After Genocide

How Ordinary Jews Face the Holocaust

Sue Lieberman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429910654
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

2015 was the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War Two, and, for Jews, the seventieth anniversary of the end of the worst Jewish catastrophe in diaspora history. After Genocide considers how, more than two generations since the war, the events of the Holocaust continue to haunt Jewish people and the worldwide Jewish population, even where there was no immediate family connection. Drawing from interviews with "ordinary" Jews from across the age spectrum, After Genocide focuses on the complex psychological legacy of the Holocaust. Is it, as many think, a "collective trauma"? How is a community detached in space and time traumatised by an event which neither they nor their immediate ancestors experienced?"Ordinary" Jews' own words bring to life a narrative which looks at how commonly-recognised attributes of trauma - loss, anger, fear, guilt, shame - are integral to Jewish reactions to the Holocaust.

Chapter One
"A traumatised people"?

To speak of the Holocaust in one breath almost implicitly seems to involve the word “trauma” in the next. “Jews are”, said Caroline, “a traumatised people.” Sonia thinks that “we all suffer a collective trauma”, and for Louis it is also a matter of “a collective trauma”. Avigail Abarbanel, an Israeli-born psychotherapist, believes that it is “Jewish trauma [which] is behind the aggression of Zionist ideology, the colonisation of Palestine, the ethnic cleansing of 1948 and the way Israel has been treating the Palestinian people in the last 56 years” (Abarbanel, 2006). Abarbanel continues her line of thinking (although she does not specify what the “foundational myths” she refers to are), asserting that “Jewish foundational myths show very clearly that we, the Jews, have always been thinking and acting out of trauma.” Richard sees an historic and continuous Jewish trauma derived from the practice of circumcising tiny babies: an experience which, in his view, sensitises Jews to later traumas such as the Holocaust: “it’s utterly traumatic, the child does not understand this.” Another interviewee completely refuted this idea. My interviews contained many references to trauma and, often, to a kind of trauma that was thought of as generic and shared. Post-Holocaust, a concept of common trauma seems to have become part of a Jewish vocabulary of self. But it is apparent from the brief quotations above that whilst Jews are interested in the idea of trauma as a Jewish experience, especially when related to the Holocaust, there isn’t necessarily agreement on what it means or how it arises. Can we accurately speak of Jews who did not suffer the Holocaust as collectively traumatised by it? And if we are traumatised “by” it without having gone through it, how has this happened?

In recent years “trauma” seems almost to have become the defining characteristic of the Holocaust; consequently, this makes it unavoidable as a starting point for my explorations. But discussing trauma, much less “collective” trauma, is no simple task. Trauma is a complex and variable phenomenon, theories and practice around which have been evolving for more than a century, mainly for the purposes of clinical treatment. Some degree of consensus has formed as to the nature of trauma in its clinical manifestations, although it has to be said that the field of trauma studies is still characterised by considerable diversity and, as often, disagreement. What, then, are we to make of “collective” trauma? Not only is the concept itself on the whole new, but the expression is made additionally problematic by its very composition, for it is formed by linking two terms (“collective” and “trauma”), each of which suffers from its own definitional challenges.¹

There are, of course, links between personal and “collective” experience, between personal and “collective” trauma. No collective (however defined) exists independently of individuals. But what these links are; how they work; the relationship between external traumatic events and internal traumatic responses; the issue of memory—what gets remembered and what gets forgotten in the formulation of cultural “memory”: all these and more are questions central to developing our understanding of what constitutes “collective” trauma. Without addressing them, all we have are half-formed assumptions attached to an idea whose meaning is shadowy and vague. Yet if we are to take seriously an instinct which dictates that events as catastrophic as the Holocaust have serious and lasting consequences for individuals, communities, countries, and our very notion of civilisation, such questions must be addressed, however difficult they may be.

Theories and practice from the clinical field of personal trauma offer useful guidance to this exploration, and in subsequent chapters I explore in some detail how different dimensions of trauma manifest in “ordinary” Jews’ narratives at both individual and shared levels. In this chapter, though, my focus is on the generic theme of “trauma”. It is a complex phenomenon with many layers and associations. As I present the thoughts and experiences in relation to the Holocaust of the “ordinary Jews” whom I interviewed, I observe that there are numerous influences at work; for no two people have exactly the same relationship to trauma but must first approach it through the individual experience of their own lives. I suggest that in many respects the Holocaust acts as a magnet to which traumatised reactions attach; and that it is not necessarily the Holocaust as such which is the trauma for “ordinary” Jews so much as its evocative power to disturb and provide a focus for other experiences, inherited and actual, in people’s own lives. At the same time, there are distinct features associated with the Holocaust which are relayed through the cultural and communal connections Jews live with and which have their own impact. Individual and shared domains overlap; there is nothing about this subject which is easy.

Trauma and the Holocaust

In introducing a collection of theoretical readings on the Holocaust, Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg refer to the rise of trauma as a specific category of study in relation to the Holocaust. “The recent fascination with traumatic memory […] comes to mind as one example of a phenomenon that links collective, historical experiences—such as war and genocide—with the psychic suffering of individuals.” “The concept of trauma” has become, they say, “a key to understanding a range of individual and collective histories (including slavery, war, and sexual assault)” (Levi & Rothberg, 2003, p. 15).

To Levi and Rothberg, it is traumatic memory that links the individual with the collective. This begs its own question, and I return to this later, in Chapter Seven. For now, I focus on the idea of trauma as a theoretical “key” to certain histories. It is undoubtedly true that trauma has become of great interest in academic circles, particularly in the humanities, with whole departments now dedicated to trauma studies. However, extensive study has not in itself led to whole-hearted agreement as to what constitutes trauma. Furthermore, the idea of traumatic memory as the means through which indirect experience of a large-scale trauma such as the Holocaust percolates into a wider community contains its own difficulties, not least because “memory” itself is notoriously malleable. Cathy Caruth, who according to Weissman has become “the leading ‘trauma theorist’ in the humanities” (Weissman, 2004, p. 133), says of trauma’s clinical uses that “this powerful new tool has provided anything but a solid explanation […].” (Caruth, 1995, cited in Levi & Rothberg, op. cit., p. 192). To an extent, Caruth is right. Even in the clinical field, there are considerable variations in how different disciplines describe and approach trauma in order to treat it. Clinicians also work largely with individuals. By contrast, in the humanities academics consider trauma largely from a theoretical and speculative position, reflecting an effort to apply the concept of trauma speculatively to social patterning and cultural expression. Neither of these fields reach the more indefinable levels of collective experience. So whilst the idea of collective or shared trauma may be the best that Jews themselves can come up with in this post-Holocaust era, it still exists in something of a conceptual vacuum.

At one level, it is not difficult to see how, in thinking about the Holocaust, Jews might describe themselves as traumatised. A horror is deeply felt. Since the Holocaust presents to our gaze repeated depictions of events, images, descriptions, artefacts, and pieces of information which are highly disturbing and, not least, extremely frightening, “trauma” offers a kind of shorthand explanation for those disturbed personal feelings. At the same time it may not on its own be a sufficient explanation. Why, for example, should the Holocaust disturb me more than, say, watching a brutal murder in a film such as The Talented Mr. Ripley? (Minghella, 1999).² The fact that the one really happened, and the other is a fictional representation, is in a certain way immaterial, since I—like most Jews—know both largely through representation and narration, not through direct experience. Both speak to my personal capacity to be appalled and frightened at human propensity to inflict horrifying death and injury on others, but neither has factually happened to me. There is, of course, a difference. I can put down a disturbing novel or leave the cinema secure in some measure that what I have read or seen was only fiction. This is not possible with the Holocaust. Part of this trauma is that the Holocaust cannot easily be “put down”—relegated to a back shelf or donated to Oxfam. For better or worse, it is ours.

In Kalooki Nights, Howard Jacobson constructs a whole novel around one post-war-born Mancunian’s inheritance of the Holocaust. Referring sardonically to “two sorts of Jews […] those who went through the Holocaust and those who only thought they did”, Jacobson satirises what he sees as a tendency amongst Jews who have not themselves suffered greatly in their own lives to identify with a common lot of woe, rather than as the fictional father does, “to seek deliverance … to ditch the J-word as a denomination of suffering altogether” (Jacobson, 2006, p. 18). Yet Jacobson is as aware of a central anomaly in the experience of second- or third-generation British-born Jews as he is also aware that the Holocaust casts a heavy shadow, calling this “the death-in-life grip those slaughtered five or more million had on our imaginations” (ibid., p. 8). Through the mouth of Max, his central character, Jacobson poses this anomaly:

By any of the usual definitions of the word victim, of course, I wasn’t one. I had been born safely, at a lucky time and in an unthreatening part of the world, to parents who loved and protected me. I was a child of peace and refuge. […] But there was no refuge from the dead. (Ibid., p. 5)

Jacobson’s novel is almost unique in the English language. It takes an “ordinary” Jew, born after the war to English-born parents, and looks at the Holocaust, and more particularly at the meaning of the Holocaust, to this central character. It cleverly weaves a narrative in which arise many of the questions which someone born in these circumstances might ask: Where did we come from? Who are my parents? What does it mean to be Jewish? Why don’t we talk about what happened? Fictional as it is, it nevertheless presents something recognisably from that time, and a curious question arises: where is the trauma of the Holocaust to be found? In the fictional character Max’s experience, was it in his shock of learning about it through a book,³ and realising that his parents had avoided talking about it? Was it already in the family experience, having lived in and then left the village Jacobson caustically dubs “Novoropissik”? Or was it conveyed through the disquieting attitudes of his friend’s deeply orthodox parents, which made his own friend somehow worryingly “other”?

What is "trauma"?

There are central problems associated with any discussion of trauma, and even more so with a presumption that the Holocaust as an historic event is, especially in this by now much later period, not only still but particularly traumatising for Jews. One obvious problem is that the word has so invaded normal daily language that its value as a term which might meaningfully describe experience has become quite eroded. People regularly can be heard describing themselves as having had “a traumatic day” or “a traumatic journey”; by which, usually, they simply mean that they have had a difficult day (or journey) within the normal parameters of daily life. But if “trauma” is to be taken seriously as a concept—and particularly as a clinically useful tool—it has to mean something more than the normal difficulties which arise in the course of daily living. Ruth Leys begins her book, Trauma—A Genealogy, by citing two public instances to illustrate the wide discrepancies in situations to which “trauma” finds itself applied. Her first example focuses on the abduction and enforced involvement in violence of about twelve thousand Ugandan children by a Ugandan guerilla group in the ten or so years after 1988. The second example takes the case of Paula Jones, who famously brought a case for sexual harassment against the-then President Clinton, citing post-traumatic stress as evidence of the harm she had suffered. Leys observes that “it is hard not to feel that the concept of trauma has become debased currency when it is applied both to truly horrible events [such as the Holocaust, and the appalling outrages inflicted on the kidnapped children of Uganda] and to something as dubious as the long-term harm to Paula Jones” (Leys, 2000, pp. 1–2).

Widespread popularisation of the term “trauma” is one issue, although of course it has to be said that this is not the way in which Jews who think of the Holocaust as “a collective trauma” usually use it. More to the point is the fact that even in clinical⁴ settings, where the very concept of trauma arose and where people are centrally engaged with trying to understand traumatic experience for the purpose of therapeutic healing, there are different perspectives on what trauma actually is, and therefore the extent to which, and how, it can be healed. In her densely written book, Leys traces the evolution of thinking about trauma over the course of a century, beginning with Freud and working through a succession of chapters focusing on particular psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and psychologists, before ending with the Holocaust-focused, post-modern work of professor of English and comparative literature, Cathy Caruth. Leys concludes that “from the moment of its invention in the late nineteenth century the concept of trauma has been fundamentally unstable, balancing uneasily—indeed veering uncontrollably—between two ideas, theories, or paradigms” (ibid., p. 298).

From an overview of the historical development of clinical thinking around trauma, one thing is particularly obvious: there are different dimensions to trauma, and often, therefore, different formulations at work. Broadly speaking, these are reactions to defined and material events which result in symptoms usually grouped together under the heading of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); and what can be thought of as more systemic forms of trauma: that is, traumas which have become built into an individual’s (or possibly a group’s) system of psychological organisation in the world. The PTSD traumas are traumas of conscious life, even if the memory of those traumas has been pushed away. Experiences in the concentration camps, or the experiences of the Ugandan children Leys refers to, fall into this category. “Systemic” traumas are less specific events than they are certain kinds of experience which have occurred in early life, usually before the development of language, thought, and therefore of conscious memory. By definition, they are more elusive to grasp and can often only be inferred from later behaviour, attitudes, and orientation in and to the world. However, within any individual, these two dimensions are bound to overlap, thereby fostering considerable variation in how different individuals respond to the same external event(s). Thus Ruth Kluger, a Holocaust survivor, insists that while the camps were unremittingly grim places where one’s chance of survival depended as much on whim and luck as on personal character, no two survivors experienced the Holocaust in the same way: “Though the Shoah involved millions of people, it was a unique experience for each of them” (Kluger, 2001, p. 66).

From a clinical point of view, trauma is essentially a deep wound of complex character. Doctors use the word in specific physical terms to refer to a blow or injury to the body that will take weeks or months to heal. The complexity of character refers to the way the injury impacts on different parts of the body’s system: while a simple fracture is “simply” a localised break in a bone, a complex fracture will also involve damage to surrounding tissues or structures. A particular experience of my own, however, illustrates how even a physical trauma may be more than an event: how it can impact on the whole self in complex ways, and how it sits within a context. In the early stages of researching this book, I suffered a serious trauma when, for unknown reasons, I catapulted over the handlebars of my bicycle and landed on my (unhelmeted) head. I sustained a head injury; because this came from a blow to the head, it impacted on my nervous system. My most vivid memories of the days following the accident are of the utter terror that overwhelmed me as my brain and body no longer seemed connected, and I could not physically move without intense fear of falling. Yet, overwhelming as these experiences were at the time, I was almost completely recovered within weeks and never suffered afterwards from nightmares, flashbacks, or any of the other symptoms associated with some traumas. It was, after all, an isolated, contained, and unprecedented event with no other human agency involved and with comparatively little reason to fear that it would happen again. However, if my childhood history had been different—if it had included, for example, experience of a terrifying accident in which someone had died, or of physical violence, my long-term reactions might have been very different. In other words, many traumas are isolated events: they may be overwhelming and disturbing at the time, but they can be recovered from. Other traumas are different: they sit within a history and, consciously or unconsciously, demand meaning. The Holocaust is one of these.

Sometimes it seems as though the very word “trauma” evades definition: that it is, in consequence, itself a shorthand word for ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• INTRODUCTION "I don't know why it affects me this much"
• Dedication
• CHAPTER ONE "A traumatised people"?
• CHAPTER TWO "A profound sense of loss"
• CHAPTER THREE The broken contract
• CHAPTER FOUR "It's all very frightening"
• CHAPTER FIVE Guilt—or shame?
• CHAPTER SIX "So conflicted"
• CHAPTER SEVEN Held captive?
• POSTSCRIPT
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• REFERENCES
• LIST OF RADIO PROGRAMMES, TELEVISION PROGRAMMES, AND FILMS CITED
• INDEX