The future of the holocaust: Storytelling, oppression, and identity see under: "Apocalypse"

Judaism

Volumn 51, Issue 1, 2002, Pages

  Ezrahi, Sidra Dekoven ^a  

^a HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM   (Israel)

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EID: 60949899088     PISSN: 00225762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. On the theater of make believe, see Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
2. Die letzten Tage der Menschheit: Tragödie in fünf akten mit Vorspiel und Epilog(Munich: Kosel-Verlag, 1957), written between 1915 and 1922.
3. Only short versions have appeared in English. Karl Kraus, The Last Days of Mankind, translated and edited by Frederick Ungar (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1974). Although it is set in the context of World War I, the mindcast is apocalyptic.
4. On this subject see Jay Winter, "The Apocalyptic Imagination in War Literature," in Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 178-203.
5. For a discussion of "comparative suffering," see Tzvetan Todorov, Les Abus de la memoire (Paris: Arlea, 1995), and Henri Raczymow's exchange with him and others.
6. For an overview of this debate, see Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 71-75.
7. For a discussion of the philosophical ramifications of the philosophy of Carl Schmitt and the slide from a definition of the enemy into a target for extermination, see Bartov, pp. 143-165. Bartov views genocide as continuous with modern warfare, and totalitarian regimes as a function of Utopian thinking.
8. Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem. On this painting, see Sanford Budick, "Rembrandt's Jeremiah,"Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 51 (1988): 260-264;
9. and "Rembrandt's and Freud's 'Gerusalemme Liberata,'" Social Research 58.1 (Spring 1991): 189-207.
10. Euripides, The Women of Troy, in The Bacchae and Other Plays, translated by Philip Vellacott (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 130, ll. 1240-1247.
11. The Peloponnesian Wars lasted from 431-404. Euripides may have been as opposed to the war as Aristophanes, but the elegiac framework of Women of Troy suggests total destruction rather than war as reference. Helen, his parodic version of the same story, comes closer to what I am calling the "war paradigm."
12. Edmund Blunden, ed., The Poems of Wilfred Owen (London: Chatto and Windus, 1933), p. 66.
13. Yehuda Amichai, from "And Who Will Remember the Rememberers?" (no. 4) In Open Closed Open, translated from the Hebrew by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2000), p. 170.
14. The poem was published in Alterman's regular newspaper column just two weeks after the U.N. vote for partition and the invasion of the Arab armies. "Magash ha-kesef" [The Silver Flatter], Davar, December 19, 1947.
15. Reprinted in Ha-tur ha-shivi'i[The Seventh Column], Vol. I (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz ha-meuhad, 1977).
16. See David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
17. Dan Pagis, Variable Directions: The Selected Poetry of Dan Pagis, translated by Stephen Mitchell (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989), p. 30.
18. S. Yizhar, "Hirbet Hiz'eh," in Arba 'a Sippurim (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz Ha-me'uhad, 1976), p. 85.
19. For recent rereadings of the texts by Yizhar and Alterman and other cultural sites that have become central to the performance of memory in post-'48 Israel, see Dan Miron, Mul ha-ah ha-shotek: Iyyunim be-shirat melhemet ha-'atzma'ut[Facingthe Silent Brother: Essays on the Poetry of the War of Independence] (Jerusalem: Keter, 1992);
20. Nurith Gertz, Shvuya be-haloma: mitosim ba-tarbut hayisraelit[Captive of a Dream: National Myths in Israeli Literature] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1996);
21. and Hannan Hever, Pitom march ha-milhama: leumiut ve-alimut ba-shira ha-'ivrit be-shnot ha-arbayim [Suddenly the Sight of War: Nationality and Violence in the Hebrew Poetry of the 1940s] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz hameuhad, 2001).
22. See Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, "Acts of Impersonation: Barbaric Space as Theatre," in Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery, edited by Norman L. Kleeblatt (New York: The Jewish Museum and Rutgers University Press, 2001), pp. 17-38.
23. Volume published in conjunction with the exhibition Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art at The Jewish Museum, New York, March 17-June 30, 2002.
24. It is true that as early as the immediate aftermath of the Six Day War, this became one of the dominant themes in the nonfictional discourse. Soldiers who participated in a roundtable discussion after the war admitted to feeling uneasy about having taken part in a victorious military exploit and invoked images of the Holocaust to express their unease. As one soldier put it: "If I had any clear awareness of the World War years and the fate of European Jewry it was once when I was goingup the Jericho road and the refugees were going down it I identified directly with them. When I saw parents dragging their children along by the hand, I actually almost saw myself dragged along by my own father." The Seventh Day: Soldiers' Talk about the Six-Day War, recorded and edited by a group of young kibbutz members (New York: Scribner, 1971), pp. 216-217. It bears mentioning that many other soldiers expressed the counterpart of that dread which we are exploring: the fear that a defeat of the Israeli forces might mean extermination and a common fate with the Jews of Europe.
25. David Grossman, See Under: Love, translated by Betsy Rosenberg (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989), pp. 50, 29.
26. Arbeit Macht Freiwas directed by Dudi Ma'ayan and featured Haled Abu 'Ali in the role of Haled and Semadar Ya'aron-Ma'ayan as Selma. As both "tour guide" explaining the model of Treblinka to visitors at the Lohamei Ha-getta'ot Museum, and as the hired hand of the main character, Selma, Haled becomes the reincarnation of the Arab as Galut Jew. For an illuminating discussion of Arbeit Macht Frei, see Amnon Raz-Karkotzkin, "Galut be-tokh ribonut" [Exile within a Sovereign State], Te'oria u-vikorit [Theory and Criticism] 4 (Autumn 1993): 122-124. He develops the idea that Selma and Haled, together, represent the two repressed forms of memory precipitated by the formulaic Israeli engagement with the Holocaust: its repression of the "European" memories of its victims, and its impact on the Israeli-Arab encounter. He also points to the eclectic, postmodern structure of the performance as a critique of the linear narrative that establishes causality between events as complex as the Shoah and the construction of the State of Israel.