With the enormous popular success of the movie Schindler’s List, the revival of The Diary of Anne Frank on Broadway, and the virtual cult status of Art Spiegelman’s avant-garde, Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus comic books, there can be no doubt that the Holocaust has become a full-blown multimedia event. Even the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the American repository of our official memory of the genocide, has become a major tourist attraction, with people standing on line for tickets just as they would to see the IMAX films at the National Air and Space Museum. Yet this proliferation of mainstream representations of the Holocaust is accompanied by a rigid set of artistic criteria, set forth by Jewish artists and critics concerned about how the public is perceiving the events of history.
Their anxiety is not new, but it is heightened now that more works about the Holocaust are being created for a mass audience. Traditionally, works about the Holocaust -- even in fictional form -- have been expected to function as “true to life” artifacts of a historical event, to provide the public with an ethical education. Now that survivors themselves are less often the creators of such art, the rigid standard of historical authenticity seems unrealistic.
Indeed, the creators of most contemporary Holocaust art, including Steven Spielberg and Art Spiegelman -- even while struggling to be entertaining and make something to which the public can relate -- have insisted on classifying their work as authentic testimonial, akin to the documents housed in the Holocaust Museum. Artists’ goals of helping people to remember the Holocaust seems to hinge on avoiding the label of “fiction.”
Unfortunately, as has become clear in the controversy over Joseph Skibell’s recent novel, A Blessing on the Moon (Algonquin, 1997), such a rigid definition of authenticity in Holocaust art undervalues an emerging type of Holocaust fiction that attempts, just as any good piece of fiction does, to attract readers with creativity and innovation.
A Blessing on the Moon is a surrealistic fantasy, described by the author as an “imaginative restoration” of his family members who died in the war. It was critically acclaimed by The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as by many Jewish readers. But other publications, including the country’s leading Jewish newspaper, The Forward, panned it, and Holocaust Museum officials determined that it was too “disturbing” for them to stock on their bookshop shelves. Those judgments suggest that the long-standing conventions of Holocaust art, and their heavy-handedly didactic purpose, need some re-evaluation.
A colleague of mine first advertised Skibell’s novel to me as “a humorous piece told in the first-person narrative by a dead Jew.” As a child of Holocaust survivors who was weaned on the stark and somber realism of novels such as those by Elie Wiesel, I was taken aback by Skibell’s book. To say the least, A Blessing on the Moon is an epic departure from Wiesel’s moralistic narratives, which iterate their Jewish protagonists’ heroism in the face of Nazi cruelty.
The novel begins with its protagonist, Chaim Skibelski, arising from the pit in which he lies dead with 3,000 other victims of Nazi mass murder in a small Polish village. The story then leads us through a series of absurd, sometimes even slapstick, adventures. While trying to solve the mystery of the moon that has fallen from the sky, Chaim makes love to a young Polish girl who is the new occupant of his dead daughter’s bedroom; shares humorous banter with the decapitated head of the Nazi who killed him (a head that Chaim, reluctantly, cradles like a baby when it cannot get to sleep); argues with the cantankerous Jews who also met their fate in the pit; and, despite being reunited with the similarly revivified Mrs. Skibelski -- his current wife -- attempts to woo back his first wife with roses and candy.
The rejection of the novel by the Holocaust Museum, which would seem the obvious home for Skibell’s literary memorial, provides a nice bit of irony: Will museum visitors, after hours of viewing images of corpses and execution, be pushed over the edge if they encounter A Blessing on the Moon? More important, the museum’s decision makes clear how easy it is for a work that deviates from the Wiesel paradigm to be thought dangerous because of its potential to discourage moral outrage at the Holocaust.
Alvin Rosenfeld, an English professor and director of the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University, implied in his review for The Forward that the novel violates the unspoken rules of Holocaust fiction by representing Jewish victims not as heroic martyrs, but as a group laden with human imperfections. Skibell’s “jarring” and “grotesque” bickering victims, Rosenfeld argued, may demote the Holocaust to fodder for lighthearted humor. Skibell’s novel fails, Rosenfeld claimed, because the author neglects a social responsibility to represent victims with the utmost reverence.
Yet the novel’s biggest transgression, according to Rosenfeld, is Skibell’s audacity about fiction itself. By offering such an overtly “made up” story as a legitimate representation of the Holocaust, he said, Skibell seems blind to the “sheer inadequacy of the literary imagination to position itself at the slaughter pits and render that horror in plausible ways.”
When associated with the subject of the Holocaust, the notion of fiction -- by its very nature “made up” and “inauthentic” -- can too easily evoke the machinations of revisionist historians. Witness Art Spiegelman’s rebuke of The New York Times Book Review for listing Maus, a biographical account (in comic-book form) of his father’s time at Auschwitz, as a “fiction” best seller: “I shudder to think how David Duke ... would respond to seeing a carefully researched work based closely on my father’s memories of life in Hitler’s Europe and in the death camps classified as fiction.”
Might fiction, goes the logic, with its standing license to manipulate, eventually be weighed against the credibility of a survivor’s story? And might the survivor’s story thereby seem trivial, or be replaced in the public’s memory by the fictional version? As the literary and Jewish-studies scholar Sara R. Horowitz explains in her recent book about Holocaust fiction, Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction (State University of New York Press, 1997), “The suspension of disbelief integral to the reading of fiction runs counter to the exacting demands one places upon testimony.”
Despite this obvious paradox, many fictional treatments of the Holocaust struggle to be taken as testimonies in themselves. Consider Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, which, lest we forget, was based on a book classified by its author, Thomas Keneally, as fiction. Spielberg, according to Time magazine, instructed his cast while filming Schindler’s List that, “We’re not making a film, we’re making a document.” In Newsweek he took this claim even further, saying that while making the film he experienced the Holocaust “just like any witness or victim would have.” Ironically, though, Spielberg’s film helped to create a cultural milieu in which Holocaust art is not taken as a document but, unabashedly, as entertainment (a phenomenon that is rendered hilariously in a Seinfeld episode in which Jerry and his girlfriend make out in the back row at the movie).
As the writer Philip Gourevitch has rightly pointed out, we face a “critical moment of generational transition,” as those who witnessed the Holocaust firsthand become fewer in number. Spielberg’s misconceptions of his own artistry, albeit embarrassing, are an understandable response to a common anxiety about a future in which no more authorities are alive to tell -- and confirm -- their story. Yet for Rosenfeld -- like Gourevitch, who condemns Spielberg not just for his in-your-face empathy with victims, but for giving his viewers a dumbed-down “good Nazi” -- portrayals of the Holocaust need to follow stricter guidelines than ever precisely because the number of living authorities is decreasing. Spielberg should provide his audience with “historical authenticity,” not “moral ambiguity,” Rosenfeld said.
Similarly, Art Spiegelman believes that Spielberg’s formulaic Hollywood-style film should never have been made at all, because it will only prompt people -- by suggesting that they can feel the pain of the Holocaust -- to condemn Jews for not just “getting over it” as easily as non-Jews can.
Although I recognize the critical importance of remembering the Holocaust accurately, I don’t see the value in fostering such a censorious climate. As survivors and their children begin to die off, the public (including both non-Jews and Jews who are increasingly removed from the actual event) needs to take a more active role -- perhaps as authors and artists, or else just as their responsive audience -- in remembering the Holocaust and in understanding its significance. Insistence that this growing public must experience the Holocaust only in certain ways seems particularly unproductive.
Understandably, the Holocaust Museum faces great pressure to set some “official” political and ethical standards for presenting Nazi Germany. Museum officials are undecided about how the Holocaust can best be held sacrosanct -- as indicated by the recent debacle, resulting in the resignation of the museum’s director, over whether the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat would be given an official tour of the museum.
In spite of the museum’s gatekeeping role, it tries hard to make the Holocaust accessible to everyone. Each visitor is given an I.D. card with the name of someone who actually endured the Nazis’ genocidal campaign, and is encouraged to imagine being that person through a partial re-creation of the victims’ experience. Visitors can even hear the chilling, intimate details of my parents’ escape from Nazi Germany in the 1930s by listening to their oral histories in the museum’s audio room.
But such openness is undermined by the push by some officials and supporters of the museum to monitor what visitors will see, by an unwillingness to let them have too long a leash in interpreting the Holocaust for themselves. The result is a contradictory, even hypocritical message: The public is asked to rent the Holocaust at Blockbuster Video, to watch it on Broadway, and to visit it on a tourist excursion to Washington -- indeed, to experience intimate details of its horror -- yet only under terms established by the proper authorities.
It is reasonable for critics to fear the brainwashing effects of the mass media. But in accusing artistic and cultural projects that bring the Holocaust to the public of doing more harm than good, critics seem to assume that people are a bunch of ethically malleable sheep.
Perhaps a more useful response is Skibell’s. In writing A Blessing on the Moon, Skibell takes a leap of faith -- that is, risks a trust of and openness to the public -- that other Jewish artists and scholars have been unwilling to take. What makes the novel disturbing, of course, is that it does ask us to “get over” treating the Holocaust -- and what is now its vast audience -- with kid gloves. Skibell’s brand of Holocaust fiction does not insist that the reader react with shock or guilt; it defies the pressure to be an overtly prescriptive, educational tool. Instead, the novel assumes the reader’s ethical autonomy. That assumption is necessary if representations of Nazi Germany are going to continue to be dynamic and challenging, and to move beyond what inevitably will become old hat, given the happy marriage between the Holocaust and the American entertainment industry.
More significantly, such Holocaust fiction, unlike raw testimony, documentary film, or more realistic, “approved” fictional treatments, does not put up a barrier between those who “know” and those who don’t. There is a certain value in making the Holocaust respond to the humble requirements asked of any fictional subject. I am reminded of the questions I chanted continuously to my creative-writing students last semester: How are you going to make your reader interested in this? Why would they want to keep reading?
I do not in any way question the importance of making profuse documentation of the Holocaust available. Nor would I suggest that the concept of the Holocaust as a fictional subject is not a frightening one. Turning page after page of Skibell’s novel, I was struck by my own visceral resistance to its absurdist elements. And, yes, it disturbs me to think of my own students -- many of them native Wisconsinites who had never encountered a Jew until college -- laughing at the antics of a decapitated Nazi. Would they find him endearingly vulnerable? Would they lose respect for a survivor who was, at times, lascivious and immature? Indeed, it is hard to let go of a need to have every mention of the Holocaust do some ethical hand-holding with its audience.
Allowing readers emotional and ethical autonomy, though, will not necessarily lead to their moral lapse, or to their denial or diminution of the Holocaust. In fact, perhaps the achievement of Skibell’s novel is that it not only allows us our autonomy but, in doing so, gives us a chance to prove the public-memory police wrong.
Michelle Ephraim is completing a Ph.D. in English literature at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.