The Jewish Wars: Reflections by One of the Belligerents. - book reviews

Judaism, Fall, 1997 by Emil L. Fackenheim

Reviewed by EMIL L. FACKENHEIM

Some twenty years ago the critic Alfred Kazin wrote that "year by year these terrible events [of the Holocaust] press themselves more tightly on our minds," while at the same time he asks, "where is faith? How can we possibly live without it? . . . Without hope, Jewish history utterly nullifies itself." This tension between faith and catastrophe, unprecedented in Jewish history, often encourages hollow sermons, futile infighting, and other forms of escapism. What it needs is an honesty of truly heroic proportions. For this generation, such honesty is exemplified in Edward Alexander's work.

Admitting the Holocaust(1) is the title of a book by Lawrence L. Langer. Admitting it? One could understand this, half a century ago, when - both during and after the war - highly-placed politicians confessed to being tired of those never-ending Jewish complaints. But in 1995, with a vast library on the Holocaust? Yet Langer is on solid ground when he finds novels, plays, movies, poetry, philosophies, all seriously grappling with the catastrophe, but still not "admitting" it as it was: a need to save the "triumph of the spirit" wins even when the spirit was murdered; consolation must be found where there is none. As Alvin Rosenfeld puts it in a thought-provoking essay of this title, this is "The Americanization of the Holocaust."

A well-known, much-loved book, Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, may serve as an example. If Frankl has inspired generations of readers, it is because, as Langer puts it, "his strategy is to minimize the atrocities he himself survived, and to stress the connections between pre- and post-Auschwitz reality." Thus "Great Literature" survives for his readers about Auschwitz, when in Auschwitz itself it died by constant atrocity. "What does not kill me makes me stronger," writes Frankl, quoting Nietzsche. But, Langer asks, does what "kills my mother or father (or wife, or children, or neighbors) make me stronger?" Again, "there is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings." Thus Dostoevski's "Christian declaration," as invoked by Frankl. Langer cannot find it relevant to the Holocaust. Frankl's summing up of his book, at the end, sounds gloriously inspiring, to be sure. But, to me at least, on second thought, tougher thought, it is not merely irrelevant but offensive. "Man has invented the gas chambers . . . but he . . . has also entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips." How can he privilege the few-if anyone at all-who may have gone in as he says, over the many who thought these were showers, or who, when they realized, were driven into them with dogs and rifle-butts! As for the Lord's prayer, is he trying to make Auschwitz safe for Christianity?

If stressing a brutal truth few want to hear makes Langer one kind of hero, Edward Alexander is a hero of another sort. One has read and re-reads Nietzsche, Dostoevski, and even Frankl. But who wants to read the scoundrels and fools in a "war" in which Alexander is himself a "belligerent"? Every week one scoundrel "steals" (Alexander's expression) the Holocaust, this week German scientologists, who claim to be treated as were Jews by Nazis, just as another makes Israelis into Nazis, this week Egyptian cartoons with a swastika on Netanyahu's head.

In addition to the volume under review, Alexander has to his credit three other books on related subjects - The Jewish Idea and Its Enemies: Personalities, Issues, Events; The Holocaust and the War of Ideas, and a collection of essays by various writers called With Friends Like These: The Jewish Critics of Israel.(2) These are confusing, even depressing days for self-respecting Jews. For morale as well as instruction, I urge them to read or reread these books, all of them.

To get a sense of where Alexander finds his stamina, one must turn to an earlier book, his The Resonance of Dust: Essays on Holocaust Literature and Jewish Fate,(3) which is on Holocaust literature, but not on Langer's kind. This volume concerns Nelly Sachs, Moshe Flinker, Abba Kovner, Chaim Grade but also and in particular Yiddish poetry-writers who do not aim at comfort-for-Americans but rather express a comfortless, utterly Jewish anguish. Alexander is a professor of English literature, and perhaps he would rather stay with it than be forced, time and again, into defending just this anguish, just this experience, this Jewishness. But if thus being torn is surely at great personal cost, it is a boon for his readers. They are reading not just another Jewish or Zionist partisan, but a writer, as Alvin Rosenfeld puts it, whose "polemical essays at their best are almost without rival in contemporary American Jewish writing."

Thus far this review has been easy, indeed a long-felt debt of gratitude at long last expressed. But now comes the hard part: to review his book, must I do what he has done, find out for myself why MIT Jewish professor Noam Chomsky chooses to defend the right of free speech, of all people, of Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson? To decide for myself whether he is a scoundrel, fool, or both? Or investigate whether Palestinian advocate Edward Said is an honest or dishonest enemy? Or do a great deal of research of my own as to whether Bishop Tutu ever did anything for Jews except advise them to turn the other cheek? How far does a reviewer's duty extend?