.