BREAKING TABOOS IN ISRAELI HOLOCAUST LITERATURE

Abstract

This article focuses on the phenomenon of second-generation Israeli Holocaust literature, also known as ‘bearing witness’ fiction, that appeared with great resonance on the Hebrew literary scene in the 1980s. It argues that this new band of writers overcame the dual moral obstacles of describing a reality that they did not directly experience and making art of a subject that defies human comprehension. The article focuses on one particularly important novel, Agadat Ha-agamim Ha-atzuvim1 (The Legend of the Sad Lakes) by Itamar Levy, which tested the limits of representation of the Holocaust and provoked intense debate about its graphic and violent scenes of Jews tortured by the Nazis as well as about its postmodern techniques in portraying the Holocaust experience. The article maintains that despite the fact that Agadat Ha-agamim Ha-atzuvim broke taboos in Israeli Holocaust literature with its disturbing, and perhaps sensational sequences, that at heart Levy’s narrative presents a profound confrontation with the anguished past that affords young readers the necessary gateway to engage with the Holocaust on an individual, rather than a public level. The article makes the case that novels such as Agadat Ha-agamim Ha-atzuvim represent deeply veined journeys into the heart of the Nazi beast, by Israeli writers who are propelled by a wish to unshackle the Shoah from the fetters of the collective and reclaim it as a personal experience. Despite the critical and testimonial surfeit available about the Shoah, and the relentless sword thrusting by historians, a sensitive and intelligent novel of the Holocaust can offer a band of golden rays for those numbed by the nature of historical documentation. No doubt, novels and short stories can grant an open space for independent and meaningful thought about the Holocaust in a way that history books cannot. This inevitably raises the question of how does one write after Auschwitz?, how do those who mercifully were spared the catastrophe imaginatively fill in the blanks?, and how do they translate the trauma that has been transmitted with empathy and affinity? Indeed, an often discussed aspect of the act of writing after Auschwitz is the way in which it tests the limits of representation. Second generation Holocaust stories encompass multivalent forms. They often depict the life crises of the children of survivors, who delve into their consciousness to recover their personal identity, yet sometimes adopt fantasy, blurring the boundaries dividing truth and fiction. This brings up the question of the authenticity and the legitimacy of such writing, especially when it engages in flights of fantasy – usually associated with postmodernism – that may deform and twist the burning horror. Thus, an obvious question is: why are second generation prose writers shifting to the fantastic over the mimetic? Hanna Yaoz takes up this point: * Director of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, School of Historical & Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 3010 Email: dvir@unimelb.edu.au 1 Itamar levy, Agadat Ha-agamim Ha-atzuvim (Tel Aviv: Keter, 1989). BREAKING TABOOS IN ISRAELI HOLOCAUST LITERATURE (DVIR ABRAMOVICH) 47 The tendency toward the fantastic in second generation writing can be explained by the fact that what the Nazis did deviated from any former reality and pushed the imagination to the absurd, so that when we speak of the Holocaust the fantastic is real. The joining together of real and familiar facts acquires a reality of its own in the minds of the writer and reader precisely when it comes to the Holocaust, whose reality was so abnormal. Those who were not there – who write out of attraction and repulsion, who need to fill the blanks with the creative imagination – resort to fantastic realism much more than do Holocaust survivors in order to close the gap between what is known and what is guessed, often on the thinnest factual grounds.2 Second-generation novels represent an attempt to undermine and deconstruct predominant Israeli assumptions about post-Shoah identity. Hence, the works question the adequacy of the official and sacrosanct frameworks produced by the state to portray the Holocaust as well as offer alternate ways to depict the legacy of the Holocaust. In more ways than one, the works betray a gritty spirit of rebellion against the statist appropriation of the Shoah and a vigorous desire to de-nationalise Holocaust narrative and reclaim its personal and intimate dimension. In other words, what is at play here is an effort to privatise the traumatic memories of individuals that had been collectivised by the state. Above all, these texts serve as testament to the fact that within Israeli culture, literary representations of the Holocaust have transcended generational, tribal, or national limitations. Ideology has ceded authority to literature. If, before, the state was the repository of collective memory, enlisting its institutions in service of a mono-ideology that dictated the terms for local memory of a specific experience, the Holocaust, this oppressive coherence no longer exists. To be sure, the notion of an indisputable canon has now been completely dismantled. Looming large are questions of how secondary Holocaust Israeli fiction helps those reading it edge closer to identification with the victims, despite being separated from the event by several decades. Given the imminent passing of the survivors, the torch has been passed to this generation, in particular the sons and daughters of the survivors, who suffered vicariously from the syndrome of silence. In other words, the second and third generation are the new eyewitnesses to the dying group of victims. They form a bridge to allow those future generations who feel impelled to cross over, to enter the world of devastation, which, while not inflicting a physical wound upon them, has left an emotional scar. Thus, the medium of fiction acts as a mode of articulation, liberating both parents and children from living with an untold past, and allowing them to burst the membrane of a proscribing amnesia. In the wake of the rise and rise of postmodernism, both in prose and literary hermeneutics, it is not unreasonable to ponder the role this aesthetic has played in expanding the cohabitation of art and the Shoah. A central pillar of postmodern posture is the absolute denial of one narrative, truth, or reality, within the whirlpool of ideas, constructs, histories, and references. It is a modality that moves towards the concept of an ungraspable reality, and liberates the writer from the need to depict a precise and fixed reality of the Shoah universe. As such, postmodernism rejects the tendency towards accurate coordination of words or terms comparable with any accepted image history 2 Hanna Yaoz, ‘Inherited Fear: Second Generation Poets and Novelists in Israel’, in Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory After Auschwitz, ed. Efraim Sicher (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1998), 164. MELILAH MANCHESTER JOURNAL OF JEWISH STUDIES 48 might render. It empowers the author to sketch his or her own plastically ambiguous and evanescent map. ‘It is precisely the Final Solution,’ Friedlander avers, ‘which allows postmodernist thinking to question the validity of any totalising view of history, or any reference to a definable metadiscourse, thus opening the way for a multiplicity of equally valid approaches’.3 Such jettisoning of mimetic vestiges notwithstanding, Friedlander warns of the dangers lurking within such a theory: ‘This very multiplicity... may lead to any aesthetic fantasy and once again runs counter to the need for establishing a stable truth as far as this past is concerned ...’4 Any author who chooses to write about the Holocaust will inevitably consider the adequacy of the literary frameworks and criteria that were available before, but now may seem to transgress and violate the truth of the historical event. Perhaps, if we are to employ Lyotard’s metaphor of the Holocaust as an earthquake that has obliterated all tools of measurement, we must admit that the event has shattered humanity’s common sense and foundations and along with it its conventional instruments of figuration.5 Since this recalcitrant reality is at the heart of our situation, the principal questions before us are these: How can an author appropriate the Holocaust for his or her aesthetic aims? And what modes of description can be generated to fit this design? Salient to this discussion is Hayden White’s formula of historical interpretation. White insistently questions the headlong pursuit of a single version and the demand that Holocaust narratives represent reality as it was. According to White’s re-alignment of the historical compass and re-defining of the traditional frames of reference, the very nature of narrative requires the writer to make a choice among the abundance of fictional forms available, including and excluding certain technical emplotting devices, language and ideological markers. White argues that there is no one objective standard superior to another, that any critical faculty engaged with assessing the reality of any given instance is a frail vessel that can be kept or glossed over. Unlike previous commentators, White’s discourse does away with the requirements of an authentic representation of the Holocaust. He discards the constraints on imaginative storytelling that were embraced by those Holocaust writers who felt obliged to remain utterly faithful to the factual record. In asking whether the Final Solution and its evils impose absolute limits on writers of fiction, White argues that: ... unless a historical story is presented as a literal presentation of real events, we cannot criticize it as being true or untrue to the facts of the matter. If it were presented as a figurative representation of real events, then the question of its truthfulness cannot be criticised as being either true or un