Review of Holocaust Literature

Marceline Loridan-Ivens, But You Did Not Come Back, trans. Sandra Smith  (Atlantic Monthly, 2016) 100 pp.; originally Et tu n’est pas revenue (Paris : Grasset, 2015)

Reviewed by Norman Simms (Hamilton, New Zealand)

Not too many years ago I asked, rhetorically of course, whether we still needed more Holocaust literature.  This was not a way of discouraging people from recording their own or family histories, but only putting into the light a way of distinguishing between real personal experiences and would-be novelists who want to take advantage of the general interest in stories and essays on the Shoah. The question came up at a time when several dubious and a few outright deceptions were exposed, that is, people pretending that they were survivors or the next generation on from those who perished in the greatest crime ever committed. 

I also brought up in that cluster of reviews something that I was studying for other related reasons: the way in which memories were passed from generation to generation, and most significantly for my research, how somatic pains and humiliations altered the way memories were created, influenced the expression of genes and shaped the basic patterns of perception, emotional responses to later catastrophes and tragedies, and intruded into decision-making on matters that seem to be totally unrelated. Since the Shoah created perhaps the largest number of sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder, it remains a key component in psychological and neuroscience investigation. Such scientific research feeds into historical and aesthetic readings of what in very general terms may be considered a single, albeit complicated, field. In particular, since novels and other works of fiction—we include poetry and drama, as well as non-verbal arts such as painting, architecture, dance and sculpture –often provide a much better lens through which to measure the meaning, significance and lasting power of the Holocaust as a revelation of human experience in the world, the intrusion of poorly-written and pseudo-depictions of real persons, events and consequences requires moral vigilance.

Where traumatized person’s accounts appear without the linguistic or historical skills to convey what is real and thus fall into platitudes, clichés and confused expression, we must, as literary critics and guardians of sacred memories, approach such texts with care, respecting the writer’s attempts and maintaining the dignity of their memories. Distortions, lapses, replacements—all sorts of hesitations, denials, and confusions, the stuff, in other words, that any psychoanalyst will recognize as the real  weight of the past, both  conscious and unconscious—are part of the thick text that accumulates and requires careful analysis.

Put bluntly, every single Holocaust survivor’s story is valuable, as only when they are all collected and recollected can there be a point of rest in the struggle against forgetting, denial and boredom. Until then we need to keep trying to scour our memories and those who lived through the ordeal, so that the evidence is not only more than the weight of those who claim it never happened but the presence of those memories is not allowed to die out, so that there is more to read than we can bear to forget. Those who suffer from some kind of fatigue should not put us off—yes, even those who cry they are tired of having to listen to those “pesky Jews” who keep telling their stories, lamenting their losses and fighting to prevent something similar from ever happening again.

Every Holocaust survivor’s story is different, and yet not unique, and some writers know how to tell a story better than others. But even the most fragmented, halting and awkward memory is worth preserving. Some people can recall every detail they experienced and put it into vivid language, create powerful scenes, see deeply into the emotional darkness that shrouds the historical records.  Others, of course, can only fumble for words, speak in vague terms of what they went through, lose their way in the narrative of events that seemed to have neither order nor meaning. However, their hesitations, frustrations and sense of failing to achieve the goal are also part of the story, a vital element in the significance of such terrible things for ordinary people.

In one sense, the book before us here, Marceline Loridan-Ivens’s Et tu n’est pas revenue (But You Did Not Come Back) is a long meditation on her lapse in memory, in particular, her inability to remember the last letter her father write to her before he disappeared into the oblivion of the Shoah. And yet he is always there, always for her and for the reader she addresses in her memoirs; he is always the standard by which she tries to adhere to in everything she felt, saw and did, not just during her own years as a victim of the Nazi attempt to kill every Jew, man, woman and child, but afterwards as she returns to the remnants of her family in the south of France, as she matures into an adult and an intellectual in Paris, and as she continues to wrestle with what she can recall and what she cannot from a past that will never allow her to be normal. 

As Marceline says at one point:

…if I still search deep within my memory for those missing lines even though I’m sure I’ll never find them again, it’s because they are etches where I sometimes slip away with the things I cannot bear to share, a blank page where I can still talk to you. I know all the love those lines contained. I’ve spent my entire life trying to find that love (p. 80).

Not a novelized life and not a narrative history, the book is, as we said, an extended  meditation, a playing, teasing and coming to terms with the missing message from her father, and all the other gaps in her life, such as the loss of childhood innocence and the absence of children of her own. There are few colours, textures and tangible things in her text, and most of the details repeat what other survivors have recalled; for that reason, the few substantial, vivid moments that are recalled stand out, such as her memory of having to tear apart a pair of men’s dirty and smelly briefs to use in the latrine, something particularly difficult for a frightened, lonely adolescent girl.

The writing of Et tu n’est pas revenue is understated and the more powerful for that, in that the reader comes to recreate the harsh and ugly truths she only hints at—a participatory or dialogical engagement, drawing from past readings in the literature of the Holocaust and an imagining of a reality that is really unimaginable, finding words that are otherwise unspeakable, and a conceptualization of those horrid experiences that are inconceivable. And whatever the reader tries to fill in or imagine proves inadequate. We are frustrated, and yet our own secret presence with the missing father is maintained, even humiliated by the uncomfortable tension between what a reader wishes to add and refine that which the author leaves out and the knowledge that has been broken, the language that proves insufficient, and the longings to help that remain unsatisfied. What the Nazis did can never be corrected. What is missing in the lives of those who somehow came out alive can never be filled.