As a child, I often heard the term “the Nazi beast,” and when I asked the adults who this beast was, they refused to tell me, and said there were things a child should not know. Years later, I wrote in See Under: Love about Momik, the son of Holocaust survivors who never tell him what really happened to them “Over There.” The frightened Momik imagines the Nazi beast as a monster that controlled a land called “Over There,” where it tortured the people Momik loves and did things to them that hurt them forever and denied them the ability to live a full life.
When I was four or five, I heard for the first time of Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi-hunter. I felt a great sense of relief: Finally, I thought, there is someone courageous enough to fight the beast, even willing to hunt it down! Had I known how to write at the time, I might have written Wiesenthal a letter full of the detailed and practical questions that were preoccupying me, because I imagined that this hunter probably knew everything about his prey.
My generation, the children of the early 1950s in Israel, lived in a thick and densely populated silence. In my neighborhood, people screamed every night from their nightmares. More than once, when we walked into a room where adults were telling stories of the war, the conversation stopped immediately. We did pick up the occasional fragment: “The last time I saw him was on Himmelstrasse in Treblinka,” or, “She lost both her children in the first Aktion.”
Every day, at twenty minutes past one, there was a ten-minute program on the radio in which a female announcer with a glum and rhythmic voice read the names of people searching for relatives lost during the war and in the Holocaust: Rachel, daughter of Perla and Abraham Seligson from Przemyl, is looking for her little sister Leah’leh, who lived in Warsaw between the years … Eliyahu Frumkin, son of Yocheved and Hershl Frumkin from Stry, is looking for his wife, Elisheva, née Eichel, and his two sons, Yaakov and Meir … And so on and so forth. Every lunch of my childhood was spent listening to the sounds of this quiet lament.
When I was seven, the Eichmann trial was held in Jerusalem, and then we listened to the radio during dinner when they broadcast descriptions of the horrors. You could say that my generation lost its appetite, but there was another loss too. It was the loss of something deeper, which we did not understand at the time, of course, and which is still being deciphered throughout the course of our lives. Perhaps what we lost was the illusion of our parents’ power to protect us from the terrors of life. Or perhaps we lost our faith in the possibility that we, the Jews, would ever live a complete, secure life, like all other nations. And perhaps, above all, we felt the loss of the natural, childlike faith—faith in man, in his kindness, in his compassion.
About two decades ago, when my oldest son was three, his preschool commemorated Holocaust Memorial Day, as it did every year. My son did not understand much of what he was told, and he came home confused and frightened. “Dad, what are Nazis? What did they do? Why did they do it?” And I did not want to tell him. I, who had grown up within the silence and fragmented whispers that had filled me with so many fears and nightmares, who had written a book about a boy who almost loses his mind because of his parents’ silence, suddenly understood my parents and my friends’ parents who chose to be mute.
I felt that if I told him, if I even so much as cautiously alluded to what had happened over there, something in the purity of my three-year-old son would be polluted; that from the moment such possibilities of cruelty were formulated in his childlike, innocent consciousness, he would never again be the same child.
He would no longer be a child at all.
When I published See Under: Love in Israel, some critics wrote that I belonged to the “second generation” and that I was the son of “Holocaust survivors.” I am not. My father immigrated to Palestine from Poland as a child, in 1936. My mother was born in Palestine, before the State of Israel was established.
And yet I am. I am the son of “Holocaust survivors” because in my home too, as in so many Israeli homes, a thread of deep anxiety was stretched out, and with almost every move you made, you touched it. Even if you were very careful, even if you hardly made any unnecessary movements, you still felt that constant quiver of a profound lack of confidence in the possibility of existence. A suspicion toward man and what might erupt from him at any moment.
In our home too, at every celebration, with every purchase of a new piece of furniture, every time a new child was born in the neighborhood, there was a feeling that each such event was one more word, one more sentence, in the intensely conducted dialogue with over there. That every presence echoed an absence, and that life, the simplest of daily routines, the most trivial oscillations—“Should the child be allowed to go on the school trip?” or “Is it worth renovating the apartment?”—somehow echoed what happened over there: all those things that managed to survive the there, and all those that did not; and the life lessons, the acute knowledge that had been burned in our memory.
This became all the more pertinent when greater decisions were at stake: Which profession should we choose? Should we vote right-wing or left-wing? Marry or stay single? Have another child, or is one enough? Should we even bring a child into this world? All these decisions and acts, small and large, amounted to a huge, practically superhuman effort to weave the thin fabric of everydayness over the horrors beneath. An effort to convince ourselves that despite everything we know, despite everything engraved on our bodies and souls, we have the capacity to live on, and to keep choosing life and human existence.
Because for people like myself, born in Israel in the years after the Holocaust, the primary feeling—about which we could not talk at all, and for which we may not have had the words at the time—was that for us, for Jews, death was the immediate interlocutor. That life, even when it was full of the energies and hopes and fruitfulness of a newly revived young country, still involved an enormous and constant effort to escape the dread of death.
You may say, with good reason, that this is in fact the basic human condition. Certainly it is so, but for us it had daily and pressing reminders, open wounds and fresh scars, and representatives who were living and tangible, their bodies and souls crushed.
In Israel of the 1950s and ’60s, and not only during times of extreme despair but precisely at those moments when the great commotion of “nation-building” waned, in the moments when we tired a little, just for an instant, of being a miracle of renewal and re-creation, in those moments of the twilight of the soul, both private and national, we could immediately feel, in the most intimate way, the band of frost that suddenly tightens around our hearts and says quietly but firmly: How quickly life fades. How fragile it all is. The body, the family. Death is true, all else is an illusion.
Ever since knowing I would be an author, I knew I would write about the Holocaust. I think these two convictions came to me at the same time. Perhaps also because from a very young age I had the feeling that all the many books I had read about the Holocaust had left unanswered a few simple but essential questions. I had to ask these questions of myself, and I had to reply in my own words.
As I grew up, I became increasingly aware that I could not truly understand my life in Israel, as a man, as a father, as a writer, as an Israeli, as a Jew, until I wrote about my unlived life, over there, in the Holocaust. And about what would have happened to me had I been over there as a victim, and as one of the murderers.
I wanted to know both these things. One was not enough.
Namely: If I had been a Jew under the Nazi regime, a Jew in a concentration camp or a death camp, what could I have done to save something of myself, of my selfhood, in a reality in which people were stripped not only of their clothes but also of their names, so that they became—to others—numbers tattooed on an arm? A reality in which people’s previous lives were taken away from them—their family, their friends, their profession, their loves, their talents. A reality in which millions of people were relegated, by other human beings, to the lowest rung of existence: to being nothing more than
flesh and blood intended for destruction with the utmost efficiency.
What was the thing inside me that I could hold up against this attempt at erasure? What was the thing that could preserve the human spark within me, in a reality entirely aimed at extinguishing it?
One can answer this question only about one’s self, in private. But perhaps I can suggest a possible path to the answer. In the Jewish tradition there is a legend, or a belief, that every person has a small bone in his body called the luz, located at the tip of the spine, which enfolds the essence of a person’s soul. This bone cannot be destroyed. Even if the entire human body is shattered, crushed, or burned, the luz bone does not perish. It stores a person’s spark of uniqueness, the core of his selfhood. According to the belief, this bone will be the source of man’s resurrection.
Those of you who would like to find your own response to the question may, when you go home, choose to gather your thoughts and consider: What is the thing within me that is the true root of my soul? What is the quality, the essence, the final spark that will remain in me even when all other things are extinguished? What is the thing that has such great and concerted power that I will be re-created out of it, in an extremely private sort of “big bang”?
Once in a while I ask people close to me what they believe their luz is, and I have heard many varied answers. Several writers, and artists in general, have told me that their luz is creativity, the passion to create and the urge to produce. Religious people, believers, have often said that their luz is the divine spark they feel inside. One friend answered, after much thought: Parenthood, fatherhood. And another friend immediately replied that her luz was her longing for the things and people she missed. A woman who was roughly ninety at the time talked about the love of her life, a man who committed suicide over sixty years ago: he was her luz.
The second question I asked while writing See Under: Love is closely related to the first one, and in some ways even derives from it: I asked myself how an ordinary, normal person—as most Nazis and their supporters were—becomes part of a mass-murder apparatus. In other words, what is the thing that I must suspend within myself, that I must dull, repress, so that I can ultimately collaborate with a mechanism of murder? What must I kill within me to be capable of killing another person or people, to desire the destruction of an entire people, or to silently accept it?
Perhaps I should ask this question even more pointedly: Am I myself, consciously or unconsciously, actively or passively, through indifference or with mute acceptance, collaborating at this very moment with some process that is destined to wreak havoc on another human being, or on another group of people?
“The death of one man is a tragedy,” Stalin said, “but the death of millions is only statistics.” How do tragedies become statistics for us? I am not saying, of course, that we are all murderers. Of course not. Yet it seems that most of us manage to lead a life of almost total indifference to the suffering of entire nations, near and far, and to the distress of hundreds of millions of human beings who are poor and hungry and weak and sick, whether in our own countries or in other parts of the world. We are capable of developing apathy and alienation toward the suffering of the foreigners who come to work for us, and toward the misery of people under occupation—ours, and others’—and toward the anguish of billions of people living under any kind of dictatorship or enslavement.
With wondrous ease we create the necessary mechanisms to separate ourselves from the suffering of others. Intellectually and emotionally, we manage to detach the causal relationship between, for example, our economic affluence—in the sated and prosperous Western countries—and the poverty of others. Between our own luxuries and the shameful working conditions of others. Between our air-conditioned, motorized quality of life and the ecological disasters it brings about.
These “Others” live in such appalling conditions that they are not usually able to even ask the questions I am asking here. After all, it is not only genocide that can eradicate a person’s luz: hunger, poverty, disease, and refugee status can defile and slowly kill the soul of an individual, and sometimes of a whole people.
There are many terrible things occurring not far from us, for which we are unwilling to take any personal responsibility, either through active involvement or through empathy. It is convenient for us, where the burden of personal responsibility is concerned, to become part of a crowd, a faceless crowd with no identity, seemingly free from responsibility and absolved of blame.
Perhaps it is only in this global reality, where so much of our life is lived in a mass dimension, that we can be so indifferent to mass destruction. For it is the very same indifference that the vast majority of the world displays time after time, whether during the Armenian Holocaust or the Jewish Holocaust, in Rwanda or in Bosnia, in the Congo, in Darfur, and in many other places.
And perhaps, then, this is the great question that people living in this age must relentlessly ask themselves: In what state, at which moment, do I become part of the faceless crowd, “the masses”?
There are a number of ways to describe the process whereby the individual is swallowed up in the crowd, or agrees to hand over parts of himself to mass control. Since we, here, are people of literature and language, I will choose the one closest to our interests and to our way of life: I become part of “the masses” when I give up the right to think and formulate my own words, in my own language, instead accepting automatically and uncritically the formulations and language that others dictate.
I become “the masses” when I stop formulating my own choices and the moral compromises I make. When I stop articulating them over and over again, with fresh new words each time, words that have not yet eroded in me, not yet congealed in me, which I cannot ignore or defend myself against, and which force me to face the decisions I have made, and to pay the price for them.
The masses, as we know, cannot exist without mass language—a language that will consolidate the multitude and spur it on to act in a certain way, formulating justifications for its acts and simplifying the moral and emotional contradictions it may encounter. In other words, the language of the masses is a language intended to liberate the individual from responsibility for his actions, to temporarily sever his private, individual judgment from his sound logic and natural sense of justice.
The values and horizons of our world, the atmosphere that prevails in it and the language that dominates it, are dictated to a great extent by what is known as mass media, or mass communication. The term “mass media” was coined in the 1920s, when sociologists began to refer to “mass society.” But are we truly aware of the significance of this term today, and of the process it has gone through? Do we consider the fact not only that, to a large extent, the “mass media” today are media designed for the masses, but that in many ways they also turn their consumers into the masses?
They do so with the belligerence and the cynicism that emanate from all their manifestations; with their shallow, vulgar language; with the oversimplification and self-righteousness with which they handle complex political and moral problems; with the kitsch in which they douse everything they touch—the kitsch of war and death, the kitsch of love, the kitsch of intimacy.
A cursory look would indicate that these kinds of media actually focus on particular personas rather than on the masses. On the individual rather than on the collective. But this is a dangerous illusion: although mass media emphasize and even sanctify the individual, and seem to direct the individual more and more toward himself, they are ultimately directing him only toward himself—his own needs, his clear and narrow interests. In an endless variety of ways, both open and hidden, they liberate him from what he is already eager to shed: responsibility for the consequences of his actions on others. And the moment they anesthetize this responsibility in him, they also dull his political, social, and moral awareness, molding him into conveniently submissive raw material for their own manipulations and those of other interested parties. In other words, they t
urn him into one of the masses.
These forms of media—written, electronic, online, often free, highly accessible, highly influential—have an existential need to preserve the public’s interest, to constantly stimulate its hungry desires. And so even when ostensibly dealing with issues of moral and human import, and even when ostensibly assuming a role of social responsibility, still the finger they point at hotbeds of corruption and wrongdoing and suffering seems mechanical, automatic, with no sincere interest in the problems it highlights. Their true purpose—apart from generating profits for their owners—is to preserve a continually stimulated state of “public condemnation” or “public exoneration” of certain individuals, who change at the speed of light. This rapid exchange is the message of mass media. Sometimes it seems that it is not the information itself that the media deem essential, but merely the rate at which it shifts. The neurotic, covetous, consumerist, seductive beat they create. The zeitgeist: the zapping is the message.
In this world I have described, literature has no influential representatives in the centers of power, and I find it difficult to believe that literature can change it. But it can offer different ways to live in it. To live with an internal rhythm and an internal continuity that fulfill our emotional and spiritual needs far more than what is violently imposed upon us by the external systems.