In several interviews you mentioned that your book The Lost is the only testament to Shmiel Jäger and his family. Do you see yourself or your book as a "bearer of testimony"?
I wouldn’t be so pretentious as to claim that my book is a “testimony,” or that I am a “bearer of testimony.” My book is exactly what its title says it is: an account of my search for information about my relatives who were murdered in the Holocaust. Note that I say “an account of my search,” and not “a book of information about my relatives”: for me the crucial theme of the book is searching for knowledge—what it means to want to know as much as I could know about one specific thing. (I jokingly like to say that the alternative title is “Moby-Dick.”) If my book bears testimony, it is only second hand testimony, because it reproduces testimony of other people who were actually in a position to “testify”: witnesses, other victims. A major part of my book is to make distinctions between first-order knowledge (and –witness) and second-order knowledge and witness. I think it’s an important distinction to stress, because today, rather sentimentally, we like to say “we remember” or “we will never forgot”, but of course “we” can’t do anything—you can’t “remember” what happened to other people.
Since The Lost was published there have been reports that Bolechow has become a memorial site and a place of pilgrimage for interested tourists. How do you see this phenomenon? Do you think that your book has contributed to the transformation of Bolechow into a "memory space"?
I find the entire phenomenon of Holocaust tourism to be bizarre in the extreme—but then, I am someone for whom books and narratives have a far greater reality than places do (a point I bring up often in The Lost). I could imagine that if one were, like me, descended from Bolechow Jews, there might be some sentimental value in going there, but beyond that I cannot fathom why anyone would want to schlep to Ukraine to look at places associated with the stories of total strangers. On a personal (and, perhaps, unjustifiable) note, I find it an invasion of privacy to have people stomping around taking pictures of my family’s house, or (worse) clumping around the house where my uncle and his daughter were being hidden and where they were killed, taking pictures for their iPhoto albums. For what purpose? I was, for instance, extremely offended, to say nothing of irritated, when I discovered that some documentary filmmaker had gone to the hiding-house and had filmed some footage there, against my express wishes. Again, I’m aware that this is a matter of personal tastes; people can do what they like. I personally don’t see the point of it. And as we know—it’s a question I ponder in my book—when anything becomes a tourist destination—however elevated the intentions of the tourists—there is the danger that the tourism will devolve into kitsch.“Let’s see, we did Treblinka, Belzec, Auschwitz—what else can we squeeze in before lunch?” Rather than that, it’s better for people not to go at all.
Looking back, how do you see the journey you have made in working on this book? Have you discovered new details about your family since the book was published?
Quite honestly I can’t believe it—first, I can’t believe i actually had that energy and obsessive determination, which now amaze me, and which I doubt I’d be able to muster—it seems like a dream. I have no doubt that it will remain the single most remarkable experience I’m likely to have in my life, as a person and as a writer. As for new revelations, the only significant one was the one about Bronia (my great-uncle’s youngest child) which came to light after the American publication in 2006, thanks to a source at Yad Vashem, and which I included in the Postscript to the book which has appeared in all subsequent editions and translations. I had great hopes that the Polish publication, a few years ago (in a superb translation) would stir something up and produce some new information about Cesko Szymanski, the Polish boy who tried to save my relatives; but nothing happened. At this point, I think the “trail is cold,” as they like to say on detective shows—I doubt anything more will come to light.
In an interview for [Israeli daily] Haaretz four years ago, you said that "when the last survivor dies, the Holocaust will become an abstract history, we will commemorate the Holocaust once a year, and on the following day we will go out and enjoy our lives." Is this an inevitable process? Are there measures you think can help mitigate this process? If so, what is the significance of collecting survivor testimonies today?
But why should we “help mitigate” the process? The question itself is rife with unexamined—and, to my mind, disturbing—assumptions. The process I described is, in fact, a natural one, in which culture, through memory, assimilates history—a natural and healthy one, I would say. Commemoration (as opposed to phony, sentimental “memory”) is the tool that culture uses to enshrine and utilize—by which I mean, make useful—what has happened in the past. A good example is the Seder [Jewish feast of passover], a brilliant cultural transformation of history into commemoration (to say nothing of ideology). Do we want, in the year 2012, to sit around and listen to the story of every Hebrew camel-driver and date-merchant and mother-in-law who was a slave of Pharaoh and then schlepped through the Red Sea? No — it would be boring, and the details would overwhelm the message. Culture has clever ways of streamlining history in useful ways, and 2000 years from now the Holocaust will not (and should not) be any different. The details—the testimonies, the eyewitness accounts, the huge bulk of preserved memory—is important, but in time, it will become the province of specialists, of scholars: the proper custodians of “detail.” The large contours of the event—and its meaning, culturally—will be preserved in a usefully abbreviated, symbolic form. This is normal, natural, healthy. If we try to import the whole of the past into the present, there cannot be room for the present.
After the generation of the survivors of the Holocaust is gone, do you think the Jewish identity of American Jewry will change?
Not particularly—why should it? Americans in general have a feeble grasp of history, and a weak feel for history. I don’t think American Jews are particularly different. Indeed, I was startled, when I was doing the book tour for The Lost in the US, how little so many Jewish audiences actually know about the Holocaust. (Many people think that every Jew went to Auschwitz; they don’t even know about the Einsatzgruppen killings in the East between 1941 and 1942.) Anyway, I don’t claim to know much about the Jewish identity of American Jews.
You mentioned that the icons of the Holocaust, in that they lead us to unavoidable generalizations, cause a blurring or even erasure of the specificity of the victims. In a way, your book and its success have made The Lost into universal symbols ("Six of Six Million"). How do you see the existing tension between personal and collective memory (monuments, memorial days, museums, literature)?
I don’t think there has to be a “tension”—I don’t think that personal narrative and collective narrative are mutually exclusive. Rather, I see them as complementary, two aspects of historical narrative, both very useful. The kind of books that Saul Friedländer writes—what I think of as “real” history books, by scholars and authorities doing meticulous scientific research—are vital to our understanding of history; the kind of book I wrote inflects that understanding with (let’s say) a different perspective. But there’s no “tension,” I think, because both are useful in enhancing our understanding of the past, which is what history is. Anyway, I find it alarming to hear my book should “symbolize” anything: the whole point of it is, as I endlessly repeat in the text, specificity. No person can be a symbol; no person dies as a “statistic”; every life is specific, as is every death. That’s the point of my book.
In The Lost you mentioned that during the research for the book you realized that you want your book to focus on the lives of your relatives instead of their deaths. In an important sense, however, it is just this extermination, that is the Holocaust, that gives survivor testimony its justification. Is it possible, in your opinion, to tell the story of the victims and to avoid the victims' death overshadowing their lives?
I think my book is the answer to that question. The whole point of it is to restore the balance away from the intense (and, I think, often macabre and fetishistic) preoccupation with Holocaust death, in favor of remembering the lives of the victims.
In our contemporary culture, cinematic representation has acquired a central role in our "historical education", especially in relation to the Holocaust. Have you ever received a suggestion, or considered processing The Lost into a film?
Yes. Jean-Luc Godard read the book when it was published in France in 2007 and was extremely enthusiastic about it, and for a few years it looked as if he might do a film of it, but (as often happens with these film adaptations) nothing ever came of that. The film rights have been optioned by a producer in the US, and they are trying to raise money to get a script done. At this point, a wonderful Israeli (long resident in the US), Oren Moverman, is slated to write and direct; but again, these things are subject to all kinds of financial pressures and it’s hard to tell whether anything will, in fact, happen. Personally, I don’t envy the person who has to adapt my book. It would be a very difficult challenge, I think, since there’s no “story” in the Hollywood sense of that word. It’s me sitting in the apartments of little old Jewish ladies, talking.
You said that you are not going to write anymore about the Holocaust. Why not?
“Any more”? I don’t think The Lost is “about” the Holocaust. It’s about family, and memory, and history, and what it means to “know” the past, and oneself, ultimately; the Holocaust, you might say, happens to be the narrative vehicle for an extended meditation on those themes—which, I should say, are the themes I always write about, although an Israeli audience has no way of knowing that because The Lost is the only one of my books to have been published in Hebrew. (It is no more “about” the Holocaust than my first book, which is about the same themes, although the narrative vehicle is quite different.) I’m not a Holocaust expert, nor even a student of the Holocaust; I wasn’t particularly fascinated by it, as a historical event, prior to working on The Lost—certainly not as interested in it as I am interested in ancient Greek history, which is (one could say) my “real” subject. I necessarily had to think about it, and learn something about it, in order to write The Lost, but it’s not my subject, really; which is why I won’t write about it again. I have nothing left to say about it, apart from what I’ve already written.
In fact, I have made a point never to write about the Holocaust in any way, in the various periodicals I write for—The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times— and never to write about or review Holocaust-themed books, although, as you can imagine, I am asked to do so very often. The one exception to this rule was a long review-essay I wrote for The New York Review of Books about Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones; but that was because I am a literary critic, and the book was interesting to me as a novel. Otherwise, I really am finished with it.
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