On Being Adjacent to Historical Violence

Irene Kacandes

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9783110753264
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110753356
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers to academic and general public readers timely reflections about our relationships to violence. Taking cues from the self-reflexivity, themes, and subject matters of Holocaust, queer, and Black studies, this large group of diverse intellectuals wrestles with questions that connect past, present and future: where do I stand in relation to violence? What is my attitude toward that adjacency? Whose story gets to be told by whom? What story do I take this image to be telling? How do I co-witness to another's suffering? How do I honor the agency and resilience of family members or historical personages? How do past violence and injustice connect to the present? In smart, self-conscious, passionate, and often painfully beautiful prose, cultural practitioners, historians and cultural studies scholars such as Angelika Bammer, Doris Bergen, Ann Cvetkovich, Marianne Hirsch, Priscilla Layne, Mark Roseman, Leo Spitzer, Susan R. Suleiman and Viktor Witkowski explore such questions, inviting readers to do the same. By making available compelling examples of thinkers performing their own work within the cauldron of crises that came to a boil in 2020 and continued into the next year, this volume proposes strategies for moving forward with hope.

Part One: Connections

Debts

Marianne Hirsch

Note: An earlier and shorter version of this article appeared in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32, no. 2 (2017).

It was possible that I did owe something to my own family and the families of my friends. That is, to tell their stories as simply as possible, in order, you might say, to save a few lives.

Grace Paley

Every day my inbox bursts with messages from the Czernowitz listserv.¹ Mostly, I send them off to the trash-bin over my first coffee. I thought I was done with Czernowitz. I spent more than two decades researching, writing, speaking and publishing about my strong personal connection to a place that can no longer be found in any contemporary atlas. I read memoirs and historical accounts, a pored over old maps and postcards and stared at faces in faded photos, trying to imagine and to animate a world that had long ago been destroyed and dispersed. Together with Leo Spitzer, I wrote about the rich Habsburg and interwar Romanian Jewish life that thrived there, and about the persecution, deportation and survival of the city’s Jews during the Second World War.² I was able to visit my parents’ childhood apartments in crumbling buildings in what is now Chernivtsi in Ukraine, and to retrace their ghetto experiences, in their company. I even traveled to Transnistria, a region now in Ukraine and Moldova to which tens of thousands of Jews from Czernowitz/Cernăuți and Greater Romania were deported and where they suffered starvation, disease and mass murder at the hands of Nazi and Romanian perpetrators. I went there twice, even though my parents had been among the fortunate third of the city’s Jews who were able to evade deportation. I had to see and touch not just what they suffered, but also what they feared. These experiences fueled my scholarship and lent personal and political urgency to my writing. And now, seventy-five years after the end of what to me will always be “the war,” my parents, my aunts and uncles, along with nearly all their contemporaries have died. I would have liked to think that I have paid my debts to this past by listening to them and by retelling their stories “as simply as possible.” By trying to ensure that the particular Jewish history of this border region, largely missing from most historical accounts of the Holocaust, will not sink into oblivion, I had hoped, in Grace Paley’s words, “to save a few lives.”

The legacies of genocidal violence, however, are not so neatly put aside. They leave their traces and shadows for decades and generations to come. That’s what hit me when, one morning a couple of years ago, I was about to delete yet another message from the Czernowitz listserv. This one was from Stephen Winter of New York,

My mother, Blanka, turned 93 today. Once in a while her memory gets confused

Her only wish to me today was to go back to Transnistria and die to be with her brother Leopold

This made me think … no one has ever apologized to her for their cruelty!

What a load Transnistria has been on my 62 years of life.

I think she deserves at least 1 apology!

This was quickly followed by a response from Miriam Süss from Melbourne:

Stephen, as I read your post and tears run down my cheeks, I hear the voice of my 97-year-old mother, who at least once a week cries over her losses and the terrible suffering in Bershad Transnistria.

A shadow over all our childhoods and indeed our adult lives.

And then a message by Sally Bendersky from Santiago:

I connect with you, Miriam. … My mother passed away several years ago, but the memory of her suffering and the impossibility of enjoying her life is still here.

Who is there who might apologize to 93-year-old Blanka Winter and to her son? Hers is a history that has never been properly acknowledged. In a context in which historical transmission is short-circuited by shifts in national borders, the realignment of political orientations, and the contestation, erasure and forgetting of histories even as devastating as the Romanian Holocaust in Cernăuți and Transnistria, survivors transmit more than memories of wartime suffering to their descendants. Their anxieties and needs, their trauma and mourning, are compounded by the limited possibilities of recognition that exist after decades of impunity, political denial, and contestation. It’s these incommensurate affects I hear in the brief outcries from around the globe, written in shorthand and, for most, in a foreign language, forging a digital community of what Eva Hoffman has termed the “postgenerations.”³ That community shares the many dimensions of postmemory I’ve myself experienced and analyzed in the art and writing of those who came “after”: mourning for a lost world, the impulse to repair the loss and heal to those who have suffered it, anger about the absence of public recognition, frustration in the face of our own ignorance and impotence.⁴ In short, the inheritance of a trauma that survives the survivors, overwhelming the present and hijacking the future.

As familial and affiliative descendants of survivors, we continue to feel the need to research and to tell their stories of injustice and persecution, as well as to reclaim moments of courage and resistance on their part. But as the survivors have themselves now, mostly, left our midst, shouldn’t we also ask ourselves what more we can do with this persisting legacy in our own present? How can we envision a future that recalls past crimes without being paralyzed by them, and without perpetuating a culture of fear and denial, of nationalism and ethnocentrism that was responsible for those crimes in the first place?

I believe that the structure of postmemory applies to co-witnesses not only of past trauma, but also of contemporary catastrophic events occurring in proximate or distant parts of the world.⁵ Might our own subject position as descendants of the Holocaust, in particular, move us to be responsive to the violent histories of others, whether past or present? As the geographical reach of the Czernowitz listserv shows, survivors from Nazi-occupied Europe were dispersed throughout the world, and, despite the early resolve of “never again,” we, as their descendants, have witnessed injustice, violence and genocide again and again. Even as postgeneration Jews have inherited, viscerally, what it feels like to be deemed “other,” undesirable, and unworthy of life, we have also witnessed and been implicated in the “othering” of our neighbors and compatriots. Particularly, the evolution of the Israeli state, in large part created as a refuge for European Holocaust survivors, has raised the question of how the victims can themselves become victimizers of Palestinian populations who have been expelled from their homes, whose lands have been expropriated and who have been living under decades of violent occupation.

As I witness the alarming growth of nationalism and ethnocentrism, racism and anti-Semitism, often based on past grievances, I am keenly aware of how the memory of painful pasts is often mobilized as an alibi for persecution, exclusion and violence. The memory of the Holocaust is regularly used by the state of Israel and by other countries to instill fear and xenophobia. As descendants of Holocaust survivors, I believe we need to resist such instrumentalization and to refuse to allow the suffering of our ancestors to be used to inflict further violence. This is what I feel I owe my parents now, and it is a debt as weighty as the injunction to tell their stories, and one that might be more intractable.

For retrospective or distant co-witnesses, the challenge is to allow ourselves to be vulnerable to what Susan Sontag has called “the pain of others,” to recognize the entanglements of our connective histories while, at the same time, resisting an appropriative form of identification and empathy between self and other, past and present.⁶ It is to mobilize the vulnerability we have inherited as postgenerations to serve as a platform of attunement and connectivity that reaches beyond identity and ethnicity, in favor of solidarity, co-witnessing and co-resistance.

The afterlives of violent histories are anything but simple. I would like to envision a day when we could emerge from our traumatic legacies feeling lighter because we have paid our debts – not by ceasing to revisit the ghosts of our own past, but by feeling that mobilizing them in our writing and our work has opened a door to a more connective present and future.

Works Cited

Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

Hirsch, Marianne, and Leo Spitzer. Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.

Hoffman, Eva. After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust. London: Public Affairs, 2005.

Kacandes, Irene. Talk Fiction: Literature and the Talk Explosion. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.

Kacandes, Irene. “How Co-Witnessing Could Transform the Post-Pandemic World.” #10. In 13 Perspectives on the Pandemic: Thinking in a State of Exception. Edited by Rabea Rittgerodt. Berlin: de Gruyter Verlag, 2020.

Paley, Grace. “Debts,” The Collected Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994.

Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001.

Notes

1

See http://czernowitz.ehpes.com/.

2

Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

3

Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust (London: Public Affairs, 2005).

4

Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

5

On co-witnessing, see Irene Kacandes, “How Co-Witnessing Could Transform the Post-Pandemic World,” #10, in 13 Perspectives on the Pandemic: Thinking in a State of Exception, ed. Rabea Rittgerodt (Berlin: de Gruyter Verlag, 2020).

6

Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001).

Telling Our Own Stories and Speaking on Behalf of Others

Amy Shuman

Carol Bohmer

Eric Niyitunga

Whose stories are told and retold? And who can tell them? Who should not tell them? What stories cannot be told, and when, or to whom? What are...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• On Being Adjacent to Historical Violence: Introduction
• Part One: Connections
• Part Two: Families
• Part Three: Journeys
• Notes on Contributors