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    The Jewish Critique of Nature

    by

    Review
    Aharon Appelfeld: The Age of Wonders. Boston: David R. Godine, 1982.
    Cynthia Ozick: Levitation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.

    Published in Chronicles of Culture, December 1982.
    Republished with permission.

     

    If God created the heavens and the earth out of nothing; if He is a holy God, separate from His creation; if one part of his creation, mankind, receives the gift of free will and exercises it by disobeying His commands; if as punishment for this rebellion against His regime, He causes mankind to speak multiple languages, thus dividing them from one another; if He chooses one of those peoples as His own, the ones He marks out as citizens of His new regime; then the divisions between God and not-God, and between the godly and the ungodly, must persist, troublingly. Jews (the very name bespeaks separation of one part of the Israelites from another) don’t `fit in.’ Their God does not want them to. Through the centuries, many have hated them for it.

    These books suggest that something more than custom or prejudice separates Jews from the rest of us. Jews struggle with Gentiles, with God, with themselves, but the struggle that scars them deepest here started in Eden: the struggle with nature. Nature in it simplest aspects–brutal and seductive, stubborn and malleable–ceaselessly provokes their fascinated distrust.

    Aharon Appelfeld lives in Israel and writes his novels in Hebrew; neither his country nor his language fits into the world. He has learned some of his techniques from this century’s virtuoso of fascinated distrust, Franz Kafka. But unlike the writer he depicts in The Age of Wonders, Appelfeld is no simple Kafka devotee; he uses what he’s learned for a purpose. He has discovered that the Kafkaesque captures childhood, when people come and go, including yourself, and you know something of what’s going on but not enough, so you guess part of it and imagine the rest.

    The writer here is the father of the book’s narrator. Father’s devotion to art, particularly Kafka’s art, substitutes for his ancestors’ devotion to Judaism. His esthete’s humanism find its echo in liberal politics; “very close to Stefan Zweig” and, like him, an Austrian Jew, Father shares Zweig’s horror of violence, fondness for political and cultural internationalism. `Assimilated’ as he can be, Father curses Jews and Judaism with the `30s intellectual’s blackest word, “petit-bourgeois.”

    Like childhood, the 1930s was an age of wonders. Metamorphoses proliferated, as life imitated Kafka. The narrator’s teenaged aunt suffers a nervous breakdown, converts to Christianity, and dies, inspiring Father’s praise of her “true religious feeling.” A lifelong friend of the family, a sculptor, offspring of a mixed marriage, converts to Judaism, sending Father into a drunken rage against the `loss’ of a fine artist. (“Your father, Austrian by birth, left you land, health, hands fit to carve stone, and you want to exchange this health, this freedom, for an old, sick faith. Take pity on your freedom, take pity on your body, which never ad to suffer a senseless mutilation.”)

    More metamorphoses occur. A critics attacks Father’s writings because they concern Jews, albeit secularized ones, “parasites living off the health Austrian tradition.” The critics is Jewish, and Father, after months of living-room fulminations, quietly agrees with the riposte. A young peasant woman arrives from Father’s native village; her presence in the household causes Father and his friends to go on a series of binges. The family adopt an orphan who stays with them until the end, perhaps because he had lost something in our house, that animal vitality that makes men brave.” Mother responds to their increasing social ostracism with “a strange self-denying piety… as if she were purposely imposing hardships on herself.”

    Sickness and health, decadence and freedom, fear and bravery and guilt: it is the language of fashionable Nietzscheism. Nietzsche despised the despisers of Jews, but he detested the Christianity that emerged from Judaism and, he said, from Platonism. Christianity, Judaism, and Platonism set inhibiting ghosts above life. Only nature and art, merged into `creativity,’ yield strength. “`I deny,’ thundered Father, `the Judaism others attribute to me.'” In the end that won’t do him any good.

    Father, too, metamorphoses. He begins as an `Austrian’ writer “drunk with success,” a novelist, playwright, essayist, and editor of the journal of the Jewish-Christian League. He ends as a pariah who leaves his family for Vienna, hoping to co-found, with a sympathetic baroness, a liberal salon aimed at saving Austria from anti-Semitism. By now it is 1939.

    Almost all of Appelfeld’s self-denying Jews hunger for nature but fail either to conquer it or to blend into it. They lust after approval from Austrian men and favors from peasant girls. They drink, lurching after Nietzsche’s Dionysus. They fool no one. An Austrian intellectual confides to Father that he “can always tell a Jew because `the Jew’ looks anxious, while `the Austrian’ “never blames himself or anyone else.” In the end, as the Jews are collected in the town synagogue, awaiting the arrival of the cattle train to the camps, businessmen snarl about “decadent artists,” Mother cries, “Shopkeepers!” and everyone blames the rabbi–who, indeed, called them there without saying why.

    In the novel’s second part, it is 1965. Bruno, the narrator, returns to his native town from Jerusalem. “For Bruno, everything held a baffling, wondering question.” His father’s life is “the disgrace he had not dared to touch, seething silently all these years like pus inside a wound.” Even in death, Father and sickness go together, and Bruno searches, if not for the cause of that sickness, perhaps for its meaning.

    Meaning doesn’t come cheaply for Appelfeld’s characters. An uprooted Japanese student tries unsuccessfully to engage Bruno in a conversation on the subject of life’s meaning. A part-Jewish nightclub singer wonders if there is any place on earth or her; a hack would have Bruno exalt her with a vision of Jerusalem–Appelfeld spares us that.

    Instead, we hear of the town, which hasn’t changed, and the people, who have. The Jews are gone, and the people who remain partake of the combined perpetuation and metamorphosis nature imposes. A promiscuous housemaid who had lived with Bruno’s family has stayed, but she has gone to obesity; “of Louise nothing remained and all that sat before him was an old Austrian woman.” Some Jews who had metamorphosed themselves into Christians also survive. Bruno remembers many members of one such family who had the courage to go to the synagogue on that last day; only they, “their strange integrity intact, had chosen death with their eyes open.” “The rest had coveted life, and they had been absorbed by it.”

    Life has not entirely absorbed some ex-Jews. In 1939, a Jew named Brum married his housemaid and metamorphosed himself into an imitation Austrian. “H grew taller, his shoulders filled out, and a luxuriant moustache appeared on his face; he sat with his new wife in the cellar of the White Horse drinking beer.” The Jew-haters left him alone. Yet when Bruno finds him, Brum complains about his ex-wife, “a whore.” Woman-as-betrayer: the would-be Austrian relives a story as old as the Book of Genesis.

    Whatever they try, Appelfeld’s Jews never quite get inside life, nature. Thinking of the unchanged buildings and trees of this town, Bruno sees that objects survive longer” than people. “They are passive. Otherwise how could they withstand such changes? Could it be said, perhaps, that they lack sensitivity?” Non-Jews, at home with nature, imitate its indifference. They change little, but that change usually amounts to slow degeneration, like natural law of inertia. Austrians, who supposedly never blame themselves or anyone else, gradually started to blame the Jews for everything; decades later, they cannot really face a Jew who returns. Their indifference, itself an imitation of nature’s indifference, is imperfect. They too are sons of Adam.

    Irremediably conscious or `sensitive,’ Jews face life with anxiety, but they face death with open eyes. Nietzsche condemns those who exhort men to learn how to die. He commands men to live. Nonetheless, we must notice that the one person in Appelfield’s book who does not change is the one closest to death, Bruno’s step-grandmother Amalia, an observant Jew whose words had a “certainty… forged with steel.” “There was power in her voice: next to her we felt small.” The narrator’s embarrassed parents put her into a sanatorium. Nietzsche’s life ended in a sanatorium, after life had metamorphosed him not into his chosen `Superman’ but into a catatonic–a perfectly indifferent natural object.

    Throughout the novel, green is the color Appelfeld associates with nature. Bruno recalls the green light in his wife’s eyes after they quarreled, but he also remembers the violet light in them that he loves. What is that light. If it is sensitivity, sensitivity for what? Ultimately, for God and the God-breathed spirit inside the natural man? After old Brum “hisse[s],” serpent-like, that his hatred for Jews “knows no bounds,” Bruno punches him in the face. The impact of that blow may strike the reader as the divinely-moved punishment of a traitor by a citizen who remains loyal.

    Appelfeld’s measured, delicately-shaded style is thoroughly European. Cynthia Ozick’s “five fictions” contain narrative, allegory, history, myth, fantasy, criticism. Exuberant mixing goes well with contemporary America although, notwithstanding this, Jews don’t quite fit in here, either–although here, at least, difference brings down no slaughter. In Appelfeld’s world, sadness overshadows comedy; the death camps beckon. In Ozick’s America, Jews can afford to laugh.

    Still, fire burns upward in America as it does in Europe. Nature remains intractably natural, as Ozick’s Jews (and some of her non-Jews) learn. The title story presents the theme.

    A husband and wife, novelists, he Jewish and she a convert from Protestantism, throw an unsuccessful literary party (“My God,” he gasps, revealing a kind of religiosity, “do you realize no one came?”). The ambition to host a party to attract “luminaries” (Howe, Sontag, Kazin, Fiedler, Podhoretz, Hardwick–invited, obviously, for the glow of their fame, not for congeniality) mirrors the couple’s obsession: “they were absorbed by power,” Ozick’s narrator tells us, “and were powerless.” They feel “counterfeit pity” for the characters they imagine and, one suspects for the people they encounter. They reserve genuine pity for themselves–he, as a Jew, she, as a woman.

    Confronted by failure of their modest power-venture, they return to the surer territory of being victims. For the husband, this means speaking to his guests of “certain historical atrocities” committed by non-Jews against Jews, culminating in the Holocaust. For the wife, it means listening to these stories and seeing her isolation: “It seemed to her that the room was levitating…. She felt herself at the bottom, below the floorboards while the room floated upward carrying Jews” elevated by “the glory of their martyrdom.” She has another vision, a vision of “the goddess.” Giving every evidence of having read Robert Graves, she regards the Madonna, Venus, Aphrodite, and Astarte as successive incarnations of “eternal” nature, of nature’s fertility, eros, and solidity. “Lucy sees how she has abandoned nature, how she has lost true religion on account of the God of the Jews,” who inspires “morbid cud-chewing,” talk of “Death and death and death.”

    One need not take Lucy-the-female-Lucifer’s conclusions too seriously. (She resembles a lapsed Catholic more than a lost Protestant, anyway). Ozick has presented comically the same contrast Appelfeld presents sadly. Jews levitate, non-Jews luxuriate (or wallow, depending on their upbringing). the nature that seems to satisfy much of humanity most of the time cannot satisfy Jews.

    Ozick explores this in each of her fictions. In “From a Refugee’s Notebook,” we read an essay on Freud, who “lust[ed] to become a god absolute as stone” by imposing his psychoanalytic paradigm on nature. As Moses invented the Sabbath, that interruption of nature, Freud invented “a Sabbath of the Soul,” a rationalistic attempt to capture, to conquer, the irrational. The essayist sees the problem: this conquest, attempted by rational means, owes its origin to a fascination with the irrational; “it may be that the quarry is all the time the pursuer.”

    The same “Notebook” also contains an account of life on the planet Acirema, an America turned inside-out by feminism, where “the more sophisticated females” attempt to conquer nature by a novel means of birth control. It doesn’t always work, and the women learn that the resultant children, raised communally in this “community of philosophers,” interfere with adult “self-development.” Children, the future, are discovered to be regrettably “anti-progressive.” Although undeniably “central to the community,” “morally and philosophically, they had no right to exist.” Acirema’s civilization, such as it is, gradually crumbles under the weight of this contradiction, as the neglected children, the only ones who reproduce prolifically, take over.

    Nature teaches its most painstaking, and pain-giving, lesson to Ruth Puttermesser, a liberal Jewish lawyer who appears in a short story and a novella. We meet her at age 34, leaving a Wall Street firm to work in city government, and “looking to solve something, she did not know what.” She has a sensible, private vision Paradise, consisting of a tree to sit under (shade of the Book of Micah, perhaps) and an inexhaustible supply of books and chocolate; “if she still does not know what it is she wants to solve, she has only to read on.” She also imagines an uncle who tutors her in Hebrew; “America is a blank, and Uncle Zindel is all her ancestry.”

    In the novella, twelve year in the City Hall bureaucracy have induced her to envision a more grandiose Paradise. (One imagines this must have been during the Lindsay Administration). Demoted, then fired during a political shakeup, she dreams of making a golem–a humanoid shaped from clay and brought to life, in mankind’s parody of its own creation by the hands of God–knowing that learned Jews have occasionally resorted to golem-making in times of danger. Her golem, a female, wants to be called Xanthippe, on the grounds that Socrates’ wife criticized even Socrates, the arch-critic who built a Paradise in words, re-forming the corrupt Athens of actuality. (To be a critic, one should note, is not unprecedented among literary golems. I once heard the great scholar Hugh Kenner describe Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster as “the first Romantic critic.” Kenner may have been remembering that the monster, a decidedly goyish golem, forms his taste on Plutarch’s Lives Goethe’s sorrows, and Milton’s Paradise Lost.)

    Puttermesser’s golem rids the city of corrupt politicians by installing her maker as mayor. Mayor Puttermesser fulfills the liberal reformer’s dream, replacing the pols and incompetents with idealists. The dreamers finally have power, and New York becomes “a rational daylight place,” orderly and pleasant–Plato’s republic conceived by John Gardner. But nature, driven out by the golem, stubbornly return. The golem lusts after Puttermesser’s former lover; eros “enter[s] Gracie Mansion,” a decidedly ungraceful thing for it to do. The golem tells Puttermesser, “I want a life of my own. My blood is hot.” What the golem did, the golem undoes, and in the end Puttermesser understands that “Too much Paradise is greed. Eden disintegrates from too much Eden. Eden sinks from a surfeit of itself.” She has learned what Ozick’s photographer learns in the book’s most intriguing story, “Shots.” A photographer can save truth by arresting its attacker time. But, possessing truth, she cannot become truth. She remains outside of it, taking pictures. That goes for writers, dreamers, and politicians, too. It puts a limit on any wayward ambitions of self-deification. As for Ozick herself, she aspires someday “to drill through the `post-modern’ and come out on the other side, alive and saved and wise as George Eliot.” With Eliot and Appelfeld, she already understands the separation of Creator from creation and some of the limits that hierarchy imposes.

     

    The American Flag

    by

    Speech prepared for the Benevolent Paternal Order of Elks Flag Day Ceremony
    Freehold, New Jersey
    June 13, 1982

     

    We all remember what the colors of the American flag once were said to mean. Every year, our teachers explained that red stood for the blood of patriotic Americans who sacrifice their lives in the struggle for independence; white stood for purity, blue for justice and devotion. We were told that George Washington himself set down the meaning of the red, white, and blue, shortly after our country’s birth.

    Today, historians insist that the story is only a story, a myth. George Washington really said nothing about the meaning of our flag–no more than he chopped down a cherry tree or spent time in the thousand places that now claim, “George Washington slept here.” As for the colors of our flag, they came from the British flag. The American colonists wanted to claim, as they did in the Declaration of Independence, that they were the ones who were true patriots devoted to the ideals of Britain, that George III was the rebel, the one who wilfully violated the right of Englishmen overseas, provoking patriotic resistance. The thirteen stripes symbolized the unity, but also the independence, of each American colony: a unity in resistance to what the Declaration calls the King’s attempt to impose “an absolute tyranny over these states.”

    That is what historians tell us, and I have no reason to doubt their research, as far as it goes. Historians love to debunk myths, and we shouldn’t deny them their favorite recreation. But most of us are not historians, and when someone erases our flag’s meaning, we wonder how we can replace, and with what.

    Fortunately, we are Americans, and Americans are lucky. The United States Congress implied as much when they described our flag’s “thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.” Throughout recorded history, constellations have symbolized destiny arranged by the power of Heaven. In associating our states with a constellation, the American founders expressed their hope that fortune would be on our side, and when it comes to recovering the meaning of our flag, it is.

    I say that because historical research also tells us that the red, white, and blue of the British flag have traditional, symbolic meanings much like those we once ascribed to the same colors on ours. If the founders merely imitated the flag of their old homeland, their imitation was a lucky one. Traditionally, red does stand for the courage and sacrifice that sometimes means shedding blood so that our country can live. Today, as much as ever, in a world that still has not won freedom from fear courage is our country’s life-blood.

    Traditionally, white does stand for purity, and also for the wisdom that comes to those who defend it, which resist the many things that corrupt. Wisdom rests on the moderation of men and women who both understand and withstand the liberty Americans enjoy. Today, as much as ever.

    Finally, blue does stand for justice, and for devotion. We still hear the expression `true blue,’ and we associate blue with the sky–that is, in symbolic terms, with Heaven, the traditional source of the justice that commands our devotion.

    All of these colors, and their meanings, reinforce one another. Courage without wisdom, moderation, and justice does not know what to defend. Wisdom, moderation, and justice without courage cannot defend themselves. The American founders knew that, and their lives proved it. If they really did adopt red, white, and blue without knowing what those colors symbolize, they accidentally affirmed the virtues that formed the constellation of their own excellence. And that excellence helped to assure the destiny of these united states, the “new constellation” in world politics.

    New Jersey’s only president, Woodrow Wilson, wrote: “This flag, which we honor and under which we serve, is the emblem of our unity, our power, our thought and purpose as a nation. It has no other character than that which we give it from generation to generation. The choice is ours.” As we have seen, Wilson was wrong. Our flag does represent a constellation of meanings beyond whatever meaning one generation may try to give it. Its meaning was given to us. The purpose of our political union was to secure our unalienable right, endowed to all human beings by their Creator. We can choose to defend the republic for which our flag stands, we can choose to make its intended purpose and meaning our own. We can also reject that original purpose, as Wilson wants us to do, give it some new character.

    Each generation of Americans must choose to accept or reject the courage, wisdom, moderation, and justice seen in the character of the American founders, given political form in the Constitution they designed and symbolized in our national life by our flag. It is a choice that no one makes only `once and for all.’ In each life, each of us chooses, many times. If enough of us make the right choices, this union of states will endure in liberty. I hope that we will make those choices. By coming here today, you tell me that you share this hope, beneath the American flag.

     

    2016 NOTE: I wrote this talk for New Jersey State Senator Thomas Gagliano. He had me re-write it and he delivered the new version. This one was never delivered.

    The Costs of Survival

    by

    Review of Jack Eisner: The Survivor. New York: William Morrow & Company, 1981.

    Published May 1981 in Chronicles of Culture.
    Republished with permission.

     

    “Learn to be silent”–so Elie Wiesel advises those who would speak of the Holocaust. Especially those who were not there: “In intellectual, or pseudo-intellectual circles, in New York and elsewhere too, no cocktail party can really be called a success unless Auschwitz sooner or later figures in the discussion. Excellent remedy for boredom….” (Legends of Our Time: New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968).
    The Jews, he observes, died because they had no friends, and even friends should not judge one another until shared circumstance teaches them understanding. Savants’ chatter camouflages their secret indifference along with their ignorance.

    Wiesel knows that “the only ones who were, who still are, full conscious of their share of responsibility for the dead are those who were saved.” Here, responsibility means guilt–not the unreasoning guilt of one tormented by his own survival, but the all-too-reasonable guilt of one who remembers the terms of survival. The Nazis death quota, that engine of arbitrary selection, seems a triumph of collectivism, a perfect expression of indifference to the individuality of the victims. But the quota forced another excruciating individuality upon the survivors: “the one who had been spared, above all during the selections, could not repress his first spontaneous reflex of joy. A moment, a week, or an eternity later, this joy weighted with fear and anxiety will turn into guilt. I am happy to have escaped death becomes equivalent to admitting: I am glad that someone else went in my place.” Some of those who admitted this tried to forget the dead. Others joined them in death. Still others initiated a silent monologue, continued to this day, “which only the dead deserve to hear.”

    What is this monologue? Those of us who ask risk becoming cocktail party cognoscenti, pretenders to understanding. Yet we should ask, I think; we may not deserve to hear the monologue, but if we do not hear of it, if we do not face the memories of the Holocaust, our silence will begin with tact and end with the cowardice tact may conceal.

    Jack Eisner calls his memoir The Survivor. He knows the silent monologue of which Wiesel speaks. After the war he spent much time with other survivors. “We understood one another’s silences.” Did they? Surely they understood each other’s need for silence, but I doubt that all these monologues with the dead were alike. Both Wiesel and Eisner call themselves gravestones, markers commemorating the dead. But they are different men with different things to say to us–whatever they say to the dead.

    Guilt enters Eisner’s monologue to us, like Wiesel’s. Not as Wiesel’s: “I am one in a thousand who survived. Why me? Was I better than the half million Jews in Warsaw who did not?” Eisner tells us how he survived. Although in this passage he means to deny his superiority to the dead, his memoir shows us in what ways he was `better’ than those who died, why he was a better survivor. Acts concern him more than thoughts. Wiesel, who cares much for thoughts and less for action, tortures himself with the question, “Why did you not resist?” Eisner did resist, did act, at times with a prudence that Wiesel might find profoundly disconcerting. These two men could not say the same things to the dead any more than they can say the same things to us. Guilt touches them differently.

    To Eisner, thought undirected toward acts weakens the thinker. “My father was a dreamer a philosopher, a gentle man.” “He believed in the goodness of humanity” and “had faith in a civilized Germany.” “I loved and respected him, but sometimes I wished he were a more forceful man.” The means by which the 13-year-old Jack Eisner might have begun a life of the mind disintegrated by the grace of the Nazis: in 1939 they destroyed the Warsaw Music Conservatory, which had awarded him a scholarship. After that, his thoughts served action and his acts served survival. Action, in this circumstance, required courage first of all. “I knew that my Christian friends didn’t believe in Jewish valor…. But I also knew, in my heart, that they were wrong.” Indeed they were. When the Nazis tried to destroy the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, Eisner was there. They “entered the ghetto in their usual way, firing guns in the air and screaming for all Jews to come out of their buildings.” Eisner adds proudly, “But we weren’t the usual Jews.” After repeated invasions failed, the Nazis finally could `conquer’ the ghetto only by leveling it with artillery fire.

    Eisner himself is no “usual” man. His courage did not depend on comrades. At Budzyn, the second of four concentration camps he endured, he escaped alone, then faced punishment alone after his recapture. The commandant beat him with a whip: “he wanted me on the ground at his feet.” Eisner refused to fall. Eventually, the commandant exhausted himself, but Eisner “straightened back to attention.” “I felt the world was crushing me. The sky was falling like a shattered mirror on my face. But I stood.” Survival, both as a Jews among Jews and as an individual, obsessed Eisner, but survival finally served not only the will to live, the desire for revenge, and the need to bear witness to the struggle of those who died; it was a matter of dignity, of affirming the humanity the Nazis–and all the Jews-haters of the day, whether malevolent persecutors or icy bystanders–tried to deny.

    Yet survival, as Wiesel insists, can also cost dignity, expend what it tries to save. Eisner knows this. Courage needs thought to complement it, and thought that serves survival often recommends indignity. Eisner watched an SS officer whip Eisner’s mother: “I wanted to leap at the sadist’s throat. But I didn’t budge. Survival was what counted.” He watched a Nazi commandant herd Jews into a synagogue, put a gasoline can on the porch, then explode the can with machine gun bullets. “Sick to my stomach, I watched the inferno from a distance. All my fears, anguish, and self-pity vanished. I wanted to jump on [the commandant’s] neck. To squeeze it. To wrench the last breath from his body. But my mind told me I was helpless. All I could do was turn my eyes to the forest.” In Flossenburg, his last concentration camp, Eisner became `friendly’ with a German criminal who worked at the disinfection chambers. “I soon became part of the elite, an inmate with connections”–so much so that he achieved re-designation as “an Aryan Christian.” Wiesel would devote many pages to such incidents, weighing the moral problems they pose (in fact he did watch his father beaten and writes extensively about it). Eisner, the survivor who acts, moves on.

    Eisner has no immunity to guilt. Early in the war, after escaping the ghetto to live in “Aryan Warsaw,” he returned; “my conscience was bothering me.” When a young friend was killed during a smuggling expedition, Eisner felt responsibility. Forced to carry starving inmates to the crematorium in Flossenburg, madness nearly claimed him: “That night, I couldn’t sleep at all. Those big brown eyes. those big blue eyes. Those big wide-open green eyes. Millions of eyes stared at me all night long. I hated those eyes…. I hated the world.” Guilt, yes: disabling guilt, never. In his monologue with the dead–with these dead, the ones he carried–Eisner may accuse himself, but he can accuse the world with more vehemence, and more justification. In his book he restrains himself, except when he writes of the Nazis.

    This world, not quite rid of Nazis, reads memoirs of the Holocaust, watches new holocausts in Mao’s China and in Cambodia. Perhaps the world’s continued ignorance, indifference and criminality goads Eisner not only to present Hell but also to explain it. (For example, he tells of a sign on Flossenburg’s gate that said, “Work liberates,” adding “The message was totally ironic.” He does this sort of thing more than once.) At times he tells us more than we should know, as when he describes a couple of his early sexual adventures in prose worthy of Penthouse. There are pages that read all too much `like a novel’–or worse, a cheap and trivial screenplay. He embarrasses his reader when he dips into what can only be described as Holocaust kitsch. What he has lived needs no such (melo)dramatization. Eisner, who writes with terse forcefulness at his best, should not be blamed for literary misjudgment; he runs an import-export business (the world of acts, as always), not a literary journal. Blame his editors.

    Wiesel’s more refined and powerful intellect takes us places Eisner cannot. Eisner’s activeness also takes us places, giving us five memories for each Wiesel presents. Here is one that only Wiesel could elaborate upon properly: at one camp, a Nazi general on a white horse stopped in front of the inmates. At his side, on a white pony, road a 10-year-old Jewish boy dressed in a white uniform, black boots, and carrying a small whip. The boy ordered his fellow Jews into the showers, Days later, he saved Eisner from execution, ordered him to be whipped, smiled, complimented Eisner’s courage and handed him a chocolate bar. Shining like ebony, this brilliant evil mesmerizes as it repels. If he had survived, what would be this child’s monologue with the dead? If memoirs of the Holocaust teach us to learn the right silence, they also teach us to try to find the right speech and the right acts by showing us what happens if we fail.

    2016 NOTE: Jack Eisner died in 2003, having dedicated much of his life’s considerable earnings to educating people about the Holocaust, especially through memorials he caused to be built in several countries. His memoir does indeed read at times like a screenplay for a melodrama and was produced as both a stage play and a film. The jarring disjunction between his experiences and some of his descriptions of them show a tough, blunt sensibility somewhat warped by the vulgar forms of entertainment he escaped to live in the midst of,  for the rest of his life. His book’s many fine and striking passages in this way represent his triumph not only over the death camps but over the trivializing coarseness of what Malraux calls “the arts of satiation.”