On Holocaust Essay, Research Paper
Marie Syrkin
While he was still obdurately producing more Testimony I urged him to use the
technique of law cases for another project–the Nazi extermination of European Jewry.
Available were the records of the Nuremberg trials and other accounts. Remembering his
moving "Kaddish," written in the thirties, and various later poems I hoped for a
lyrical threnody. But Charles was committed to his system. He refused to use any material
from numerous first-hand witness reports. Only the records of the Nuremberg Trial and of
the Eichmann Trial were to be his sources; nor would he allow himself any subjective
outcry. Again the bare facts, as selected by him, would speak for themselves: there would
be no tampering with the experience through imagery or heightened language. The Black
Sparrow Press brought out Holocaust in 1975.
From "Charles: A Memoir." In Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet. Ed.
Milton Hindus. Copyright ? 1984 by the National Poetry
Foundation. Reprinted with permission.
Janet Sutherland
The sources for Holocaust were The Trials of the Major War Criminals at
Nuremburg and The Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem. These are the verbatim records
of the trials in English and are voluminous works amounting to a total of twenty-six
volumes. Much of the material contained within them is concerned with secondary material
relating to the trials such as discussions over which documents are admissable,
discussions over points of law, comments by judges, etc. Reznikoff is interested only in
the primary sources; affidavits given by witnesses, and to a lesser extent material from
certain official war documents used in the trials. Of the primary sources Reznikoff
extracts only those concerned with the Jewish question. He excludes material about
Gypsies, Poles and the ill-treatment of prisoners of war by Germany. Whilst reading Holocaust
the reader never becomes aware that the sources are trials (except when the sources
are cited at the beginning) for the names of the war criminals are withheld, their
sentences are not given, the judges do not appear. It is by these means that Reznikoff
achieves most of the compression of Holocaust. Twenty-six volumes are reduced to
one hundred and eleven pages in which events concerning the Jewish problem are divided up
by subject-matter, for example "Escapes," "Children,"
"Marches" etc.
From Reznikoff and His Sources." In Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet. Ed.
Milton Hindus. Copyright ? 1984 by the National Poetry
Foundation. Reprinted with permission.
Sylvia Rothchild
Holocaust, published in 1975, is written in the same, dry, spare style as the early
testimonies. The twelve chapters are counted off like the plagues afflicting the Egyptians
before the exodus. Altogether they are a remarkably accurate record of deportation,
invasion, research, of ghettos, massacres, gas chambers and trucks, work camps, treatment
of children, the sadistic entertainments, the mass graves, marches and escapes. Reznikoff
in a hundred and eleven pages has left us with his version of the record, as much and more
than we will ever need to know. He tells about the rare good men, "A priest in
Germany would find Jews shelter," as well as about the S.S. squads "whipping
those who lingered," about "the children screaming Mama as–they’re taken into
trucks," and about the deceptions used to lure and confuse the victims. The details,
reported by witnesses, document a collapse of Western civilization.
[. . . .]
His Holocaust testimonies are unsentimental, unreligious, unvarnished with mystical
consolations. He is more explicit than many survivors care to be. He also seems determined
not to exploit the tragedy for any purposes beyond its own credibility. He wrote as if to
a morally responsible world, capable of feeling outrage. His Auschwitz was not Elie
Wiesel’s holy mystery or William Styron’s "fatal embolism in the bloodstream of
mankind," but a real place where men and women lived and died without witnesses, and
mourners.
From "From a Distance and Up Close: Charles Reznikoff and the Holocaust." In Charles
Reznikoff: Man and Poet. Ed. Milton Hindus. Copyright ?
1984 by the National Poetry Foundation. Reprinted with permission.
Anne Stevenson (with Michael Farley)
When we come to the end of Holocaust (granted, it is a poem, not a play) we want
to find a place to be sick. No poet has ever written a book so nakedly shocking, so
blatantly calculated to make us feel that the Nazi persecution of the Jews can never be
fictionalized or abstracted into "literature." One marvels at the courage
Reznikoff must have drawn upon to write it. Yet it is because Holocaust is
written–every word and fact of it–that it is believable. Reznikoff deprives us of our
coveted catharsis while he gives us no excuse for forgiving ourselves (who in some
sense does not share in the perpetration of such crimes?) through abstract understanding.
No wonder Reznikoff has never been a popular writer.
From "Charles Reznikoff In His Tradition." In Charles Reznikoff: Man and
Poet. Ed. Milton Hindus. Copyright ? 1984 by the National
Poetry Foundation. Reprinted with permission.
Paul Auster
The success of Testimony becomes all the more striking when placed beside Holocaust,
a far less satisfying work that is based on many of the same techniques. Using as his
sources the U.S. Government publication, Trials of the Criminals before the Nuremberg
Tribunal, and the records of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, Reznikoff attempts to
deal with Germany’s annihilation of the Jews in the same dispassionate, documentary style
with which he had explored the human dramas buried in American court records. The problem,
I think, is one of magnitude. Reznikoff is a master of the everyday; he understands the
seriousness of small events and has an uncanny sympathy with the lives of ordinary people.
In a work such as Testimony he is able to present us with the facts in a way that
simultaneously makes us understand them: the two gestures are inseparable. In the case of Holocaust,
however, we all know the facts in advance. The holocaust, which is precisely
the unknowable, the unthinkable, requires a treatment beyond the facts in order for
us to be able to understand it–assuming that such a thing is even possible. Similar in
approach to a 1960s play by Peter Weiss, The Investigation, Reznikoff’s poem
rigorously refused to pass judgement on any of the atrocities it describes. But this is
nevertheless a false objectivity, for the poem is not saying to the reader, "decide
for yourself," it is saying that the decision has already been made and that
the only way we can deal with these things is to remove them from their inherently
emotional setting. The problem is that we cannot remove them.. This setting is a necessary
starting point.
Holocaust is instructive, however, in that it shows us the limits of Reznikoff’s
work. I do not mean shortcomings–but limits, those things that set off and describe a
space, that create a world. Reznikoff is essentially a poet of naming. One does not
have the sense of a poetry immersed in language but rather of something that takes place before
language and comes to fruition at the precise moment language has been discovered–and
it yields a style that is pristine, fastidious, almost stiff in its effort to say exactly
what it means to say. if any one word can be used to describe Reznikoff’s work, it would
be humility towards language and also towards himself.
From "The Decisive Moment." In Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet. Ed.
Milton Hindus. Copyright ? 1984 by the national Poetry
Foundation. Reprinted with permission.
Eliot Weinberger
I wrote him wildly enthusiastic letters, soliciting work for Montemora, offering
him as much space as he liked in the magazine; the manuscripts he sent in reply always
contained a self-addressed stamped envelope. Yet this invisible man, who published his own
books for 50 years, who never left the country, who sat in Hollywood watching the flies on
his desk, whose poetry is filled with people but no friends, who rarely mentioned in print
his life after late adolescence or his wife of 46 years–this man also lived in the world
of Testimony, Holocaust, The Lionhearted, the novel By the Waters of Manhattan. It
was a world of injustice without ultimate justice, of disembodied outbursts of violent
passion, of suffering without the illusion of a political redemption. If Reznikoff’s life
is ever known, I suspect that what we saw as an untiring humility will be far more tragic.
From "Another Memory of Reznikoff." In Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet.
Ed. Milton Hindus. Copyright ? 1984 by the National Poetry
Foundation. Reprinted with permission.
Robert Franciosi
Despite his persistent interest in Jewish history, Charles Reznikoff waited
nearly thirty years before writing a major poetic response to the destruction of
the European Jews?his long poem Holocaust. During those years he had
often explained to Milton Hindus that "his emotions about [the subject] had
entered into the parts of Testimony he was working on in the 1960s,"
yet Hindus suspected a more complicated reason for the poet’s hesitation:
Until this time I had attributed his refusal to treat the forbidding
subject directly to his aesthetic tact, his literary instinct that the
explosive power of such a subject could hardly be contained, certainly not by
someone who had not actually "been there." If even the expressions
of survivors sometimes seemed to be little better than exploitative
"Kitsch" and those of others more sincere and genuine proved
repetitive, diminishing and sentimental, was it possible for an American Jew
to do any better? There was an abyss of clich?, propaganda and editorialism
in the subject which even the wariest writer might have difficulty in
avoiding. Was it possible, then, that the central event of Jewish history in
almost two thousand years defied the imagination and had best be surrounded by
silence? (37)
While George Steiner might deem silence appropriate (and moral), for
Reznikoff reticence seems not entirely attributable to the Holocaust’s enormity
as historical event and literary subject. Reznikoff had in fact written poems on
both the rise of the Nazis and the ongoing destruction of the Jews of Europe
during the war. Only after 1945, when the full magnitude of these crimes against
the Jewish people was known, did he fall silent. When he broke that silence in Holocaust,
it was by means of the poetic adaptation of court records, the technique
that he had used to write the multivolumed Testimony?only in this poem
the testimonies were derived from the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials.
The literary use of testimony from the war crimes trials, however, was not
original with Reznikoff. Peter Weiss had adapted similar records in his
controversial play The Investigation (1965); indeed, Holocaust initially
seems vulnerable to many of the charges lodged against Weiss’s play. Lawrence L.
Langer, for example, condemns Weiss’s minimal alterations of court testimony
given at the Auschwitz trial held in Frankfurt in the mid-1960s: "By
duplicating the details of history without embellishing them, while at the same
time being highly selective in his use of them, Weiss eliminates any perspective
which might offer his audience an entry into their implications; oddly, and
certainly unintentionally, the result is not a new aesthetic distance, but an
aesthetic indifference, a failure of the artist’s imagination to seduce
the spectator into a feeling of complicity with the material of his drama"
(31). For Alvin H. Rosenfeld, the inadequacy of The Investigation’s language
results from Weiss’s political interpretation of Auschwitz as a logical product
of capitalism. The playwright removes all emotion from the witnesses’ testimony,
he says, and thus reduces it "from the level of actual human discourse to a
code of raw data that would accommodate his political design" (158).
Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi also views the removal of "the emotions with which
the testimonies were delivered by the witnesses" as a fatal flaw in Weiss’s
play. "The facts or evidence in this drama," she says, "serve as
statistics, not as means of individuation" (38). She criticizes the absence
of names for the testifying survivors, the scientific detachment of the
language, and Weiss’s unwillingness to identify the Holocaust’s particularly
Jewish reality, then questions his use of the legal frame itself. Courtroom
protocol might seem "to provide a kind of decorum to defy or reform the
criminal order of the concentrationary system," she says, but when applied
to the "systematic lawlessness of Auschwitz," it becomes "a
mockery of the pretense of justice" (36).
Ezrahi contends that Reznikoff’s Holocaust suffers from a similar
"explicitly reverent attitude toward the operations of justice":
In the absence of any visible editorial hand, whatever irony is brought to
bear on the notion that the legal procedure can contain or avenge the horrors
of genocide must be read into the text. The condensed presentation of bare
facts, the terse, forensic language give equal weight on the written page to
the testimony of Jew and Nazi and assign a kind of anonymity to both sides as
they appear as witnesses for the prosecution or the defense, for the victim or
the victimizer?as two facets, that is, of the human condition. (37)
Her willingness to associate the deficiencies of The Investigation, particularly
its detached, monotonous language, with Holocaust is based, I believe, on
a superficial similarity between the two works. Reznikoff’s earlier poetic
responses to the Holocaust, which I will discuss directly, reveal his struggles
to encounter the event in poetry and suggest that his decision to use the legal
documents as the basis for his long poem was not a casual one.
Reznikoff’s use of the testimonies is not a sign of excessive faith in the
procedures of the courtroom. Rather, it is an invocation of that setting’s
rhetoric of factuality, a rhetoric he deemed equal to such grave matters.
Reznikoff commits himself to these testimonies as his source, but he does not
surrender the emotional and moral authority with which they were delivered to
austere factuality, does not sacrifice the witnesses’ humanity (in the manner of
Weiss) to a naive gesture toward the "neutral" documentation of
historical or political events. His very selection of these records is
rhetorically determined and precludes any possibility of neutrality. Ezrahi
claims, however, that "a comparison of the successive drafts of Reznikoff’s
Holocaust reveals [a] process of simplification, of objectification, that
left a bare skeleton of facts without any rhetorical wraps" (45). In fact,
by examining the evolution of a representative section of Holocaust from
trial record to final poetic form, I will demonstrate that Reznikoff does indeed
embellish his material by deliberately attempting to instill the "bare
facts" of the transcribed testimonies with a rhetorical, an emotional
power.
[. . . .]
Reznikoff once explained, in remarks before a reading from Holocaust, his
motive for adapting trial records as poetry:
In telling about a minor incident or a great catastrophe -like the
Holocaust in which six million Jews lost their lives?how is it to be told?
In the conclusions of the facts? The way many histories?generally out of
necessity because of the absence of details?are written? Or in detailing the
facts themselves? As, for example, the way law cases are tried in court. A
witness in a court, for example, cannot say a man was negligent in crossing a
street: he must testify instead how the man acted: the facts instead of a
conclusion of fact. So, in reading or listening to the facts themselves,
instead of merely [coming] to conclusions of what happened in the life of a
person or to a people, the reader or listener may not only draw his own
conclusions but is more apt to feel actually what happened as if he or she
were?fortunately?only a spectator. (Charles Reznikoff Papers Box VII,
Folder 26)
In theory, Reznikoff refuses, as Kathryn Shevelow notes, "to provide any