A Mission
After the Holocaust, no further doubt was possible. Isaac said so explicitly: the work he wanted to fashion would also be a surviving testimony to a murdered people, a vanished culture, and a dying language. …
Category: Khurbn
Today’s One-Liner (#134)
I was crushed, overwhelmed by having to face what the nation of Goethe, Schiller, and Kant was capable of. –Rachmil Bryks, May God Avenge Their Blood: A Holocaust Memoir Triptych, trans. Yermiyahu Ahron Taub
Genres
[Alexander Kluge’s two books] are sobering inventories of a catastrophe, cool, dry and therefore more gripping. A card index of all imaginable inhumanities. Kluge’s books consist of excerpts from diaries, telegrams, official reports, sermons of…
Selective Sensitivity
On one of his trips [in South America] ([Franz Stangl] confessed to Gitta Sereny in 1971), ‘my train stopped next to a slaughterhouse. The cattle in the pens, hearing the noise of the train, trotted…
Long Live Peretz!
Today we must take the most important thing that [Peretz] possess and that shines through in all his works, in all their times: his love for Jew and man. Also his universalism and humanism, his…
Inexpressible, Expressible
Whether culmination or aberration of history, the Holocaust transcends history. Everything about it inspires fear and leads to despair. The dead are in possession of a secret that we, the living, are neither worthy of…
Pessimism of the Intelligence, Optimism of the Will
Actually, even if it were possible, Rachel Ertel would not have tried to revive Eastern European culture. She wants only to preserve its memory and apply some of the political insights associated with the tradition…
He Must Go on, He Can’t Go on, He’ll Go on
Everything was doomed [in 1943]: [Yankev Glatshteyn’s] people, his tradition, its language, his artistic freedom, his chances of contributing to a continuing literature. Even his awesome responsibility as the chronicler of the last days of…
Denying Adorno
I have no idea that at the same time in the United States of America, Theodore Adorno has come out with the sweeping statement that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. A meaningful, powerful…
Reckoning with Russia, War, and Ourselves: A Spring-Summer Class
War presented itself to him only as a matter of subjecting himself to danger, to the possibility of death, and thereby earning awards, and the respect of his comrades here and of his friends in…