When is Enough Enough?
In July 2013, I published a short review of Otto Dov Kulka’s Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death,[1]
a memoir subtitled “Reflection on Memory and Imagination.” Because of that description of his work, I
treated the book in terms of the way in which poetry, memory and historical
facts jockey for position, and expressed some surprise that a man who is usually
a scientific and historical writer should here express himself in virtually
impressionistic terms. The result, it
seemed to me then, was something other than a recollection of personal
experiences from the time of the Holocaust re-experienced over several periods
in his life as those events, persons and places passed through his
imagination. Thus Kulka’s memoir lies somewhere
between objective facts—the truth, the whole truth and nothing but truth,
insofar as any person can condense a multitude of traumatic shocks to barely
one hundred pages (in the English translation of the original Hebrew text)—and
a partly fictional recreation that both imparts the feeling of a time long past
and gives voice to those who are forever silenced.
Recently, however, Anna Hájková, an Assistant Professor of Modern
European Continental History at the University of Warwick, has taken issue with
Kulka’s Landscapes of the Metropolis of
Death.[2] Why? Because, she says, Kulka has distorted
the truth by not telling the whole story, airbrushing out of existence some
characters whose presence would have raised embarrassing and inconvenient
questions about his family, the memory of which he seeks to honour and present
to future generations as worthy of memory.
Not only does Kulka omit such facts as “adultery, bitter divorce and a
paternity suit,” she claims, but he thereby “created a family that never
was.” As a disinterested and meticulous
scholar, she has combed the archival records, interviewed persons who knew the
families involved, and studied the way in which other survivors and their
children have grappled with the painful history of the Shoah. Thus in her long essay, Hájková seeks to
point out the omissions and distortions and fill in some of the missing data
Kulka removed from his book.
While one must thank Anna Hájková for setting the historical record
straight and respect her argument that all attempts to sanitize or idealize
persons whose lives were disrupted, distorted and destroyed by the Nazi’s Final
Solution to the Jewish Question do not actually help preserve and protect the
memory of the victims nor of the events that constitute the Holocaust. People before, during and after the ordeal
were usually not necessarily or or even often paragons of virtue and moral
strength; they were ordinary human beings subject to all the unruly urges,
ambitions and foibles of life itself.
“These stories about real people,” she claims, ”are absent from Kuka’s Landscape.”
And yet… There is always a hesitation when one approaches books of this
kind that do not profess to be immediate, unadulterated records of the past…and
that somehow ambiguiously shimmer in the half-light of generic space between
pure history, unabashed confession or self-analysis, fiction—and that may be
based on personal or family traditions or made up out of whole cloth from a
mixture of private readings and an active imagination—so that just as there is
a need to take into account the pains and humiliations to the survivors and
their extended families who now are introduced to aspects of their personal
history that could not or would not be exposed to them for all sorts of
reasons, motives that now may seem credible or unwise in retrospect, there is
also another imperative: respecting the integrity of the author exploring all
the possibilities of fiction.
And yet… There is something
specifically distinct about Holocaust Literature, as there is about the
Holocaust itself, that should not be trivialized by moral equivalence (reducing
the Nazi attempt to annihilate all Jews and destroy all of Jewish culture to
just one more pogrom in a long history of lachrymose persecutions; or seeing
genocide as a type of action taken many times, not only against various peoples
and societies, such as Armenians or Hutu, but also against animals and plants,
political movements or ideas, or anything else the speaker wishes to treat with
hyperbole or in a vivid metaphor).
And yet… It is all a matter of
public sensibilities and proprieties. Some
of the people associated with Kulka’s family now question why Hájková has
chosen to exemplify her argument on the need for strict accuracy of detail by
raking up old scandals and by suggesting that some survivors have not been
honest in their publications—and may have some hidden unspecified agenda:
though there is no suggestion that she should be seen to be little better than
those immoral and unethical authors who seek to exploit the popularity of
Holocaust literature to advance their own literary careers by pretending their
fictions are true stories.
But the complexity of the problems here will continue to grow more
urgent as the survivors themselves pass away, their own children find
themselves grappling with private memories of parents they cannot fully
understand or reconstitute, and other writers, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, who
wish to integrate those seemingly unimaginable, unspeakable and inconceivable
events into the legacy of literature and other arts. Some of these artists will do the job better
than others, but can we, across the board, forbid—morally and
aesthetically—anyone who was not him or herself specifically a victim from ever
dealing with such a topic? At what
point, too, do the sensitivities of and individuals and families have greater
weight in the evaluation of history, novels and plays? As the current controversy over the
Metropolitan Opera’s production of The
Death of Klinghoffer, it is all too easy for ideologues to highjack a
Jewish tragedy—the murder of an innocent Jewish tourist by Palestinian
terrorists on a cruise in the Mediterranean—and manipulate the facts so
egregiously as to create a false moral equivalence between Jewish and Israeli
suffering and the questionable nationalistic ambitions of radical Jihadists. The Klinghoffer family’s hurt, not to mention
the gross distortion of history and political motivations, has been aside for
the sake of a dubious understanding of artistic freedom—and a wilful travesty
of artistic expression.
In a sense, these are not easy questions to answer. On the one hand,
proponents of freedom of speech are right to object to censorship of books or
artistic productions; although freedom to think and say whatever you want is
neither absolute nor guaranteed to the extent of being entitled to publication
and performances on the public purse or the garnering of favourable
reviews. On the other hand, because of
those provisos and limits to freedom of speech and artistic expression,
audiences need not attend, sponsors have no obligation to provide financial backing,
and critics may vilify and mock those who lack the skills, talent and insights
to create persuasive and lasting works of art.
Kulka’s Landscape, in my view,
does not present itself as a historical work subject to strict evidential proof, but
as a poetic representation of what it felt like as a child to be caught up in
the Holocaust, and then gradually to wrestle with the losses it entailed and
the legacy of pain it passes on to himself as he grows up and others who must
live with those absences and the wounds that will not and cannot be healed by
time. There are times when, for the sake
of a higher truth, small details can be silently put aside, and when, in order
to give voice to feelings and personal values that are otherwise lost in the
shuffle of official history and an obsessive need to record every small event
is recorded, the devices and strategies of rhetoric should be called into
play.
And yet… Can we trust that
present or future audiences, especially when those readers no longer have the
living remnant of the Holocaust to monitor their productions, will be able to
discern the distinctions outlined above, and the moral sensitivity or authority
to distinguish between what really happened and what is only made up for a
variety of purposes?
In his memoirs
called Rumor and Reflection (1952),
looking back on his time hiding from the Nazis during World War Two, Bernard
Berenson considered how to evaluate the difference between mere rumour, gossip
and tittle-tattle and formal chronicles and professional histories and
concluded that difference was in quality—style, elegance and eloquence—but not
in quantity. In other words, for him,
the great historians, like Gibbon or Michelet, and the great historical
novelists, like Dumas and Hugo, were no better in getting to the heart of the
matter—the truth value of events and ideas—than third-rate scribblers, hack
journalists and old men or women whispering half-remembered stories to one
another.
[1] Review of Otto Dov
Kulka, Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death Reflections on Memory and
Imagination, trans. Ralph Mandel on EEJH (1 July 2013). And reprinted a few
days later in eejh@yahoogroups.com
[2] Anna Hájková, “Israeli Historian Otto Dov Kulka Tells Auschwitz Story of
a Czech Family that Never Existed: Why Holocaust Accounts—and their Fictions or
Omissions—can be a Threat to ther Hoistory of a Complicated Tragic Human Reality”
The Tablet (30 Octoiber 2014) online
at
http://tabletmag.com/jnewish-arts-and-culturebooks/186462/otto-dov-kulka?print=1
