A History of Their Own

At the suggestion of a friend, I took with me for reading on the flight to Ukraine the popular new novel Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (Houghton Mifflin). It is a clever-at times overly clever-entertainment, and a remarkable achievement for a writer still in his early twenties. The story line is simple enough. A young American Jew with time on his hands is hanging out in various European cities and decides upon visiting the shtetl in Ukraine from which his family escaped, and some who did not escape were killed by the Nazis.

A large part of the book is composed of letters to the young hero, who is also named Jonathan, by a young Ukrainian, Alexander, whom he had engaged as a guide. Written in the aftermath of their ambiguously successful search for the shtetl, these letters are sometimes poignant but mainly humorous, and frequently hilarious, exercises in Alexander’s efforts to master the English language in expressing his unbounded dreams of one day living in America and being rich like his friend Jonathan. Darker themes intervene with Alexander’s grandfather, who accompanies them as driver in their search, and who harbors a terrible secret about what happened during the Nazi era. Interspersed between Alexander’s letters, and moving with cinematic rapidity, are vignettes of the shtetl as it was in the late eighteenth century, in the 1940s, and is no more.

As I say, it is a clever entertainment, and provided a pleasant enough distraction from a long and tedious flight. Foer employs the usual tropes in depicting shtetl life in Eastern Europe-tropes made familiar by Isaac Bashevis Singer and treated more profoundly by the likes of Chaim Grade. One is at home again with God-obsessed and God-denying Jews aligned with rival synagogues of the observant and the skeptical, and consumed by intergenerational quarrels, most of which resolve around who copulated with whom, frequently with grotesque consequences. (Unlike most books in the shtetl genre, copulation keeps returning to center stage in this story. But then, unlike most authors of that genre, Mr. Foer is a very young man.) The historical vignettes include mysterious births, genealogical irregularities, and bizarre coincidences that are variously interpreted as miracles or evidence of ontological absurdity. Not included in Everything Is Illuminated is anything that might illuminate the reality of Ukraine, either past or present.

Mr. Foer’s story could have been set in any part of Eastern Europe. In this depiction, there are but two realities-the shtetl and the Nazis. Goyim such as Alexander and his grandfather play a part, but only as they are related to the Jews of the shtetl and the Nazis. There is no hint that the gentiles may be part of a culture, a religion, or a people of their own. The non-Jews who make an appearance are, as it were, honorary Jews-until, that is, they betray Jews to the Nazis. I do not wish to make heavy weather of a book that is, after all, no more than a mainly light entertainment, yet it is of a piece with a large literature that distorts Western perceptions of Central and Eastern Europe and troubles many of the people of that part of the world who have lived through the great terrors of the century past.

Reviewing two other novels by Americans who knocked around the region, Adam Goodheart observes in the New York Times Book Review: “Other people’s pasts: that’s the only commodity in generous supply in post-Communist Hungary. . . . The Hungarians are also time-battered specimens, nicotine-stained survivors of wars and uprisings. Among such people, the young Americans seem weightless, almost immaterial. And the present itself has a quality of flimsy provisionality: not history itself but rather an interstice in history, a flickering blankness between movie frames. . . . For all their pretensions to something grander and more picturesque, they are nothing but tourists-not just in Hungary but in their own lives and in the world at large.” “Neither novel,” Goodheart concludes, “is really very European.” And so it is also with Mr. Foer’s book.

A Certain Puzzlement

For the last twelve summers in Krakow, Poland, I have been teaching in a seminar on Catholic social doctrine that brings together university students and junior faculty from America and Central-Eastern Europe. Each year I lecture on the Holocaust and Jewish-Christian relations, and each year the students visit Auschwitz, which is a little over an hour’s drive from Krakow. The Holocaust, as most powerfully represented by Auschwitz, is Western culture’s only available icon of absolute and undisputed evil. One can argue that there have been equal or greater evils in human history, but they are all, to one degree or another, in dispute. On the sane side of the fever swamps where dwell Holocaust deniers and flat earth proponents, nobody disputes or attempts to mitigate the evil of Auschwitz. Each year the students are manifestly shaken by their hours there. Some speak the next day of their nightmares following the visit; others cite the final words of Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “The horror! The horror!”

Yet the visit and the discussion of Jewish-Christian relations also provoke questions and objections unfamiliar to most of us in the West. Young Poles in particular deeply resent the widespread notion that Poles were somehow responsible for Auschwitz. They point out that Auschwitz was a Nazi enterprise established on what was then the territory of the Third Reich. They ask, “What about the millions of non-Jewish Poles who were killed in the Holocaust? Why do only Jewish deaths count?” Such objections bear no suggestion of anti-Semitism, which it is readily admitted was common, and is today not uncommon, among Poles and others in Central-Eastern Europe. The objections are marked, rather, by a certain puzzlement, a deep sense of unfairness, and a belief that the truth should be told.

A Polish graduate student spoke of her visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. The exhibition’s failure (refusal?) to recognize the millions of non-Jews who were exterminated by the Nazis occasioned feelings of deep complexity. Her sorrow over what happened to Jews, she said, is in no way qualified by her disappointment over the nonrecognition of what happened to so many others. It is readily admitted that there is something unseemly and wrong about competing for victim status. But, these students insist, it is also unseemly and wrong to misrepresent that long night of horror by turning it into a simplistic drama in which the only parties appearing on stage are Jewish victims and Nazi victimizers, with everyone else cast in the role of indifferent onlookers or active, even eager, collaborators in unspeakable evil. What about the Polish dead, and what about the thousands of Poles who, as all scholars of the period recognize, risked their lives and the lives of their families in rescuing Jews?

Beyond an understandable resentment over their own people being slighted and slandered, these students are getting at a deeper problem in the conventional presentation of the Holocaust. The Holocaust is in many ways singular in the historical gallery of horrors, resulting in a tendency to place its inhumanity beyond the pale of humanity. The soul-shaking truth, however, is that such inhumanity is not beyond humanity. We human beings are capable of such horror, as we are capable of indifference to such horror, and as we are capable of heroic resistance to such horror. The engagement of all these capacities must be taken into account if we are to understand the humanness of the inhumanity that was the Holocaust.

“We Do Not Have the Right . . .”

That Jewish survivors and their descendants should tell the story through the prism of their experience is perfectly natural, and for half a century they have done so with an intense productivity that is perhaps unmatched in the chronicling of any other period of history. Yet the resulting literature has by no means “illuminated everything.” Each year I encourage the students in Krakow who feel deprived of a history of their own to write the biographies, novels, and plays that might convey to a world audience the experience of Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Ukrainians, and others during the Nazi and Communist periods. This urging consistently meets with resistance. Some say that there are such accounts but they are not read except by a few who speak the language in which they are written. There is a pervasive feeling that the outside world is little interested in the experience of Central-Eastern Europeans. A further reason for reluctance, especially in discussing the Nazi era, is that telling their story would be construed as telling “their side” of the story against the dominant Jewish narrative. There is a widespread, and for the most part healthy, anxiety about doing anything that might be viewed as anti-Semitic. But perhaps the most interesting response to my urgings is the fear of shame, reflected in one student’s summing up the discussion by saying, “We do not have the right to embarrass our families.”

The Jewish story can be told, and typically is told, as a tale of unambiguous conflict between good and evil, with Jews cast as unambiguous victims. Writers such as Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1964), pay a heavy price in terms of criticism for deviating from the standard account. The Krakow students are painfully aware that any honest rendering of the actions and inactions of their parents and grandparents during the Nazi and Communist periods would, to put it gently, not be entirely edifying. Moreover, the peoples of that part of the world-battered, beaten, crushed, and generally humiliated for centuries, mainly by Russians and Germans-have only in recent years reached a point of modest hope for peace, prosperity, and cultural self-respect. Isn’t it better to forget about the tortured past and move on? One cannot help but have a measure of sympathy for that way of thinking, yet it is a great pity, for theirs is an important part of the universal human drama. It should be understood, and to be understood it must be told.

I write this in Krakow, after the days in Ukraine, and having talked again with our students upon their return from Auschwitz. Mr. Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated is still on my mind, recalling the Holocaust books beyond number that one has read over the years, and bringing home the fact that there is still so much that is unilluminated. The students here are from a half dozen or more countries only recently freed from the evil empire of Soviet communism. They want it to be known that they have a history of their own, but it will not be known unless they make it known. I appreciate the desire to move on, to make the most of this moment of unaccustomed freedom, and the reluctance to embarrass the families and peoples they love is admirable. Yet the countless stories of their story must be told, for, finally, the history of their own is also ours. Unless they tell the stories, the next generation’s understanding will be limited to, and distorted by, the tales of bright young westerners who are, as Adam Goodheart says, just tourists-not just in Central-Eastern Europe but in their own lives and in the world at large.