In the shadow of history: second generation writers and artists and the shaping of Holocaust memory in Israel and America

Judaism, Spring, 1998 by Efraim Sicher

In his 1986 novel 'Ayen 'erekh: ahavah (See Under: Love), David Grossman confesses that to emerge sane from the Holocaust complex, from the imagination's White Room at Yad Vashem is not easy: "In the White Room everything comes out of your own self, out of your own guts, victim and murderer, compassion and cruelty. . . ."(17) In order to imagine the Holocaust, a necessary condition for mourning and working through, Planet Auschwitz must be understood as real, as a place where, even there, stories could be told. Grossman works to challenge the "unrepresentability" of the Holocaust and its canonical place in official discourse. His novel is paradigmatic of the struggle to claim legitimacy for art in the wake of destruction and to find a status for the post-Holocaust Jew beyond that of victim.

That search is personally agonizing for Israeli artist Haim Maor, a child of survivors and the foremost Israeli artist to deal with what it means to live after, to inherit the Holocaust. Maor is, I suppose, representative in the sense that his art expresses a response of his generation to the inherited trauma as he articulates his own story, a personal identity which confronts public and collective memory in a problematic way. Like Grossman's Momik, for which he served as a model,(18) he heard stories about the Holocaust from his blind grandfather, a tombstone engraver, and like Navah Semel he wears an invisible glass hat which weighs down on him with the burden of memory, a magnifying glass of pain which could not be voiced. Together Maor and Semel revisited the dead in Poland, "accompanying them without coffins or shrouds, and sealing the cycle of mourning which has not yet ended. Because we did not dare weep for them properly. We internalized the pain, substituting rituals and official memorial days for the scar. Beneath the invisible coffin-lids the dead seek their mourning."(19)

In succeeding exhibitions From Birkenau to Tel-Hai, The Faces of Race and Memory and Haim Maor: The Forbidden Library, Maor has inscribed for his family the tombstones which they never had, having inherited from his grandfather's life-story the task of inscribing the faces of his lost family, but also of his parents and himself. In his exhibited installations planks resembling coffin lids carry portraits of his family, but as in some interchangeable puzzle we can never be sure of identity. This is a personal story, an autobiography which tattoos Van Gogh with the artist's Auschwitz number, and deconstructs conventions of the self in Western art from Faiyum to Andy Warhol. Identity becomes fluid and blurred; no image gives certain knowledge. One self-portrait shows Maor's head with a missing segment of the wooden board (of a coffin) on which it is painted, that same "missing memory" of which Henri Raczymow spoke in describing the black hole in the psyche of the second generation.

Brought up in that European cultural tradition from which the survivors had been violently wrenched and for which they felt nostalgia, Maor turns Christian iconology on its head, portraying himself in a triptych of the crucifix, and reveals the image of man to be bestial, driven by sexual passion. Adam and Eve have tasted from the Tree of Knowledge and cannot now return to some innocent state which did not know the evil of Auschwitz. Haim Maor: The Forbidden Library, which was shown, among other locations, at Ben-Gurion University's Central Library, in Beer-Sheba, is a Pandora's box of"forbidden" knowledge, a counter-library that subverts the "official" library and the Sabra myth associated with the man whose name that university bears. This is a private library of untold stories in which the failure to tell the story succeeds in conveying the impossibility of telling it,(20) so that we cannot walk away feeling we have "mastered" the lessons of Auschwitz or feel easy that now we "know."