Preempting the Holocaust
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Overview
Lawrence L. Langer, perhaps the most important literary critic of the Holocaust, here explores the use of Holocaust themes in literature, memoirs, film, and painting. Among the authors he examines are Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Cynthia Ozick, Art Spiegelman, and Simon Wiesenthal. He appraises the art of Samuel Bak, considered by many the premier Holocaust painter of our time, and assesses the "Holocaust Project" by Judy Chicago. He also offers a critical interpretation of Undzere Kinder, a neglected but important Yiddish film made in Poland after the war about Holocaust orphans.Langer focuses his attention on a variety of controversial issues: the attempt of a number of commentators to appropriate the subject of the Holocaust for private moral agendas; the ordeal of women in the concentration camps; the conflicting claims of individual and community survival in the Kovno ghetto; the current tendency to conflate the Holocaust with other modern atrocities, thereby blurring the distinctive features of each; and the sporadic impulse to shift the emphasis from the crime, the criminals, and the victimized to the question of forgiveness and the need for healing. He concludes with some reflections on the challenge of teaching the Holocaust to generations of students who know less and less of its history but continue to manifest an eager curiosity about its human impact and psychological roots.
Synopsis
Lawrence L. Langer here explores the use of Holocaust themes in literature, memoirs, film, and painting, examining the work of such authors as Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Cynthia Ozick, Art Spiegelman, and Simon Wiesenthal, and appraising the art of Samuel Bak, the "Holocaust Project" by Judy Chicago, and the Yiddish film Undzere Kinder, made in Poland after the war.
Amy E. Schwartz
[Langer's] objection...is to the drawing of connections from the Holocaust to other matters....all efforts to find "meaning" of anykind in the Holocaust are intrinsically suspect and reductive, even questions about how we would act in similar circumstances.....[I]t is almost a relief, late in the book, to find Langer...drawing his own meaning... —WQ: The Wilson Quarterly
Editorials
Amy E. Schwartz
[Langer's] objection...is to the drawing of connections from the Holocaust to other matters....all efforts to find "meaning" of anykind in the Holocaust are intrinsically suspect and reductive, even questions about how we would act in similar circumstances.....[I]t is almost a relief, late in the book, to find Langer...drawing his own meaning... —WQ: The Wilson QuarterlyRichard Eder
Langer's achievement is to insist obdurately that even the most terrible things said about the Holocaust do not plumb it....How valuable is the protest he...put[s] up.— Los Angeles Times Book Review
Publishers Weekly -
"Anyone teaching [the Holocaust] must be willing to confront behavior that cannot be explained by prior notions of why we do what we do," says author Lawrence L. Langer.In this collection of essays, most of which were delivered at Holocaust conferences, Langer, author of the NBCC prize-winning Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, challenges our tendency to push aside the uniquely horrible reality of this event to make room for the uplifting, the rationalizing, the triumphal versions, whether or not they convey the truth. Describing the Nazis as mindless bureaucratic killing machines rather than sadistic murderers or insisting that the establishment of Israel in 1948 somehow makes up for the death of two-thirds of Europe's Jews are examples of our inability to deal honestly with a historical event that undermines all religious and humane assumptions about people's relations to one another and to God. Langer finds a disquieting truth in the work of Primo Levi, Samuel Bak, Cynthia Ozick and Art Spiegelman, but criticizes artist Judy Chicago's Holocaust Project and theologian Tzvetan Todorov's writing for seeking falsely to universalize the experience of the Holocaust, thereby distorting and reducing it. "There is simply no connection between our ordinary suffering and their unprecedented agony, nor do our trivial inclinations toward sin resemble in any way the minds that devised such terminal torture." Langer's own experience interviewing Holocaust survivors has profoundly branded him, and his deep sympathy and outrage on behalf of the innocent victims of humanity's most horrendous crime permeates these somber and alarming essays.
Library Journal
Most of the essays in this collection by award-winning Holocaust literary critic Langer were originally presented as conference papers, and several have previously been published elsewhere. Unlike "exemplarists" who try to pull something positive from the ashes of the Holocaust, Langer is a literalist who believes that the focus should not be shifted away from mass murder. He argues firmly that "we learn nothing from the misery" that we find there, and, indeed, suffering is an undercurrent that runs through all of the essays. Among the people whose work he discusses are Tzvetan Todorov, Primo Levi, Cynthia Ozick, Art Spiegelman, and artist Samuel Bak. One of the most interesting essays (published here for the first time) is a discussion of the various responses to Simon Wiesenthal's The Sunflower over the past 29 years. -- John A. Drobnicki, York College, CUNY[Langer's] objection...is to the drawing of connections from the Holocaust to other matters....all efforts to find "meaning" of anykind in the Holocaust are intrinsically suspect and reductive, even questions about how we would act in similar circumstances.....[I]t is almost a relief, late in the book, to find Langer...drawing his own meaning...
— WQ: The Wilson Quarterly
For Langer, the Holocaust remains "an unforgivable crime" that is "beyond guilt and atonement"....Literary tragedies end in resolution, but for Laner the Holocaust is "a narrative without closure."
— The New York Times Book Review
Langer's achievement is to insist obdurately that even the most terrible things said about the Holocaust do not plumb it.
Langer, one of our most eloquent Holocaust scholars (Admitting the Holocaust), offers 11 essays that look mainly at the inadequacies of art in addressing this cataclysm. The lectures and occasional pieces collected in this new volume, written in the last three years, deal predominantly with cultural issues, ranging from the paintings of Samuel Bak (a survivor of the Vilna ghetto) to the Yiddish-Polish film Undzere Kinder (Our Children), from the moral question posed by Simon Wiesenthal's The Sunflower to the problem of teaching the Holocaust. Langer, like Bak, "insists on a tension between two narratives [of Jewish history]: a positive chronicle moving from Creation to Exodus and a negative one, beginning with round-ups and finishing with train voyages to a perplexing abandonment and final doom."
In his previous work, Langer has offered a convincing analysis of the events of the Holocaust as being beyond our previous categories of moral behavior and of the recollections of the survivors as existing in their own doubled narrative, "chronological" and "durational" time, as he puts it. The new book restates and refines the ideas of its predecessors, most notably Holocaust Testimonies (which won a National Book Critics Circle award), applying that work's insights to specific texts with incisiveness and intelligence. At a time when the daily newspapers are filled with renewed versions of genocide and atrocity, but also a time in which the last of the perpetrators of the Holocaust and their victims are dying of old age, this volume is a useful corrective to the foolish sentimentalizing of these events or their application as a hideously inappropriatelesson on the "triumph of the human spirit." As Langer himself points out dryly, "the Holocaust is a narrative without closure and with few cheerful endings." An essential work on one of the central historical moments of this century.