A Jew Can Have A Jewish Face

"A Jew Can Have a Jewish Face": Arthur Miller, Autobiography, and the Holocaust
Author(s): KINERETH MEYER

Source: Prooftexts, Vol. 18, No. 3, Jewish-American Autobiography, Part 2 (SEPTEMBER
1998), pp. 239-258
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20689521
Accessed: 03-01-2020 06:27 UTC
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KINERETH MEYER
"A Jew Can Have a Jewish Face":

Arthur Miller, Autobiography,
and the Holocaust
IN HIS 1987 AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Timebends, Arthur Miller tells of his visit

to Bari, Italy, immediately after World War IL In a line of seafront palazzos
formerly owned by prominent fascisti, he encountered hundreds of
Jewish survivors of the Nazi death camps. His attempts at communica
tion in pidgin Yiddish-German were met with total lack of interest, and
the hostility that he felt as he walked among them was nearly palpable. In
Miller's words, "they were not interested in my problem and could see no
help in me for their own, which was simply to get aboard a ship for
Palestine and leave the graveyard of Europe forever." In spite of his open
identification of himself as a Jew, Miller notes that "their mistrust was like
acid in my face; I was talking to burnt wood, charred iron, bone with
eyes."
Miller's interpretation of his experience in Bari is instructive in that it
contains patterns of his own attempt at self-definition:
In coming years, I would wonder why it never occurred to me to throw in my
lot with them when they were the product of precisely the catastrophe I had
in various ways given my writing life to try to prevent. To this day,... I feel
myself disembodied, detached, ashamed of my stupidity, my failure to
recognize myself in them.
To the question he asks himself: "Whence this detachment?" Miller

provides an answer that may be seen as an artistic and personal, as well
as a cultural and historical imperative: "One day it would seem the very
soul of the matter: a failure to imagine will make us die."1
PROOFTEXTS 18 (1998): 239-258 ? 1998 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
240 KINERETH MEYER
"One day . . ." was written in 1987. At the time of his visit to Bari,
however, the survivors he encountered were the Other, and Miller failed
to position himself at their side, to sympathize fully with their suffering.
Faced with what Lionel Trilling called "the incommunicability of man's
suffering," he underwent a "failure of the imagination"?the inability of
the imagination to grasp the horrors of the death camps. Moreover, Miller
may have been silenced by the "moral implications of distance"2?the
escape from identification by distancing the self, not only in terms of
space-time, but in terms of cultural dissociation as well.
Timebends is the record of Miller's attempt to overcome personal and
cultural detachment. In its re-creation of a past, it is both narrative and
history, a remodeling of personal experience in rhetorical form and, at the
same time, an affirmation of events and places beyond the confines of the
personal,3 in which the reader participates. As such, Timebends exhibits
what Albert Stone has called autobiography's "permeable boundaries"; it
is both an "individuating speech act and [a] shared cultural activity."4
In Timebends, and, as I shall argue in this essay, in many of Miller's
plays, language act and cultural activity are not separate undertakings,
occurring along two parallel lines. For Miller, these lines cross repeatedly,
each entailing the other. Far from being a random title, Timebends reflects
not only the non-linearity or simultaneity of structure evident in the book
itself, but also a sense of time that zigzags continually in Miller's work
between the narrating self and American/Jewish history.
Reflecting upon the narrowness of his six-year-old world, Miller
writes, "had I thought about it at all, I would have imagined that the
whole world was Jewish except maybe for Lefty the cop and Mikush [the
Polish janitor]." (T, 24) But he did not, or (as is more likely) could not
"think about it." Thought would have to wait for the autobiographical
act, what Georges Gusdorf called the "second reading of experience, . . .
truer than the first because it adds to experience itself consciousness of
it."5 As a child sitting on the floor watching and listening to his parents
and to other adults, "studying peoples' shoes, the lint under the couch,
the brass casters under the piano legs," he had been undergoing a kind of
osmosis:
my skin had been absorbing some two thousand years of European history, of
which, unbeknown to me, I had become a part, a character in an epic I did not
know existed, an undissolved lump floating on the surface of the mythic
American melting pot.
For Miller, the autobiographical "drama of self-cognition"6 that is

Timebends is also an epic in which he is a "part," a "character" in a
narrative much larger than himself. This epic contains the "power and
assurance" of sitting on the lap of great-grandfather Barnett in the 114th
Street Synagogue, and the magical Hebrew letters of the prayer book: "I
Arthur Miller, Autobiography, and the Holocaust 241
had entered into what seemed a dark and beautiful tapestry whose
patterns both flowed and remained unchanged in their relationships to
each other" (T, 37), he writes. But the epic also contains other traces of
"two thousand years of European history." Miller tells the story of his
terror at the local library when, as a child, he was asked to note his
father's name on his application for a library card, an apparently non
threatening experience. Rather than utter his father's name, Isidore, he
flees from the library. The librarian, as he later interprets his action, had
seemed to "challenge me to identify myself as a candidate for victimiza
tion." "I could not bring myself to voice my father's so Jewish name,
Isidore," writes Miller. "What does your mother call him?" the librarian
innocently asks. "'Izzie' being impossible, I finally managed .' ?' the
librarian asked. 'Is what?'" (T, 24,27) It is this question?"Is what?"?that
reverberates in Miller's work.
In Bari, Miller had sensed not only the survivor's hostility, but his
own "transparency," even "non-existence" (T, 166). Titnebends and, as I
shall suggest below, Miller's other work, are more than the narrated
history of one life;7 they are an ontological imperative, an attempt to
define and authenticate one's existence, to answer the question "is what?"
in front of an audience. In autobiography, as Stone has argued, "commu
nity [is] potentially established"; an "informal 'pact' or implicit under
standing between author and audience" concluded. The narrating self
"reinvents the historical actor," writes Stone, an act that "our culture
applauds."8
Stone is not the only theorist for whom "community" is synonymous
with "audience." Autobiography is often discussed in the language of
theater, and words such as "perform," "act," and "stage" appear fre
quently. For novelist and critic William Gass, the most "merciless" of
public stages is "the printed page." Even in an "Age of Narcissism" such
as ours, argues Gass, the autobiographer is less interested in performing
to an empty house than in "getting the world to watch."9 Nevertheless,
although the criticism is permeated by the language of theater, and
despite a general avoidance of formalist or essentialist definitions, one
rarely finds a serious scholarly treatment of autobiography and drama.
This critical lacuna is especially interesting in that autobiography is in
many ways a performance art. More than a "second reading" of experi
ence, autobiography is a performance of that second reading?the mirror
activity of a consciousness looking at itself, presented to an audience that
interprets and evaluates.
If, as I submit, autobiography is performative, is the converse also
valid? Can performance art function as autobiography, or, to present the
question in less categorically generic terms, can drama reflect the play
wright's self-examination, even self-restoration? This question is even
242 KINERETH MEYER
more problematic in light of most recent dramatic theory, where the role
of the playwright has been greatly diminished, if not entirely excluded.
Semiotic or communication-oriented models, for example, highlight the
contractual "transaction" between actor and spectator, while rhetorical
and psychoanalytical studies focus on the responses of the audience.
Cultural criticism examines theater as a public even in which the audi
ence members engage in shared rituals.
Without discounting the important contributions such criticism
has made to our understanding of the complexity of the theatrical
experience, it is nevertheless important to remind ourselves that texts
(including dramatic texts, when they exist), are written by individuals and
responded to by other individuals, and thus are, according to Paul de
Man's definition, autobiographical. As de Man explains it, autobiography
is neither genre nor mode, but rather, "a figure of reading, or understand
ing that occurs, to some degree, in all texts." Not surprisingly, de Man
also points out that "just as we ... assert that all texts are autobiographi
cal, we should say that, by the same token, none of them is or can be";10 as
a tropological structure, the text "defaces" any attempt at subjective self
restoration. Language, in other words, will always "displace" subjective
presence.11
While the incommensurability of self-presencing and language?Paul
Jay calls it an "ontological gap"12?may be a feature of all autobiographi
cal texts, it may be even more striking in the theater. Drama is a public art
realized through the filters of director, actors, and the numerous other
individuals who contribute to a theatrical performance, including the
members of the audience. And yet, although drama further problematizes
the already problematic relationship between "self" and language, I
would argue that a play is neither autonomous nor divorced from the
real, particularized concerns of the playwright who writes it. Even if we
deny the priority of the dramatic text, as some semioticists have sug
gested, the performance, once attributed to the playwright, sets up the
structure for a "figure of reading, or of understanding" between writer
and audience.
In many plays, the interaction between public enactment and private
concerns is further underscored by a second complex relationship: that of
the dramatic text?always only a blueprint for its realization in present
performance?with history and personal memory. While the interaction
between public and private, present and past characterizes many plays,
ancient and modern, it has been particularly thematized in modern plays
written by members of minorities and culturally marginalized groups,
where the playwright's use of characterization, action or mise-en-sc?ne
may relate directly or indirectly to his or her own self-definition. The
minority playwright, especially in recent American drama, often labors
under a dual imperative: to engage in an "individuating speech act" and,

at the same time, to affirm his or her responsibility to historical and
collective connections.13
The fact that Miller, a Jew and an American, is not usually considered
in the context of minority writing, makes his work a particularly challeng
ing case in point. Two reasons may contribute to an initial difficulty in
approaching Miller in this context. First is the pervasive opinion of
Miller (especially in well-known classics of the American theater such as
Death of a Salesman or All My Sons), as so culturally and dramatically
conservative?so "mainstream"?that he is placed in the position of foil
to other minority writers, often viewed as more experimental and "open."
In many ways, however, it is not only Timebends that stages the perfor
mance of Miller's examination of his own ethnic identity, but his other
writings as well. My purpose in reading Miller "against the grain" is to
suggest ways in which theatrical structures reveal patterns of this perfor
mance. Second, in much of his work, Miller draws directly upon Jewish
contexts and simultaneously distances himself (and the audience) from
these same contexts, a strategy that may itself be indicative of the
ambivalent position of Jewish Americans who came of age during World
War II and immediately after.
While Timebends may be Miller's most overt autobiographical perfor
mance, his other works also provide a "figure of reading" for examining
how the second-generation American Jew undertakes to position himself
in a historical and cultural landscape criss-crossed by the intersecting
lines of immigration, the Great Depression, and World War . Although I
would not argue that this is their sole function, Jewish?and even more
specifically, Holocaust-related?themes in Miller's early novel, Focus
(1945), in the plays of the sixties, After the Fall and Incident at Vichy (both
1964), his screenplay Playing for Time (1980), and his recent play, Broken
Glass (1994), constitute a locational strategy, a way of citing cultural
positionality.
In his early works, Miller continued his experience at Bari, failing to

recognize himself among the victims of persecution by employing var
ious distancing techniques. Questions of cultural definition, for example,
provide the narrative drive of Miller's 1945 novel, Focus. Mr. Newman, a
Gentile, is mistaken for a Jew after he is fitted with a new pair of glasses.
Newman, a grotesque inversion of the New American Adam (new-man),
and perhaps of another classic American, Henry James's Christopher
Newman, finds that his new face grants him a new identity: not only is he
beaten up as Jew by the fascist thugs of the antisemitic Christian Front
organization; he is categorized as an outsider by the police to whom he
244 KINERETH MEYER
reports the crime: "How many of you people are there on that street?"14
asks the policeman.
What is perhaps more remarkable is Newman's own myopic self
transformation: when he tries on his glasses for the first time, he looks in
the mirror and sees "what might very properly be called the face of a Jew.
A Jew, in effect, had gotten into his bathroom" (F, 26). The description that
follows is "worthy" of the most vicious antisemitic tracts, reminiscent of
the caricatures in the Protocols of the Elders ofZion. Smiling as if posing for
a hidden camera, he discovers that
under such bulbous eyes it was a grin, and his teeth which had always been
irregular now seemed to insult the smile and warped it into a cunning,
insecure mockery of a smile, an expression whose attempt at simulating joy
was belied, in his opinion, by the Semitic prominence of his nose, the bulging
set of his eyes, the listening posture of his ears. His face was drawn forward,
he fancied, like the face of a fish. (F, 27)
A perpetually intimidated man who keeps his fear of the urban

environment in check through a compulsive propriety, Newman is both
terrified and titillated by the potential violence of his conventional,
middle-class world. The subway beneath the streets of New York into
which he descends daily metaphorically captures this dual vision of the
city, for it is a place where everyday life is glaringly inverted beneath the
surface, a place where you see "behind every face," in the words of T. S.
Eliot, "the mental emptiness deepen/Leaving only the growing terror of
nothing to think about."15 Newman, a man who "walks neatly" and who
"clings to his sense of propriety" even in sleep (F, 19), is thrilled to read
the vicious graffiti on the pillars of the subway station: "Kikes started
WAR," reads one such example; "Kill kikes kill ki," reads another. To
Newman, these fragments are nothing less than "a kind of mute record
that the city automatically inscribed in her sleep; a secret newspaper
publishing what the people really thought, undiluted by fears of propri
ety and selfish interest" (F, 12). The secret newspaper, of course, is a
deeply inscribed trace of other newspapers, where Newman reads arti
cles about antisemitic vandals who invade a Jewish cemetery and over
turn headstones, marking them with the swastika. For Newman, such
news items hold a kind of pornographic fascination, evoking "the tang of
violence,... the same threat of dark deeds and ruthless force that flowed
out to him from the subway pillars" (F, 28).
Miller's interest in the documentary inscription of human evil?and
the effects of reading?would surface again in a later play (Broken Glass,
1994); in Focus, overt and covert texts of violence define Newman's world
to such an extent that in the end he finds refuge only through gratefully (!)
surrendering to the iron categories of ethnic stereotyping established by
American culture. In answer to the policeman's question, "How many of

you people are there on that street?" Newman replies, "Just them [the
Finkelsteins] and myself."
According to Edward Isser, Newman's reply indicates that he "sym
pathizes with the plight of the Jews and finally begins to understand the
universal character of evil"; his act of self-definition commits him "to
actively confronting the terror that had always been around him, but
which he had previously ignored."16 Isser, in effect, transforms Newman
into Arthur Miller, a writer whose explorations of ethical responsibility
are informed by a universalist morality, a point I shall take up below.
While I would agree with Isser that the creation of a character like
Newman can tell us a great deal about Arthur Miller, Newman is no
transparent persona. Far more interesting is what a fictional creation like
Newman tells us about the position of the Jewish writer in America in
1945.
In this context, Sidra Ezrahi is more helpful in pointing out the sense
of insecurity felt by Jewish writers in the forties, an insecurity reflected in
the various distancing strategies in Focus. The Holocaust is the absent
counter that informs this novel. Miller transposes the unimaginable
horrors committed against the victims to the fascist threat to Jews in
America, but through a distancing strategy; his central character is not a
Jew, but a Gentile mistaken for a Jew, whose final act of self-definition
seems to relieve him of guilt, but in effect, reinforces the same stereotypes
that have led to his own victimization.
Newman may be Miller's anti-persona, the absent Jew who has self
denied himself into goyhood, only to be brutally forced into ethnic
identity by the inflexible categories of the surrounding culture. In specu
lar fashion, this anti-persona is the subjective copy of an absent historical
event of such magnitude that it can only be seen myopically: the distance
remains blurred. In terms of Miller himself, what Focus suggests, not
entirely convincingly, is that "where the historical matter is a fixed and
total devastation," in Ezrahi's words, "the versions of history reflected in
art reveal each artist's struggle between continuity and discontinuity with
his cultural and private past."17
In the fifties, Miller's interviews, essays, and plays suggest that he
attempts to resolve the struggle between continuity and discontinuity
with the past by universalizing the significance of the Holocaust.
"Jewish" becomes a keyword for a very generalized Western humanism.
In a 1958 Harper's interview, for example, Miller criticized the theatrical
version of The Diary of Anne Frank, claiming that the gratification that the
audience felt after viewing the play was out of place. Moreover, he
charged, the necessary questions regarding the experience of the Frank
family had not been asked in the drama: "what is [the play's] relevancy to
246 KINERETH MEYER
the survival of the race?" he asked, "not the American race, or the Jewish
race, or the German race, but the human race?" The problem with the
play, continued Miller, is that it "lacks ... the over-vision beyond its
characters and their problems, which could have iUuminated not merely
the cruelty of Nazism but something even more terrible." Not merely the
cruelty of Nazism! For Miller in this interview, the "something more
terrible" is "the bestiality in our own hearts." What was missing in the
play, according to Miller, was what he would later call our "complicity
witt\ Cain": "so that we should know how we are brothers not only to
these victims but to the Nazis."18
In Timebends, Miller attributes his "expectation of universal emotions
and ideas" to his father, who refused to ascribe "naturally superior
virtues to all Jews and anti-Semitism to all gentiles" (T, 62). But at the
same time, in the phrase "complicity with Cain," Miller has also inter
nalized the Christian ethos of human sinfulness, recasting it in broader
humanist terms. As Richard Rorty has pointed out, a universalist morality
(incorporated by Miller in this instance) is essentially Christian in nature:
It is part of the Christian idea of moral perfection to treat everyone, even the
guards at Auschwitz or in the Gulag, as a fellow sinner. For Christians,
sanctity is not achieved as long as obligation is felt more strongly to one child
of God than to another; invidious contrasts are to be avoided on principle.
Secular ethical unwersalism has taken over this attitude from Christianity, [my
emphasis]19
This universalist tendency was also "welded," in Miller's words, to his

"hopes for the salvation of the Republic" (T, 82). In a particularly
revealing passage in Timebends, he notes that "[in the 1940s] I had
somehow arrived at the psychological role of mediator between the Jews
and America, and among Americans themselves as well." The remark
able insight following this self-assessment is striking: "No doubt as a
defense against the immensity of the domestic and European fascistic
threat, which in my depths I interpreted as the threat of my own
extinction, I had the wish, if not yet the conviction, that art could express
the universality of human beings, their common emotions and ideas"
(T, 82-3, my emphasis). Miller's deconstruction of his own universalist
position is revealing: while on one level, the universalist emphasis in his
early plays suggests that Miller was in many ways one of our most
Christian playwrights, his analysis of this position in Timebends conveys a
more deeply embedded psychological configuration, one that included
not only an intellectualized awareness of fascism, but a fear of personal
"extinction."
In After the Fall, for example, Miller's universalism takes the form of a
nearly classic Christian conversion narrative. Taking place against the
dual historical backdrop of the Holocaust and the McCarthy hearings, the
play is a complex examination of innocence and betrayal, cupiditas and
caritas. The intellectual premise of the play is whether life "after the fall"
is an irrecoverable fall into sin or a felix culpa, a fall into existential
knowledge. The dramatization of this premise is carried out through the
performance of one character's (Quentin's) conflict with himself; other
characters exist in "the inside of his head,"20 as externalizations of his
own pain. The expressionistic set, in Miller's words, is designed to
resemble "the surging, flitting, instantaneousness of a mind questing over
its own surfaces and depths."21
Audiences often find it difficult to discern whose mind is questing
over its own surfaces and depths: Quentin's agonized self-examination
has been repeatedly interpreted as Miller's search for self-confirmation.
Although the main character is a lawyer, not a playwright, the auto
biographical "figure of reading" seemed glaringly self-evident to early
audiences; in particular, Barbara Loden's portrayal of Maggie as a blond
Marilyn Monroe clone led to responses that ranged from the uncomfort
able to the negative.22 Walter Kerr's critique?Miller, said Kerr, goes into
the confessional a penitent and "emerges as the priest"23?was based on
what Kerr saw as the self-justifying nature of the playwright's perfor
mance. But perhaps it would be more apt to suggest, in light of Kerr's
comment, that in After the Fall, Miller goes into the confessional, pulls out
the audience/pnest, and forces them/him to stand with him before the
empty booth. The "motives and mechanics of betrayal"24?political,
sexual, historical?that define the structures of After the Fall refuse to
allow the audience to distance themselves from the underlying premise
of the play. The play was interpreted, to quote Stephen Spender on
Rousseau's Confessions, as an attempt "to force the hands of God and
humanity, to confess that all are equally bad."25
At the site of a concentration camp, for example, Quentin says:
I am not alone, and no man lives who would not rather be the sole survivor of
this place than ail its finest victims! What is the cure? Who can be innocent
again on this mountain of skulls? I tell you what I know! My brothers have
died here . . . but my brothers built this place; our hearts have cut these
stones! And what's the cure? {ATF, 113)
In traditional modes of confession?Augustine, for example?the cure

derives from the confessant baring his soul to God. In Puritan conversion
narratives, the confessant subjected himself to communal, as well as to
Godly, judgment. To early audiences, After the Fall suggested that Miller,
through Quentin, was attempting to bring the community down to a
common level of betrayal, not a position for post-World War II, post
McCarthy era audiences to accept with equanimity. If, after the fall,
248 KINERETH MEYER
decency is murderous and innocence can only be fake, how can we

distinguish between the victim and the victimizer? Did the emphasis on
the "complicity with Cain" ask Miller's early audiences to admit that they
all are "equally bad," and thus contribute to their sense of discomfort
with After the Fall? Aware of the playwright's return to Broadway after a
nine-year hiatus, did audiences interpret Miller's emphasis on collective
guilt as an effort to comfort himself, a strategy to avoid moral?and
perhaps cultural and commercial?solitude? To early audiences, the
semiotics of the Holocaust ("my brothers built this place; our hearts have
cut these stones!") in this play may have seemed less dramatically
functional than self-serving.
Miller's imagery of the Holocaust in After the Fall has drawn criticism
on more specific grounds as well. Indeed, poorly integrated into the
action, functioning as a kind of superficial refrain or prop, it seems at
times almost gratuitous. In a 1964 Commentary article, A. Alvarez charged
Miller with "thumbing an emotional life from Dachau," and with invok
ing the concentration camp as a kind of "atmospheric prop surrounding
the death of Marilyn Monroe."26 Similarly, Ezrahi calls the set a "back
drop to the personal drama" that offered a kind of "instantaneous
emotional pitch."27 Isser attempts to put these comments into perspective
by noting that the Holocaust in After the Fall is "reduced to the level of
metaphor" and (somewhat mixing his own critical metaphors) that it
"literally hovers over the action."28
The Holocaust is suggested in After the Fall through one major
symbol, the concentration-camp tower. As in most theatrical semiotics,
the signifying function of the tower is primary; in this case, it is expanded
until it becomes a persistent refrain at every moment of betrayal, at every
reinforcement of the loss of innocence, at every moment that we are
reminded that we are indeed living in a world "after the fall":
Rising above... [the set], and dominating the stage, is the blasted stone tower
of a German concentration camp. Its wide lookout windows are like eyes
which at the moment seem blind and dark; bent reinforcing rods stick out of it
like broken tentacles. (ATF, 1)
At the same time, as if to provide a contrast to the dramatic use of the

Holocaust in The Diary of Anne Frank, Miller describes the tower (blasted
stone, blind eyes, broken tentacles [my emphasis]) with words that verbally
and performatively "nullify" the power and terror that it historically
represented.
However, although the historical immediacy of the Holocaust had
been considerably vitiated by 1964, and although the significance of the
tower is enlarged in the play to suggest a more inclusive symbolism of
"the bestiality in our own hearts," the actual event still remains "present,"
"visible" through the very fictions that have displaced it. In Wolfgang
Iser's astute formulation, the fictive act of "boundary crossing" still

"keeps in view what has been overstepped"; while the stage representa
tion of tiie tower apparently displaces (or "disrupts," in Iser's terms)
the real historical referent?tower/Holocaust?it also "doubles the refer
ential world,"29 forcing the tower into audience consciousness with
renewed force. Historical memory, as it were, grapples with its fictive
representations.30
The nullification, or sabotage, of the Holocaust imagery in After the
Fall may also suggest that Miller half-accepts Adorno's charge that
"Auschwitz demonstrated irrefutably that culture has failed."31 Miller,
even subconsciously, may have struggled with a suspicion that "to
structure a creative response to a destructive force is an anomaly."32 In
any event, it is interesting that After the Fall was followed in the same year
by a play situated in a Gestapo detention room in Vichy, France, as if
Miller chose to confront head-on George Steiner 's charge that "the
European catastrophe . . . has left all who survived (even if they were
nowhere near the actual scene) off-balance."33 The difficulty for the artist,
in Alvarez's words, is "to find a language for this world without values,
with its meticulously controlled lunacy and bureaucracy of suffering."34
Incident at Vichy may be Miller's attempt to correct his "failure to
imagine," to regain his own balance by finding a language that would
dramatize a world beyond language. Interestingly, in Incident at Vichy,
Miller abandons the semi-expressionistic mode of After the Fall, and
returns to dramatic realism, the mode that had always provided him with
his greatest successes.
Like After the Fall, Incident at Vichy turns on a central axis of the
"complicity with Cain." As I have already suggested, the emphasis on
mutual complicity has wide-ranging implications in any discussion of the
autobiographical potential of drama. In my discussion of After the Fall, I
pointed out the difficulty such an inclusiveness entails for the audience.
Incident at Vichy further demonstrates the problematic philosophical
implications of the universalization of bestiality and sadism. The stigma
of the victim is removed: what Monceau, (significantly) an actor, calls
"not... look[ing] like a victim" is accomplished by turning everyone into
a potential victim and, more disturbingly, into a potential victimizer.35
Incident at Vichy's locale, action, and dialogue function like a series of
interlocking boxes. Within these boxes, the focus on historical identity,
ethnic affiliation, and real or perceived victimization suggests the play
wright's examination of his own cultural position. The detention room in
1942 Vichy, where a group of men are gathered for what is called a
"routine identity check" is a synecdoche for a Europe in which the
inconceivable has replaced the believable and in which, in the Dos
toyevskian terms of the Austrian prince Von Berg, "nothing is any longer
250 KINERETH MEYER
forbidden." The historical context of the play, the rise of Nazism in

Europe, becomes an extended figure of the evil capacities of human
beings in general, for our "complicity with Cain," or, as the psychiatrist
Leduc puts it, our complicity with our "own humanity."
But perhaps the most embedded configuration in the play is its
central action: a routine identity check satanically designed to ferret out
the Jew and mark him for destruction. Miller's use of the Holocaust in
this play, I suggest, was a strategy to perform his own "identity check."
Like other second-generation American writers, Arthur Miller was aware
of his otherness, even as he dreamed of going to West Point or pitching
the winning game for Yale ( , 62-63). In Timebends, Miller tells of
numerous "identity checks." If, as a child in the library, he saw himself as
a "candidate for victimization," as an adolescent, he searched for "some
thing that would reach into . . . [his] chaos and make . . . [him] like
everyone else" (T, 106). The effort to "locate in the human species a
counterforce to the randomness of victimization" (T, 27) informs the
political impetus of Incident at Vichy.
I return to my initial assumption that a theatrical transaction?a
"figure of reading"?takes place not only between actor and audience; it
also takes place between writer and audience, a point that is often
ignored or forgotten in discussions of the multiple filtering devices at
work in the theater. The mode Miller chose for this transaction in Incident
at Vichy is once again dramatic realism?an all-embracing mode that
potentially includes everything in its descriptive scope. Its premise, that
the referential world can be mimetically "captured," is supported by a
clear assumption of mastery in which playwright and audience partici
pate. But what if the referential material is a "fixed and total devasta
tion"?36 What if what is meant to be included in the play?a work of art, a
cultural product?is the negation of culture itself, a world of what
Alvarez called "meticulously controlled lunacy"?
Miller sets Incident at Vichy in a specific historical context, but again
universalizes the significance of that context: Jew is not the name given by
National Socialism to six million victims; it is "only the name we give to
that stranger, that agony we cannot feel, that death we look at like a cold
abstraction."37 These words are uttered by Leduc, and while it would be
irresponsible to claim that he is a "dramatization" of Arthur Miller, the
lucidity of his observations, and their similarity to Miller's views
expressed elsewhere, suggest that he is a dramatization of Miller's ideas.
In the same mold as John Proctor, Leduc is the voice of sanity in a world
where "nothing is any longer forbidden" (?, 47).
Miller chose to particularize this world by setting the action in "a
place of detention"?a closed, almost claustrophobic, set. However, in
universalizing the evil that such a place represents, he refuses to stay in
that place. Instead, in failing to empathize with the victims, he once again
repeats his experience at Bari.
It is thus the Christian who is the savior in this play. In giving his exit
pass to the Jew Leduc, the Austrian prince Von Berg rises above his
"complicity with . . . humanity" and demonstrates what Leduc calls
"responsibility." Von Berg acts out Leduc's statement that "each man has
his Jew; it is the other. And the Jews have their Jews." The self-sacrificing
Christian, Von Berg, becomes Leduc's "Jew" and, Christ-like, dies in his
place?imitatio Christi taken to its logical conclusion.
Interestingly, the play ends in mime; with no convincing dramatic
correlative to the "bureaucracy of suffering" that the play purports to
depict, we witness a failure of dramatic realism that is the counterpart to
the failure of the image in After the Fall:
Von Berg turns and faces [the Major]? The moment lengthens? A look of
anguish and fury is stiffening the Major's face; he is closing his fists. They
stand there, forever incomprehensible to one another, looking into each
other's eyes.
At the head of the corridor four new men, prisoners, appear. Herded by
the Detectives, they enter the detention room and sit on the bench, glancing
about at the ceiling, the walls, the feathers on the floor [previously scattered
by an old Jew holding a bundle], and the two men who are staring at each
other so strangely. (I, 70)38
The wordless conclusion raises pressing questions regarding the viability

of traditional forms of Western literature after an event that, according to
many, heralded the collapse of culture. "After Auschwitz," said Adorno,
insisting on the transformation of both culture and language after the
Holocaust, "there is no word tinged from on high, not even a theological
one, that has any right unless it underwent a transformation."39
Miller comes closest to examining the viability of art, and thus to
confronting his own position, in his 1980 screenplay (later adapted for the
stage), Playing for Time. Significantly, time figures prominently in the titles
of Playing for Time and Timebends, the autobiography that followed it
seven years later. Both works investigate the multiple interconnections
between time passing and time pressing, time left, and perhaps most
salient, time remembered. Both works explore possible strategies of self
definition in terms of collective historical experience and memory.
Neither as overtly autobiographical as After the Fall, nor as sche
matically moralistic as Incident at Vichy, Playing for Time dramatizes
Miller's most personal involvement with the subject of the Holocaust to
date. Thus, in spite of a continued universalist emphasis in the play's
moral import, Miller thematizes his own dilemma as a post-Holocaust
Jewish artist, suggesting, perhaps, that he has begun to "recognize
252 KINERETH MEYER
himself" in the Holocaust, to overcome "detachment" and "disembodi

ment." Like Incident at Vichy, the play presents a cast of "typed," rather
predictable characters. But while the dramatis personae of Incident at Vichy
included a music lover, an actor, and an artist almost by chance, Playing
for Time places the artist at the center of the play's action, questioning the
justification of art and the artist in a context that denies them.
The book by Fania Fenelon40 upon which the play is based is a first
hand account of the women's orchestra at Auschwitz. The fact that the
orchestra performed at social gatherings organized by the camp comman
dant as well as at the inhuman selections that directed innocent people to
their deaths in the crematoria underlines the action of the entire drama,
pressing home the question of how one can discuss art in an environment
that perverted conventional musical and cultural functions beyond recog
nition. Through the obscene conjunction of music, culture, and suffering
at Auschwitz, Miller explores both historical memory and the possibility
of art, his own included.
Fania Fenelon and her sister musicians were literally playing for time,
postponing their deaths by repeatedly and desperately appeasing the
Nazi beast. Miller's play is also a playing for time, an act of theater that is
also a vital act of remembering and thus of personal commemoration.
Still, despite his noble purpose, the gap between the two kinds of playing
for time is impossible to ignore; it forces us to focus on the playwright's
own position as an artist after Auschwitz, a position carrying with it a
responsibility more pointed and more pressing than the universalized
concerns expressed in After the Fall.
Miller's comment that "a failure to imagine will make us die"
presumes that the artist has a duty to the past, a duty to remember, to
imagine. Complicating the issue in Playing for Time is Miller's considera
tion of the obverse of this directive, namely, the possible implications of a
successful imagining. If, as Adorno put it, the suffering of the camps
"burned every soothing feature out of the mind, and out of culture, the
mind's objectification," if Auschwitz "demonstrated irrefutably that cul
ture has failed," does the playwright, or any other artist, for that matter,
have a right to imagine?
Playing for Time is a powerful dramatic statement precisely because it
raises both ontological and social questions emerging from the failure of
culture. Adorno phrased the artist's dilemma thus:
Whoever pleads for the maintenance of this radically culpable and shabby
culture becomes its accomplice, while the man who says no to culture is
directly furthering the barbarism which culture showed itself to be.41
Fania's reaction to the Nazis' response to her music is a dramatic

rendering of this dilemma:
Cut to the dayroom. Evening. Mengele, Kramer, and Mandel listen to the
orchestra, along with their retinues. Fania, accompanying herself, is singing
"Un Bel Di" in an agonized and therefore extraordinarily moving way. When
she does, Mandel stands, applauding?she is excited as a patron, a discoverer
of talent. . ..
MANDEL: Did you ever hear anything more touching, Herr Commandant?
KRAMER: Fantastic. To Mengele: But Dr. Mengele's musical opinions are
more expert, of course.
Cut to Fania, staring at the ultimate horror?their love for her music. . . .
MENGELE: I have rarely felt so totally?moved.
And he appears, in fact, to have been deeply stirred.42
As she continues to play music for the Nazis, Fania feels that "pieces
of . . . [herself] are falling away." In an exchange with Mme. Rose, the
conductor, she expresses her desire "to keep something in reserve. . . ."
"We can't... we can't really and truly wish to please them," she says,
almost begging for comprehension. Alma Rose's response is survival
instinct in the guise of artistic integrity: "But you must wish to please
them, and with all your heart. You are an artist, Fania?you can't
purposely do less than your best." In order for Fania to "do her best,"
Mme. Rose insists that she "refuse to see." Fania's anguished reply
embodies her pain at having to "further the barbarism," in Adorno's
words: "But what. . . what will be left of me, Madame!"
The dominant realist mode of Miller's drama may have been a way of
"keeping the door," in Yeats's words, against a "pushing world."43 The
pushing world, however, continually threatens to break in?through the
door of a monolithic (universalist) morality, and through the door of
mimetic realism and its underlying premise of artistic mastery. The
anxiety that accompanies the effort of holding the chaos at bay finds its
dramatic expression in the central image of Miller's recent play, Broken
Glass?paralysis. The overt dramatic situation of the play is a mysterious
paralysis in Sylvia Gellburg's legs; the action of the play turns on Doctor
Hyman's attempt to get to the source of this ailment, which has been
diagnosed as deriving from psychological, rather than physiological,
causes. Phillip and Sylvia Gellburg's marriage is also paralyzed, covered
with an encrustation of fear and denial that has at its core sexual
impotence. Impotence and paralysis on the interpersonal level resonate
within the historical context?Kristallnacht in Germany, November 9-10,
1938, when the free world looked on as synagogues and Jewish shops and
homes were looted and destroyed, scattering shards of broken glass in the
streets of Germany.
What is the connection between Sylvia's paralysis, the paralysis of the
Gellburg marriage, and the broken glass of Kristallnacht? Although critics
254 KINERETH MEYER
have suggested that in addition to its historical significance, broken glass

signifies the breakdown of a marriage, as in "the wreckage of dinnerware
flung in fury,"44 the paralysis-broken glass constellation has a far more
complex resonance than this reading suggests. Paralysis in this play is the
somatic equivalent for what Sander Gilman called the "new, postwar
language of the Jew, that of silence or inarticulateness." Perceived by the
world as the essential survivors of the Holocaust, even if they never
experienced the destruction first-hand, Jews everywhere (even American
Jews) are "forced to account for or bear witness" to their survival. "For
the dead are truly mute, and only the living can articulate . . . loss," in
Gilman's words.45 Paralysis is the displaced image of silence in this
play?Miller's communication with the audience of the "intense feeling"
without which "there is no work of art, no theater, there is nothing."46
Silence is the death of language, the erasure of poetry and art. Here is
where the double bind of post-Holocaust Jewish identity emerges, for the
Jewish writer is charged with both bearing silent witness and telling the
truth. Did Miller, instead of literally becoming the silent witness, write a
play about paralysis, expressing the double bind that he himself experi
enced regarding the Holocaust? In Broken Glass, did Miller experience not
"the failure to imagine" but a too-successful imagining?
According to this reading, the broken glass of Kristallnacht that
Sylvia so fears may also be viewed as the glass reflecting the "specular
pair"47?the author of the text and the author in the text. And while no
one character in a play is a transparent reflection of the author, the author
does, in Miller's words, "portion himself out among the various charac
ters."48 Phillip, for example, is ambivalent toward his own Jewishness,
and, like the young Arthur Miller, dreams of melting "into the proverbial
pot." Excitedly entering Sylvia's room with a letter from Jerome, his son
at West Point, he is shocked by Sylvia's response: "I'll never get used to it.
Who goes in the Army? Men who can't do anything else." Phillip's
answer is telling. "I wanted to see that a Jew doesn't have to be a lawyer
or a doctor or a businessman-For a Jewish boy, West Point is an honor.
... He could be the first Jewish general in the United States Army."49 At
the same time, however, the action of the play suggests that Phillip's
excessive Jewish pride is a mask that hides the fear that he is a "candidate
for victimization."
"Hyman, help me," he cries to the doctor near the end of the play,
"I've never been so afraid in my life." The doctor's response?"if you're
alive you're afraid; we're born afraid"?is more than just a generalized
philosophy; in the play, it is a description of the Jew in Western society.
Hyman says that it is not fear, but the way one deals with fear, that is
important; "I don't think you dealt with it very well," he says to Gellburg;
"I think you tried to disappear into the goyim" (BG, 69). Though present,
the universalist philosophy of Miller's earlier plays (Hyman: "Every

body's persecuted. The poor by the rich, the rich by the poor, the black by
the white, the white by the black, the men by the women, the women
by the men, the Catholics by the Protestants, the Protestants by the
Catholics?and of course all of them by the Jews") sounds more like an
echo of an old Tom Lehrer song than a firmly held authorial belief?
almost like an authorial complaint about our current ideology-laden
cultural discourse. Moreover, it is powerfully countered by Sylvia's
comment to Phillip, "What have you got against your face? A Jew can
have a Jewish face." Sylvia has the right the make such a statement, for
she is the only one in the play whose historical sense is not paralyzed.
Unlike the others, she does not fail to imagine:
But why don't they run out of the country! What is the matter with those
people! Don't you understand ... ? (Screaming)... This is an emergency! They
are beating up little children! What if they kill those children! Where is
Roosevelt! Where is England! You've got to do something before they murder
us all! (BG, 56-7)
Through Sylvia, Miller begins to probe "the contingency of his . . . own

most central beliefs and desires,"50 to stand back for a moment from "not
looking like a victim" in order to acknowledge his own positionality.
"Why is it so hard to be a Jew?" Phillip asks the doctor. Hyman's
answer is Miller's answer to his audience and to himself: "All right, you
want the truth? Do you? Look in the mirror sometime!" (BG, 71). Looking
into the mirror may also be the only answer for the twentieth-century
Jewish American playwright. The universal brotherhood of man in sin,
the "complicity with Cain," cannot erase the specific contingency of one's
own cultural position.
"Drama, if allowed to follow its premises, may betray its author's
prejudices or blindness," Miller wrote in Timebends (T, 105): dramatic
action, character, and discourse may reveal something about the writer,
perhaps even the writer's blindness. But must we assume that the
playwright is prior to the text, that the playwright is the text's creator or
cause? Miller also makes a strong case for the writer as effect: an inner
dynamics, he claims, may initiate a situation that "creates wholly new
traits, even in the author, so that [the author] is sometimes changed by the
fact that he's written something."51 As intellectual and artistic maturity, a
cultural climate open to difference, and the "threat of . . . extinction"
(T, 83) not only as a Jew, but as a man, coalesce, Miller begins to confront
his initial "failure to imagine."
Department of English
Bar-Ilan University
256 KINERETH MEYER
NOTES
1. Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (New York, 1987), p. 167; hereafter abbreviated as T.
2. Carlo Ginzburg, "Killing a Chinese Mandarin: The Moral Implications of Distance/'
Critical Inquiry (autumn 1994): 46-61. The central metaphor in Ginzburg's essay is taken
from a variety of texts, among them Balzac's Le P?re Goriot. In Balzac's novel, Rastignac
meets his friend Bianchon in the Luxembourg Gardens, where they discuss whether one
would be able to kill a Chinese mandarin if it could be done "just by an act of will" (54).
Ginzburg uses this incident to discuss the connection between distance (geographical,
ideological, cultural) and morality. His comments are particularly salient regarding the
Holocaust, and the efforts made to "affect the memory of the past by distorting its traces, by
putting them into oblivion, by utterly destroying them" (59).
3. On the affirmation of geographical location and historical time as particular charac
teristics of American autobiography, see James Cox, "Autobiography and America," in
Aspects of Narrative: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. J. Hillis Miller (New York,
1971), p. 156.
4. Albert E. Stone, Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts: Versions of American
Identity from Henry Adams to Nate Shaw (Philadelphia, 1982), pp. 4, 26.
5. Georges Gusdorf, "Conditions and Limits of Autobiography," trans. James Olney, in
James Olney, ed., Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton, 1980), p. 38.
6. Louis A. Renza, "The Veto of the Imagination: A Theory of Autobiography," in
Olney, Autobiography, p. 272.
7. On autobiography as personal history see Jean Starobinski, "The Style of Auto
biography," in Olney, Autobiography, pp. 73-83.
8. Stone, Autobiographical Occasions, pp. 13,10.
9. William Gass, "The Art of Self: Autobiography in an Age of Narcissism," Harper's
(May 1994): 43.
10. Paul de Man, "Autobiography as Defacement," in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New
York, 1984), p. 70.
11. Compare Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollindale
(London, 1967), pp. 268-69: "our belief in the concept of substance?that when there is
thought there has to be something 'that thinks' is simply a formulation of our grammatical
custom that adds a doer to every deed." The "subject," claims Nietzsche, is "the fiction that
many similar states in us are the effect of one substratum." The ego, in other words, is
posited by discourse, and is not the generator of discourse.
12. Paul Jay, Being in the Text: Self-Representation from Wordsworth to Roland Barthes
(Ithaca, 1984), p. 29.
13. See, for example, the plays of Ed Bullins, Adrienne Kennedy, and Maria Irene
Fornes.
14. Arthur Miller, Focus (London, 1964), p. 190; hereafter abbreviated as F.
15. T. S. Eliot, "East Coker," in Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (London, 1963), p. 200.
16. Edward Isser, "Arthur Miller and the Holocaust," Essays in Theatre (May 1992): 156.
17. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (Chicago, 1980),
p. 218. Ezrahi places Focus together with novels such as Laura G. Hobson's Gentleman's
Agreement (1946) and Saul Bellow's The Victim (1947). These novels, argues Ezrahi, reflect
"the specter of anti-Semitism which had haunted prewar America," and "expose the raw
nerves of Holocaust-haunted American Jews" (pp. 191-92).
18. Arthur Miller, The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller, ed. Robert A Martin (New York,
1978), pp. 186-87, 210.
19. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), p. 191.
See, too, Stanley Fish's criticism of Rorty in There's No Such Thing as Free Speech: And It's a
Good Thing, (New York, 1994), esp. pp. 200-230.
20. See the original title of Death of a Salesman. Clearly, the idea of dramatizing
memory, or mind, preceded the writing of After the Fall.
21. Arthur Miller, After the Fall (New York, 1964), p. V, hereafter abbreviated as ATF
22. Robert Brustein, "Arthur Miller's Mea Culpa," New Republic (8 Febr. 1964): 26, called
the play a "trtree-and-one-half-hour breach of taste." On the general uneasiness with the
play, even among the members of the cast, see Victor Navasky, Naming Names (London,
1982), pp. 217-18.
23. Walter Kerr, "Miller's After the Fall," New York Herald Tribune (24 Jan. 1964): 11.
24. C. W. E. Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, vol. 2
(Cambridge, 1984), p. 216.
25. Stephen Spender, "Confessions and Autobiography/' in Olney, Autobiography,
p. 120.
26. A. Alvarez, "The Literature of the Holocaust," Commentary 38 (Nov. 1964): 67.
27. Ezrahi, By Words Alone, p. 213.
28. Isser, "Arthur Miller and the Holocaust," p. 157.
29. Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Bal
timore, 1993), pp. xiv-xv.
30. According to Iser, p. xiv, the fictive is not an entity, but an "operational mode of
consciousness that makes inroads into existing versions of the world." On the subject of
representation and the Holocaust, see Robert Brinkley and Stephen Youra, "Tracing Shoah,"
PMLA (Jan. 1996): 108-28, and Miriam Bratu Hansen, "Schindlers List is Not Shoah: The
Second Commandment, Popular Modernism, and Public Memory," Critical Inquiry (winter
1996): 292-313.
31. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (1966; New York, 1973),
p. 366.
32. Lillian S. Kremer, Witness Through the Imagination: Jewish American Holocaust Litera
ture (Detroit, 1989), p. 28.
33. George Steiner, Language and Silence (New York, 1977), p. 144.
34. Alvarez, "The Literature of the Holocaust," p. 67.
35. The ramifications of such a position are complex: if every Other is potentially both
victim and victimizer, then the specific otherness of the Jews that led to their systematic
destruction is somehow nullified. The danger of a universalist position is thus that it may
elide instances of real victimization, and introduce a kind of fuzziness into what was
historically a very clearly defined situation. In any event, Incident at Vichy is a play, not a
polemical tract, and its concentrated and highly focused dramatic structures provoke, but
do not allow for, an extensive examination of the various ideological facets of the issue.
36. Ezrahi, By Words Alone, p. 218.
37. Arthur Miller, Incident at Vichy (New York, 1964), p. 66; hereafter abbreviated as I.
38. On the "silent Old Jew" of Incident at Vichy, see Timebends, p. 43.
39. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 367.
40. Fania Fenelon and Marcelle Routier, Playing for Time, trans. Judith Landry (New
York, 1977).
41. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 365-67.
42. Arthur Miller, "Playing for Time," in Plays: Two (London, 1981), p. 481.
43. W. B. Yeats, Essays and introductions (New York, 1961), p. 224.
44. David Richards, Review of Broken Glass, New York Times (25 Apr. 1994): 3.
45. Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the
Jews (Baltimore, 1986), pp. 320-21.
258 KINERETH MEYER
46. Arthur Miller, quoted by Richard I. Evans, Psychology and Arthur Miller (New York,
1969), p. 31.
47. De Man, "Autobiography as Defacement/' p. 172.
48. Quoted in Evans, Psychology and Arthur Miller, p. 20.
49. Arthur Miller, Broken Glass (London, 1994), p. 19; herafter abbreviated as BG.
50. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. xv.
51. Quoted in Evans, Psychology and Arthur Miller, p. 20.

A Jew Can Have A Jewish Face

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"A Jew Can Have a Jewish Face": Arthur Miller, Autobiography, and the Holocaust

Author(s): KINERETH MEYER

"A Jew Can Have a Jewish Face":

IN HIS 1987 AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Timebends, Arthur Miller tells of his visit

To the question he asks himself: "Whence this detachment?" Miller

For Miller, the autobiographical "drama of self-cognition"6 that is

under a dual imperative: to engage in an "individuating speech act" and,

In his early works, Miller continued his experience at Bari, failing to

A perpetually intimidated man who keeps his fear of the urban

American culture. In answer to the policeman's question, "How many of

This universalist tendency was also "welded," in Miller's words, to his

In traditional modes of confession?Augustine, for example?the cure

decency is murderous and innocence can only be fake, how can we

At the same time, as if to provide a contrast to the dramatic use of the

Iser's astute formulation, the fictive act of "boundary crossing" still

forbidden." The historical context of the play, the rise of Nazism in

The wordless conclusion raises pressing questions regarding the viability

himself" in the Holocaust, to overcome "detachment" and "disembodi

Fania's reaction to the Nazis' response to her music is a dramatic

have suggested that in addition to its historical significance, broken glass

the universalist philosophy of Miller's earlier plays (Hyman: "Every

Through Sylvia, Miller begins to probe "the contingency of his . . . own

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