from its readers, in much the same way that witnessing the event of the Shoah itself
demands silence of those in the presence of such testimony. As George Steiner says in
"Postscript" (1967), his essay on witnessing and representing the Holocaust,
"The best now, after so much has been set forth, is, perhaps, to be silent;
not to add the trivia of literary, sociological debate, to the unspeakable." By
contrast, Steiner is critical of the dramatized, but still largely accurate, account of
events in the French study Treblinka:
But because that evidence is mastered by the literary talent of the writer, because a
narrative persona full of distinct rage and stylistic force interposes between the insane
fact and the profoundly exciting economy, hence order, of the book, a certain unreality
obtrudes. Where it is represented with such skill, intricate modulations affect the
hideous truth. It becomes more graphic, more terribly defined, but also has more
acceptable, conventional lodging in the imagination. We believe; yet do not believe
intolerably, for we draw breath at the recognition of a literary device, of a stylistic
stroke not finally dissimilar from what we have met in a novel. The aesthetic makes
endurable.
In composing Holocaust, Reznikoff seems to intuit that "The aesthetic makes
endurable," and yet given his understanding of the testimonial role of poetry, he is
still obliged to produce a text in which what Steiner would call "a narrative
persona"–that is, the voice of the poetic subject–faintly lingers. The order of the
sections of Holocaust moves in a loosely chronological fashion, from
"Deportation" and "Invasion," through "Massacres," "Gas
Chambers and Gas Trucks," and "Children" to the last sections,
"Marches" and "Escapes." The poem ends with an account of the Warsaw
ghetto uprising and the escape of six thousand Danish Jews to Sweden with the help of
their gentile fellow citizens. In other words, Reznikoff proceeds from the beginning of
this saison d’enfer, to its darkest moments, to the new beginning of a period of
struggle, hope, and recovery. Furthermore, a horrible irony can sometimes be heard just
below the surface of the narration, as in this last stanza from the section called
"Entertainment":
On Sundays there was no work and Jews would be placed in a row:
each had a bottle on his head
and the S. S. men amused themselves by shooting at the bottles.
If a bottle was hit,
the man lived;
but if the bottle landed below,
well, the man had it.
The ironic resignation of that "well" in the final line can only belong to a
narrative voice that cannot lose itself entirely in the univers concentrationnaire.
Reading Holocaust throws us back on the rest of Reznikoff’s poetry with a
renewed sense of his cultural predicament. As we have seen, identifying with Jewish history
means suffering the loss of Jewish tradition. Compelled to bear the historical
burden of Jewish identity without the inner strength provided by the continuity of Jewish
faith, secular Jews like Reznikoff experience the intertwined processes of secularization
and assimilation as a full-blown crisis of transmission.
From The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics. Ed. Rachel Blau
DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain. Copyright ? 1999 by the University of Alabama Press.
320