Narrative Constructs and Border Transgressions

in Holocaust Literature within the American

Context1

Mihai Mîndra

Michael McKeon states, in his introduction to the anthology Theory of the Novel: A
Historical Approach, that a genre is “a problem solving model on the level of form”
(1). One is tempted to “consider each work as an isolated case, a ‘trait’ in search of
a ‘type’” (4). This approach suits the novel as form encompassing extremely het-
erogeneous matter. After production and consumption what remains is, as Alain
Robbe-Grillet declares, “the perceived object,” a “partial” and “provisional” signi-
fication (McKeon 804). Both writer and reader accede to reality via the betraying
slippery words. The language they put together, writing and reading, is loaded with
personal cultural memory.
When the reality represented in novelistic matrix is as traumatic and uncanny
as the Holocaust, then genre has to get adjusted to the sinuous, tricky psyche remem-
bering and attempting to communicate. Trauma blocks for a long while the capacity
to reminisce and express. One tells the catastrophic story abiding by the rules of the
affected brain and soul of the witness, participant, or perpetrator.
In the case of indirect renditions of history, the extent and depth of documen-
tation stand trial, as much as the capacity to reconstruct it via imagination. Access
to the Shoah2 may be denied by the tragically incommensurable event, but lack of
empiric experience may help. One classical example is offered by the midrash of
Lamentations by Rabbi Judah the Prince and Rabbi Yohanan. The first one, although
the compiler of the Mishnah and a pre-eminent sage of the period was bested by
R. Yohanan, his disciple, and one of the Amorites, the rabbis who succeeded the
sages of the Mishnah and whose authority was considered secondary. The paradox
is resolved by indicating the distance in time of each from the destruction of the
Temple. Rabbi J. the P. lived in the second half of the second century and the begin-
ning of the third, and though not an eye witness to the horrible consequences of
the Bar Kochba wars of 132-35, he was close enough to hear accounts of witnesses

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 Narrative Constructs and Border Transgressions in Holocaust Literature ♦ 47

and to observe the effects of the disaster. R. Y., living one generation later, was not
burdened by the same weight of memory. Experience and memory can act as im-
pediments to interpretation and authenticity. Reading and interpreting depend not
upon the authenticity of experience, but upon will and imagination: the will to re-
cover meaning from the text and the imagination of exegetical ingenuity, which in
turn depend for their success upon time and distance (Mintz 51).
I shall discuss three Holocaust hybrid texts whose constructors represent both
cases: Elie Wiesel’s novel, Night (French 1958/English 1960), factually rooted in
the author’s personal experience, as well as two novels: Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl
(1989) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated (2002), imaginarily
roundabout artistic representations of the catastrophic event. Their very unorthodox
structures illustrate the difficulty of making the matter of literary genre contain a
humanly disruptive occurrence. The uncanny schizoid nature of the Holocaust as
Final Solution, meant to exterminate a whole ethnic group by routine bureaucratic
and technological efficiency is reflected in the matter of these novels.
Wiesel’s cultural and experiential acquisitions infused in his testimonial text
include interest in the Talmud, a certain complicated, existentialist Judaism, which
mixes Camusian rebellion with mystical faith, and two years of his teenage child-
hood spent in four Nazi concentration camps (Auschwitz, Buna, Buchenwald, and
Gleiwitz). Night is born out of a tormenting doubt concerning the artistic or even
scientific possibility for Hurban3 to be described or explained. The “Holocaust defies
reference, analogy,” he wrote (Wiesel 1968: 26). It is unique in history and irretriev-
able in documentary writing or fiction. However, ten years after liberation, he meets
the challenge. The brief, terse sentences combining factual rendition with poetical
lamentation using biblical rhetoric are the product of an effort to capture the flavor
of cruelty, suffering, and despair of his Nazi camp experience. Wiesel writes:
(…) everything that has to do with writing is sacred. Since the event itself
is testimony, it must be communicated in its purest form. Later on come
the commentaries…But first is that first word, which must be basic and
austere. That is why I try to capture in writing what we call the tzimtzum
or condensation—one word instead of hundreds. (Edelman II, 83)
The austere expression and briefness come out of this respect for the economy and
concentration of words as urgent messengers of fundamental truths. He had the
responsibility to communicate the incommunicable cataclysm as near as possible
to its resisting core. There are at least two confessed sources of this aesthetic creed:
religious and historical; “Rebbe Mendel of Kotzk said that truth can sometimes be
communicated by words, though there is a level of truth so deep it can be conveyed
only by silence” (Wiesel 1970: I, 239). He also “sees himself as a writer in the tradition
of Emanuel Ringelbaum and Chaim Kaplan, the chroniclers of the Jewish agony in
the Warsaw Ghetto (Against Silence 21). “I was amazed and astounded by the style,”
he writes. “Such an incisive short style; sometimes sentences of one word. When I
read them I understood my own style, why I wrote in such a condensed way…Ac-
tually I saw myself following in their footsteps” (Edeleman II, 78).
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The ghetto memoir style, factual-descriptive, and lapidary is mixed with poeti-
cal interstices and religious connotations, in the Book of Lamentations manner:
A barrel of petrol at the entrance. Disinfection. Everyone was soaked in it.
The a hot shower. At high speed. As we came out from the water, we were
driven outside. More running. Another barracks, the store. Very long tables.
Mountains of prison clothes. On we ran. As we passed, trousers, tunic, shirt,
and socks were thrown to us. (Wiesel 1960:34)
And a few pages further he evokes the Eve of Rosh Hashana at Buna:
What are You, my God, “I thought angrily, “compared to this afflicted
crowd, proclaiming to You their faith their anger, their revolt? What does
Your greatness mean Lord of the Universe, in the face of all this weakness,
this decomposition, and this decay? Why do You still trouble their sick
minds, their crippled bodies? (Wiesel 1960:63)
Possible similarities with Lamentations continue, deploring the destruction of Jeru-
salem and the First Temple (587 B.C.) by the Neo-Babylonian (626 B.C.). The historic
event was defined as catastrophe for its apparently final spiritual destructive aspect:
the religious life of the nation had been broken. All means of communication with
God were terminated. It was also destruction that made no sense; how could God
permit this? How could God disappear (no more Temple).The incommensurabil-
ity of the tragedy as related to the poet’s calling to heal via language (metaphors)
reminds readers of Wiesel’s and other Holocaust writers’ difficulties in representing
the Nazi catastrophe. The poet(s) of Lamentations had the same creative problems:
to find the way to express the event (Mintz 22). Like with Night, one perceives and
renders collective not individual undeserved and unexplained pain (see quotations
on the Jews’ suffering and God). Inimical representation of God, as it appears below,
compares with Wiesel’s above:
From above [the Lord] sent a fire

Down into my bones.

He spread a net for my feet,

He hurled me backwards…(Mintz 27)

According to Mintz in Lamentations “…God is also pictured as a fierce hunter,
stalking and ensnaring his prey,” “author of the Destruction,” and “…the general
of a ravaging army” (Mintz 27).
The religious spirit of Lamentations penetrates Night paradoxically slighted
by secular doubt; Moshe the Beadle, the Talmud scholar, appears as a prophet of
catastrophe. No mystical Jeremiah-like intuitions define his status. The motivation
is empirical and pragmatic. He had witnessed the Nazi murder of Romanian Jews
of Hungarian extraction from Sighet and miraculously escaped death to send his

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warning. However, he is traditionally misunderstood and qualified, in the spirit of

the biblical tradition, as mad:
He told his story…Through long days and nights, he went from one Jew-
ish house to another…People refused not only to believe his stories, but
even to listen to them. “He’s just trying to make us pity him. What an
imaginations he has!” they said. Or even: “Poor fellow. He’s gone mad.”
(Wiesel 1960: 4-5)
There are scholars who consider that Lamentations (possibly written by Jeremiah)
was a continuation of pre-exilic prophecy. The prophets predicted doom if the people
did not stop sinning. They did not stop, and they were punished with Babylonian
annihilation (Stinespring 83-84). However, Wiesel, at the time of writing Night,
seems to have considered the religious and the secular as parallel realities. Moshe,
the Kabbala teacher turned into a prophet of doom, is actually a witness of catas-
trophe turned into messenger of death and emptied of his Jewish faith: “Moshe had
changed. There was no longer any joy in his eyes…He no longer talked to me of God
or of the cabbala, but only of what he had seen” (Wiesel 1960: 4).
The only elements that make him a secular singular copy of the prophet(s) of
Lamentations are his miraculous escape and the drama of the people’s incapacity to
understand and believe him:
I have been saved miraculously. I managed to get back here. Where did
I get the strength from? I wanted to come back to Sighet to tell you the
story of my death. So that you could prepare yourselves while there was
still time…I wanted…to warn you. And see how it is, no one will listen to
me. (Wiesel 1960: 5)
Wiesel, like the author(s) of Lamentations, deplores the punishment of the Jews
hoping for redemption:
In one ultimate moment of lucidity it seemed to me that we were damned
souls wandering in the half-world, souls condemned to wander through
space till the generations of man came to an end, seeking their redemption,
seeking oblivion—without hope of finding it. (Wiesel 1960: 34)
The structure of the plot in Night may also allude to religious sources. It seems to
follow David Roskies’ Jewish memory origination in the covenantal scheme4: ex-
ile (deportation), destruction (the burning of mother and sister in the Birkenau
ovens, the fire evoked by Mrs. Schächter in the cattle train taking Sighet’s Jews to
Birkenau), martyrdom of father. However, the similarities are interrupted by the
lack of redemption. Instead, the end of the ordeal brings physical satisfaction (food
and sex), near death of flesh (food poisoning), and spirit (Eliezer sees himself as a
corpse). The lack of redemption with Wiesel is non-normative. Everything is set
against an apocalyptic landscape.
The biblical covenantal scheme (Adam and Eve, Noah, Moses) was replaced
in Holocaust literature by its secular version, where the reference point is no longer

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the Old Testament but history. Wiesel the experiential writer and Wiesel the would-
be Talmudist cooperate in this first book. The tragedy of Hurban is expressed in the
dual, existentially splitting factual and symbolical narrative garb. However, history
is not abrogated, and no messianic message closes Wiesel’s Night. The lamentation
tonality is there, as well as the everyday concentration camp reality, never followed
by hope for celebratory solutions.
If the hybridity of Elie Wiesel’s Night is motivated by the singular character-
istics of the event described and the author’s status of Die Endlösung5 survivor, the
composite structure of Cynthia Ozick’s book The Shawl (1989) is paradoxically the
result of this writer’s strictly aesthetic link to her Jewish ethnicity. The Holocaust
constitutes for Ozick, who has no personal experience of it, a means to revive Jewish
memory in America, the country that belatedly saved but also assimilated Hitler’s
victims into a consumerist, hedonist culture inviting forgetfulness.
Ozick realizes in 1989 that the story The Shawl and the novella Rosa, initially
published separately in 1977 and in 1980, respectively, go together as a Holocaust text
(The Shawl) and its North American midrash6 (Rosa). Consequently, she publishes
them jointly in one book form entitled The Shawl in 1983. The short story is inspired
by a brief historical account taken from William L. Shirer’s book The Rise and Fall
of the Third Reich (1960) (Friedrich 93). A young mother marching to and then kept
in a concentration camp is trying to hide her toddler, Magda, from the Nazis, who
finally hurl her onto the electrified fence. The story is told in a highly metaphorical
manner. Ozick seems to suggest that the past can be humanized and thus properly
conveyed in this way. Human pain, destruction, and loss are approached in mod-
ernist fashion through symbolical representations of the psyche:
Stella was ravenous. Her knees were tumors on sticks, her elbows chicken
bones. (Ozick 1990: 3)

Rosa did not feel hunger; she felt light, not like someone walking but like
someone in a faint, in trance, arrested in a fit, someone who is already a float-
ing angel, alert and seeing everything, but in the air, not there, not touching
the road. As if teetering on the tips of her fingernails. (Ozick 1990: 4)

Sometimes the electricity inside the fence would seem to hum; even Stella
said it was only an imagining, but Rosa heard real sounds in the wire:
grainy sad voices. The farther she was from the fence, the more clearly the
voices crowded at her…The lamenting voices strummed so convincingly,
so passionately, it was impossible to suspect them of being phantoms.
(Ozick 1990: 9)
Ozick explains this stylistic method in her essay “Metaphor and Memory.”7 She con-
siders that metaphor preserves and transmits the past via imagination. It is a way of
translating history into human language, communicating it successfully:
Through metaphor, the past has the capacity to imagine us, and we it. Those
who have no pain can imagine those who suffer. Those at the center can

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 Narrative Constructs and Border Transgressions in Holocaust Literature ♦ 51

imagine what it is to be outside. The strong can imagine the weak…We

strangers can imagine the familiar hearts of strangers. (Ozick 1991: 283)
The book may be considered an ingenious novel where past and present appear in a
creative relationship. Rosa Lublin and Stella, her niece, survive the Nazi nightmare
poetically and tragically represented in the short story. In the novella, they live in the
United States in opposite existential states, as a direct consequence of Stella’s induc-
ing the murder of Magda, Rosa’s daughter, obsessively symbolized by the shawl.
Although Rosa subsists in novel genre terms, with its quasi realistic descrip-
tions of location (Miami) and class (Jewish American high middle class: Finkel-
stein, Simon Persky; Rosa’s similar social position: father, president of the Warsaw
National Bank before the Holocaust), its interpretative/midrashic aspects constitute
the core of the fictional matter. The shawl’s and the dead toddler’s fate reverberate
and shape characters and the vision of contemporary American Jewry as forgetful
of its ethnicity, of America as scientifically dealing with the historic drama, mem-
ory, and trauma mutilating everyday human relations. Ozick’s midrash decodes
the present consequences of the Holocaust in the lives of her illustrative characters’
manifestations: Rosa’s criticism of Finkelstein’s business attitude toward her Jew-
ish emblematic suffering, the continuous perception of Stella, who dared to steal
Magda’s shawl, thus hurrying her tragic demise, as the “criminal” enemy, Dr. Tree’s
obsessive insistence to treat Rosa for her trauma triggered delusions, Simon Persky’s
opposing his humanistic “seize the day” response to obsessive, self-destructive hate
engendering Holocaust memory. Finally, the America of the novella appears as fool-
ish and trivial in the light of the European Holocaust:
Rosa hugged the box [my note: containing the shawl]; she was feeling fool-
ish, trivial. Everything was frivolous here, even the deepest property of be-
ing. It seemed to her someone had cut out her life-organs and given them
to her to hold. (Ozick 1990:56)
The novelistic duality of Holocaust representation also appears in Jonathan Safran
Foer’s Everything is Illuminated (2002). Foer has no biographical Holocaust experi-
ence. Imagination looms large and deep in his debut novel. Shtetl (Trachimbrod/
Sofiovka) life and characters (Yankel and Brod imagine each other) are figments of
magic realism contrivance, of academic composition class practice. In postmodern-
ist fashion, the writer doubts history relevance, that is, the attempts to organize and
explain the past or acknowledge its subjectivity by undermining it imaginatively and
linguistically. Thus, he highlights the importance of the mythopoeic and language
filters separating human consciousness from the Holocaust.
A young American Jew in his twenties, Jonathan Safran comes to Ukraine
to find the woman (supposedly called Augustine) who saved his grandfather from
the Nazis during WWII. He is helped, via the Heritage Tour travel agency run by
Alexender Perchov’s father, by Alex and his grandfather. They find instead Lista,
a survivor of the pogrom that destroyed Trachimbrod/Sofiovka (named after an
eponymous mad squire), a shtetl where Jonathan’s grandfather had been born and

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lived. Alex’s grandfather will, in the end, commit suicide due to awakened remorse
for causing the death of Herschel, his Jewish friend, in order to save his own and
his family’s lives.
Foer’s novel contains three types of discourses, two of which mirror the Ho-
locaust in literary American English: Lista’s and Alex’s grandfather’s testimonies
and Foer’s, a doppelganger character-writer, magical realistic shtetl life stories. The
third discourse renders, in plain, realistic manner, post-communist Ukraine, in a
creatively original Ukrainian-American English doublespeak lingo. The vocabulary
used by Alex, in his story of the trip and his post-trip letters to Jonathan Safran,
seems to indicate Foer’s expertise in pre-1989 East Communist mechanical per-
ception of Western culture dictated by ideological Iron Curtains. Modern Western
languages were taught, in the Communist Block, according to academically out of
fashion dictionaries and East European textbooks using high standard, archaic,
non-colloquial dead lingos. The real live West was replaced by its dead classic cul-
ture. In this way, Ukraine and America are placed, even in the aftermath of the 1989
communist revolutions, at an almost incommunicado distance: one highlights es-
pecially the difficulty for the East to perceive correct North America otherwise than
“enobled” (Foer 3) in comparison with “humble” (ibid.) Ukraine. Here are a few
lexical examples selected from Perchov’s discourse: “cogitate” instead of “think,”
“view” instead of “watch,” “repose” instead of “rest,” “dislodge” instead of “move,”
“manufacture” instead of “make.”
The palpable present (1997, 1998) is located in post-communist Ukraine. There
is also the immediate present of the letters addressed by Perchov to Foer after the
trip, in Ukrainian-American English. The irretrievable past (1790s, 1940s, 1960s)
is placed by the protagonist-narrator Foer in Trachimbrod/Sofiovka, the virtually
assumed shtetl in Ukraine, where Bord and Safran, his presumed grandparents, are
imaginatively positioned.
There has been no attempt, so far, to organize the multiplicity of Holocaust
novels by relating their narrative structures to the nature of the Holocaust repre-
sented and the cultural moment when they were written. The literary history books
organized around this topic are either collections of essays on individual novels or
they use chronological and geographical criteria for discussion.
I tried to point out three literary genre disruptions in three books that are
formally perceived as novels. My assumption is that such inner dislocations are
caused by the psychological and, consequently, artistic impossibility to integrate
the historical event represented, the Holocaust, into a coherent narrative matrix,
due to the writers’ or any creator’s incapacity to incorporate that event into their
human apparatus.
When, however, coherently narrative structure, unitary language and style
novels about the Holocaust are written, readers should be suspicious of facts pro-
cessed to fit novelistic patterns. This applies to other genres or domains that re-
construct the Shoah. Holocaust testimonies like Ruth’s Story: A Survivor’s Memoir
(1997) and Ruth Kluger’s Still Alive (2001) assume the garb of narrative testimony

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 Narrative Constructs and Border Transgressions in Holocaust Literature ♦ 53

and offered wholesome descriptive versions of the humanly incoherent and inex-
plicable. So did such highly and expertly organized super productions like Steven
Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993).
The Holocaust novels discussed here are truthful attempts at rendering the
genuine, problematic phenomenon and its unusual nature characterized by the split-
ting and mincing of imaginary, harmonious humanity into evil particles engaged
in the Brownian movement of history. Art replicates history. This is why Night is
torn between factual and Bible existentialist rhetoric, The Shawl superimposes the
poetically imagined Holocaust with its secular contemporary midrash that tries to
suggest the esoteric aspect of the Shoah’s survivor’s psyche, and Everything Is Illu-
minated ironically spreads the novel matter over three narrative levels (epistolary,
descriptive narrative, and magic realism) expressed in two linguistic versions. These
three works tell readers that literature can hint, through its means, in the text, at
the strangeness, inhumanity, and illogicality of history.

Notes
1. Acknowledgment: The writing of this paper was partially supported by UEFISCU
grant no.280/October 1, 2007 [code 1003] for the research project entitled “Cultures of
Diaspora: The Margin and the Mainstream in Jewish-Romanian and Jewish-American
Literatures.”
2. Hebrew for Holocaust. The usage of a variety of terms for the word Holocaust,
motivated by the ancient connotation of the English word (originating in the Greek ὁλόκαυστον,
holókauston: holos, “completely” and kaustos, “burnt,” with ritual sacrificial sense), was
suggested by Alan L. Berger’s Crisis and Covenant. The Holocaust in American Jewish Fiction.
Albany: State University of New York, 1985 note 2, 197.
3. Yiddish for Holocaust.
4. “The Jewish literature of destruction (to specify/explain) was part of a three-way
dialogue that engaged the writer, the people and the God of Israel. The basis for that dialogue
was the covenantal ideal of sin-retribution-and-restoration. This covenantal ideal was laid
out explicitly in the biblical exhortations of Moses and the Prophets to the Israelites. If the
Israelites observed the commandments, the Land would yield its fruit; if they sinned, the
land would spew them off. But exile did not mean abandonment, for if Israel returned to
the ways of God, He would return them to their Land…In traditional Jewish society, one
rehearsed the catastrophes of old at set times in the liturgical calendar, according to fixed rites
of mourning and penitence. If there ever existed a formal anthology of Jewish responses to
catastrophe, it was the collection of kinnot (dirges) for the Ninth of Av, the official date when
the First and Second Temples were destroyed. In addition to the full text of Lamentations,
these kinot included supplementary poems that reflected on later disasters in Jewish history.
They ended with a cycle of poems on the Land of Israel, thus looking ahead to the abrogation
of history with the coming of the Messiah. This juxtaposition of mourning and celebration,
of fasting and feasting, was the operative principle of Jewish collective memory.” (Roskies
4-5)
5. German for the Final Solution.
6. The rabbinic hermeneutic technique of interpretation and expansion of the
Talmud.
7. Ozick 1990: 265–83.

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Works Cited
Abrahamson, Irving. Against Silence. Ed. The Voice and Vision of Elie Wiesel. New York: Ho-
locaust Library, 1985.
Berger, Alan L. Crisis and Covenant: The Holocaust in American Jewish Fiction. Albany: State
University of New York, 1985.
Edelman, Lily. “The Use of Words and the Weight of Silence.” National Jewish Monthly,
Nov. 1973.
Foer, Safran Jonathan. Everything Is Illuminated. London: Penguin Books, 2002.
Friedrich, Marianne M. “The Rendition of Memory in Cynthia Ozick’s ‘The Shawl.’” Eds.
Alan L. Berger and Gloria L. Cronin. Jewish American and Holocaust Literature: Repre-
sentation in the Postmodern World. Albany: State U of New York P, 2004.
McKeon Michael. Ed. Theory of the Novel. A Historical Approach. Baltimore & London: The
Johns Hopkins UP, 2000.
Ozick, Cynthia. Metaphor and Memory. New York: Vintage International, 1990.
——. The Shawl. New York: Vintage International, 1991.
Roskies, David G. The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe. Ed. Phila-
delphia, Jerusalem, New York: The Jewish Publication Society, 1988.
Stinespring, W. F. Review of Norman K. Gottwald’s “Studies in the Book of Lamentations.”
Studies in Biblical Theology, 14 (1954): 122. Journal of Biblical Literature, 75.1 (Mar., 1956):
134.
Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Bantam Books, 1960.
——. Legends of Our Time. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968.
——. From Holocaust to Rebirth. New York: Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare
Funds, 1970.

Mihai Mîndra, University of Bucharest

SAJL ♦ Studies in American Jewish Literature