Surviving the Memory
Holocaust Remembrance in a Second Generation Survivor’s Fiction
American Studies Master’s Thesis
Stef Buitenhuis 0473782
July 2012
Dr. Roselinde Supheert
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Contents
Introduction
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1. Postmemory and Identity for the Jewish-American Second Generation
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2. Elijah Visible
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3. Second Hand Smoke
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4. The Golems of Gotham
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5. Comparison
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Conclusion
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Works Cited
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Introduction
It is extremely difficult to comprehend what the Holocaust means. History books
describe the persecution of Jewish people, movies depict the rise of Hitler and statistics that
try to illustrate how many people died in the Second World War. After all this, it seems an
impossible task to try to understand what the Holocaust means. Quantification of what
happened is inadequate. The six million lives destroyed during the Holocaust have become a
symbol. The human mind is incapable of comprehending the enormity of the number, and this
is an injustice to all who died. We cannot process the distinction between five or six million
deaths. Factually, six million is more than five million, but the implications are of a million
more deaths is incomprehensible. This defence mechanism shows the importance of
individual stories. These stories make it easier to understand, on a more personal level, what
the Holocaust to this day means for people. This thesis deals with the way in which Holocaust
survivors influence their children in contemporary America. Thane Rosenbaum deals with this
issue throughout his fiction. In his novel Second Hand Smoke he describes his main character
Duncan and his parents’ influence on him:
He was a child of trauma. Not of love, or happiness, or exceptional wealth. And nightmare,
too. (…)He couldn’t help who his parents were, where they had been, what they had seen,
what they might have done…Splintered, disembodied memories that once belonged to them
were now his alone, as though their two lives couldn’t exhaust the outrage.[. . .] Duncan had
not been witness to the Holocaust, only to its aftermath. His testimony was merely second
hand.(1)
The protagonist described is a Jewish man whose parents experienced the Holocaust first
hand. The interesting part of Duncan’s description is the word “merely.” In Rosenbaum’s
fiction the children of survivors of the Holocaust do not experience their testimony “merely”
second hand. In Rosenbaum’s work the second generation survivors show great difficulty in
coming to terms with their parents’ legacy. The second generation also experiences problems
with what that legacy means for their identity.
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This paper concerns the literary work of Thane Rosenbaum. It will discuss his two
novels and collection of short stories together since not much research has been done on
Rosenbaum’s. The works included, in chronological order of publication, are: Elijah Visible
(1996), Second Hand Smoke (1999), The Golems of Gotham (2002). Rosenbaum himself is a
child of Holocaust survivors and in one of his published essays he says that writing about this
gives him a purpose in life. In “Law and Legacy in the Post-Holocaust Imagination,” he
mentions a sense of purpose he could not find in being a “corporate yuppie” (241). In
Rosenbaum’s fiction, the protagonists all have parents that witnessed the Holocaust first hand.
After the Second World War the Jewish survivors portrayed in Rosenbaum’s work moved to
the United States. Here they tried to lead normal lives. They all reacted differently to what
they had experienced in Europe in the early and mid-forties. Some survivors found ways to
cope with what they went through while others saw suicide as the only option. How this
affected the lives of their children, and what this meant for the children’s identities is what
Rosenbaum describes in his fiction.
The second generation survivors deal with inherited memories they have not
experienced themselves. Marianne Hirsch discusses this phenomenon in her book Family
Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory, and states that the required imagination to
fill in the gaps left by their parents creates the notion of postmemory.
This paper will link several sociological studies to Rosenbaum’s work. Literature and
sociological studies cannot be compared directly, since the two are not the same, but the
studies will aide in the analysis of his fiction. The theoretical background will provide a
different perspective on Rosenbaum’s fiction and will show certain similarities between
fiction and real life.
The survivors of the Holocaust who moved to the US after the war sought new
beginnings. Their children were a symbol for this new start and presumably had every
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opportunity to be successful in the land of the free. Micha and Sima Weiss have published a
study which shows a more negative perspective. Their article in The American Journal of
Psychotherapy focusses on how the Holocaust trauma is transmited from first to second
generation survivors (372). While the children of survivors were physically in a new world,
through postmemory they could not escape the old. It is interesting to note how this influences
their identity as Jewish Americans. Ofer Shiff presents an interesting view on Holocaust
survivors and their Jewish identity in American culture. In Survival Through Integration, he
discusses a universalistic Jewish ideology where the survivors want to become middle class
Americans without having to choose between the Jewish and American components of their
identities (152). Peter Novick argues a different standpoint. In The Holocaust in American
Life, he claims that American Jews, instead of seeking common ground with other
Americans, look more to differentiate and set themselves apart (7). He states that an
“increasingly diverse and divided American Jewry” put their families’ fate, experienced back
in Europe, at the center of their identity. They share the Holocaust memory as an important
part of their being. Novick even goes as far as to say that “the Holocaust […] has filled a need
for a consensual symbol” (7). The atrocities that happened to their Jewish ancestors take a
central part in shaping Jewish-American identity in present day. Much has been written on the
victimization of the Jewish people after the Holocaust. For a certain part of the JewishAmerican community, rather than focussing on the future and on past achievements, the
Holocaust turned into a symbol. Alan Mintz states in his book Popular Culture and The
Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America that this victim symbol does not provide a viable
Jewish American identity (165). There is still a question about the exact place of the
Holocaust in Jewish-American identity. The “purposeful process in which a community
endeavors to determine its relationship to the past” is what James Young, in his book The
Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, calls memorialization (1). It is
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interesting to look in what way this “purposeful process” is a choice and if it is ever even
possible to determine such a thing. It interesting to look at if the old and new world can
merge, and whether the past and present can come together in modern American life.
This thesis will shed new light on the work of Thane Rosenbaum and on second
generation Holocaust survivors. This paper will look at Rosenbaums’ fiction, and research
what it means for children of Holocaust survivors to live in the United States while having the
Holocaust loom over them through their parents’ transmitted experiences. It will look at the
Holocaust’s influence on the identity of the children of survivors. This thesis will also discuss
the parents’ influence their children’s Jewish-American identities. This is an interesting field
of research because it will provide a deeper look into Jewish-American identity, and how this
identity is shaped through postmemory. Next to postmemory, this paper will discuss the
future of Jewish-American identity and Holocaust remembrance in the US.
This paper will focus on Rosenbaum’s collection of short stories Elijah Visible and his
two novels Second Hand Smoke and The Golems of Gotham. Chapter 1 will discuss the
theories relevant to the fiction. Chapters 2,3 and 4 will take a look at the literary texts
themselves. Chapter 5 consists of a comparison.
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1. Postmemory and Identity for the Jewish American 2nd Generation
After the Second World War ended many Jewish families moved to the United States
to start a new life. The horrors had ended but staying in Europe was not an option for a large
group of Jewish survivors. They left for the home of the brave to be free. The question is,
however, whether it was possible for them to move away from the old world and leave the
past behind..
The children of Holocaust survivors are known as the second generation survivors.
Where some scholars include the third generation in this group too, this thesis will mostly
focus on the direct offspring of the survivors themselves. In the book In the Shadow of the
Holocaust Aaron Hass shows that “[t]he psychological aftereffects of the survivors’ trauma
are often mirrored in the attitudes, perceptions, and fears of their offspring” (7). These
children reflect their parents’ experiences and relation to the past. Much research has been
conducted on the second generation. One among many is Helen Epstein’s book Children of
the Holocaust. She discusses her numerous interviews with survivor children and interprets
the relationship between them and their parents. Her interviews resemble what Simone Gorko
describes in her clinical study “Myths and Realities About Offspring of Holocaust Survivors.”
They both focus on the importance of survival instilled into the children by their parents. The
importance of the second generation’s life in the light of the Holocaust is stressed by one of
the first scholars who published a study on the survivors’ parenting skills. Vivian Rakoff
concludes in her article “Long Term Effects of the Concentration Camp Experience,” that “a
life that is not simply a ‘given’ but almost an unexpected gift, may seem to be not a life to be
lived, but a mission.” This mission, also mentioned by other scholars such as Diana Wang in
“Surviving Survival” (11), can be a great burden to children who have to fulfill their potential
in the wake of genocide. Wang discusses different types of Jewish families and their reaction
to the Holocaust. Expectations by survivor parents were enormous in some cases. Next to
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these expectations, the experiences from the Holocaust were handed down to the next
generation. This undoubtedly shaped their views on life but also had an impact on their
identity.
Survivors of the Holocaust have evidently influenced their children by speaking and,
perhaps even more, by not speaking about what happened to them. Numerous works have
been published on this subject, two of which are interesting to note in the light of this study.
The first is “Transgenerational Effects of the Holocaust” in the Journal of Consulting and
Clinical Psychology, by Nadler et al. The authors argue that the children feel great
responsibility towards their parents and that they have to repress certain emotions:
The child growing up in the home of Holocaust survivors seems to be burdened by feelings of
indebtedness and responsibility towards the parents and by a need to fulfill the parents’
expectation of self. The child learns that in order to save the parent from further suffering and
to protect a vulnerable parent, aggressive tendencies must be repressed and that expression of
such feelings carries with it the price of guilt.(368)
This study focusses on what Micha and Sima Weiss in the American Journal of
Psychotherapy call indirect general transmission (373). The Holocaust experience caused
parenting inabilities which impacted the children. In this study the Weiss also mention direct
specific transmission. Through interactions with their survivor parents the children “learn to
think and behave in disturbed ways, like their parents” (373). The studies zoom in on how
children are affected by their parents’ experience. At the heart of the relationship between the
parents and children lies the Holocaust experience. This experience is handed down,
intentionally or not. Interesting to note is that the children’s identity is influenced by an
experience they have not experienced themselves.
Marianne Hirsch developed a theory which takes a closer look at the transferred
experience. In Poetics Today she argues that “in certain extreme circumstances, memory can
be transmitted to those who were not actually there to live an event” (106). Postmemory
differs from regular memory in a way that it is created by reaction to trauma and not by an
event itself. In her book Family Frames Hirsch further explores her theory:
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I propose the term “postmemory” with some hesitation, conscious that the prefix “post” could
imply that we are beyond memory and therefore perhaps[…] purely in history. In my reading,
postmemory is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep
personal connection. Postmemory is a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely
because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through
an imaginative investment and creation. (22)
Second generation survivors have to fill in the blanks left by words unspoken by their parents.
Hirsch’s postmemory gives more background to transgenerational transmittance and what it
signifies for the children. Her book cleverly compares photographs to postmemory. The
fragmentary memory available to second generation survivors resembles a photograph. Like
looking at a photograph, postmemory relies on the input of the audience. A few important
factors are the knowledge of the subject, or lack of it, and their ability to invent a story next to
the provided image. The relationship between a child and parent plays a big role in
postmemory. The relationship influences the child’s perception, but also how he is able to
understand his parents’ past and imagine what happened during the Holocaust. By creating an
imaginative backdrop to their parents’ past, survivor children can keep the past alive.
Karein Goertz says in her article “Transgenerational Representations of the Holocaust”
that the memory of the Holocaust has not faded because of the writing of the second
generation (33). Though imagined, and therefore likely not historically accurate, the works of
the second generation keep the past alive.
Keeping the past alive is what Mintz also touches on when he discusses the future of
memorialization In the US. Mintz feels Jewish Americans, among others, should look at how
they want to shape Holocaust memory:
In the last two decades of the twentieth century, the instances of Holocaust remembrance,
documents, photographs, memoirs, memorials, museums, films, movies, have been so
numerous and so intense and so chaotically all-encompassing as to leave little room for the
intentionality and self-awareness of memorialization. But as this intensity wanes, as it is likely
to do, a space will be opened up for thoughtful reflection on how we, the “we” being diverse
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and plural communities of America, wish to construct the future of Holocaust memory on
these shores.(160)
By shaping Holocaust memory in the US, Jewish Americans can further determine what the
Holocaust precisely means to them and their identity. Gorko raises an interesting question
with which the second generation struggles: “It is almost universal for a child of a survivor
family to grapple with the conflict of whether one should dwell on the Holocaust or whether
to forget it” (2). There are also numerous scholars who note a pre-occupation with the
Holocaust by Jewish-Americans. They deal with the idea of the Holocaust as the center of
Jewish-American identity. Mintz discusses this issue from inside the Jewish-American
community:
It is “within the family” of the Jewish community that critical reservations about Holocaustcenteredness have been most freely expressed. Such reservations, or even resistance, may
abound in general, non-Jewish circles in American culture; yet the powerful moral prestige of
the Holocaust, I suspect, often prevents these thoughts from being aired. But because most
American Jews view the Holocaust as a concern that ultimately belongs to them, they are more
ready to engage in debate, even though constraints deriving from the solemnity of the subject
are hardly put aside.(161)
The choice a child of survivors makes in this situation heavily influences its identity. It is
interesting to look at how exactly the Holocaust shapes Jewish-American identity.
Peter Novick argues that in the postwar years American interest for the Holocaust was
low. Interest waned even further when the Cold War started (90). Helen Epstein notes this low
appreciation for Holocaust survivors too. In Children of the Holocaust Epstein describes how
psychologists and therapists reacted to children of survivors:
Many of the people I have interviewed had, in fact, seen some sort of therapist during high
school or college.[…] But most of them told me they had never talked about the effect their
parents’ wartime experience might have had on them. “The shrink never asked,” was a
common explanation. “It never came up,” was another. [. . .] “Whenever I talked about it, my
therapist said, ‘You’re an American now,’ and I let it drop. (204)
In the years right after the war, Americans perhaps were not ready yet to deal with the
consequences for the new Jewish-Americans. Ronald J. Berger explains in Surviving the
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Holocaust that, “in 1946, no one, even Jewish relatives, was particularly interested in hearing
about this ordeal” (6).
Twenty years after the war ended, American society seemed more concerned with
what happened to the Jewish people. According to Alan L. Berger the second generation has a
significant part in this. In Children of Job he states that ”how the second-generation witnesses
shape and ritualize Holocaust memory has great bearing on how the event will be
commemorated in the future” (2). Novick elaborates further on how the Holocaust attained a
more prevalent place in Jewish American history. He notes that the Holocaust has become
more of an American memory than solely a Jewish memory (207). In “Americanizing the
Holocaust” Pól Ó Dochartaigh says the Holocaust should have attained a central position in
American consciousness (456). It is interesting to note how such a specific memory can
transfer from one distinctive ethnic group to society as a whole. Maybe it is because, as Thane
Rosenbaum writes in an article in the New York Times, “The Holocaust, so large an atrocity,
has a way of overshadowing everything.” Novick argues several things about Holocaust
memory in the US. As mentioned before he feels that Americans now share a certain part of
Jewish memory. Berger adds that the “violence of the European past is very much a part of
the American present, and attests to the continuing impact of the Holocaust on subsequent
generations” (3). Novick states that the Holocaust has become an important part of Jewish
identity in America. He even goes as far as to say it, “as the only common denominator of
American Jewish identity in the late twentieth century, has filled a need for a consensus
symbol” (7). He discusses the decline in religious practices, Jewish cultural traits and
Zionism, as a result of which Jewish Americans need some other symbol at the center of their
identity. Considering the decline of Jewish American identity, one can wonder what exactly
makes the Jewish community in the US distinct from other Americans when they share this
memory with society as a whole.
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Mintz warns the reader that the Holocaust should be elaborately commemorated but
that it does not and should not become a “primary foundation for a viable Jewish identity”
(165) in the US. An interesting question, because Mintz’s statement sounds obvious, is
whether Jewish Americans have a conscious choice in this matter.
One could argue that the enormity of what happened can only result in an identity
centered around this historical event. In “Law and Legacy in the Post-Holocaust
Imagination,” Rosenbaum argues people have a moral obligation to “remember, to honor,
ritualize, and acknowledge our collective and individual losses and pain” (244). Next to that
he notes that a Holocaust obsession can lead to not appreciating the fullness of life. One can
argue where the line lies between remembering and honoring the past, and a Holocaust
obsession. Moreover, Rosenbaum implies there is a free choice in how to deal with Holocaust
legacy, while most of his characters do not experience this as a free choice at all.
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2. Elijah Visible
Thane Rosenbaum's first fictional work, Elijah Visible, paints a vivid picture of
children of survivors of the Holocaust who are influenced by their parents' experiences. The
stories all feature a Jewish male protagonist portrayed at different stages of his life. Although
all protagonists are named Adam Posner, they are not the same character. Every story shows
Adam at a different age and different family structure. Berger notes that the “nine tales in this
collection sensitively probe issues of loss and mourning that accompany the attempt of a
second-generation witness to come to terms with his Holocaust inheritance” (79). The
Holocaust legacy is inherited indirectly since it is handed down and not experienced firsthand. The effect on Adam is obvious in every story. Berger mentions that a “presence of
absence” influences the protagonists (79). This can be perceived in a number of ways. The
absence could be in the fact that although the parents were physically there for the children,
they were not always there emotionally. Furthermore, the absence can also relate to the
children being influenced by an event that they have not witnessed themselves. The old world,
filled with atrocities, is far from the new world. The memories are not accessible for them
since they are not the ones that experienced them.
Thane Rosenbaum’s Elijah Visible resembles Hirsch’s portrayal of postmemory.
Hirsch chooses the analogy of photographs to reflect the fragmented memory that second
generation survivors experience. Rosenbaum does the same. His collection of short stories
show the reader glimpses of a personal history. A good example is the first story, named
“Cattle Car Complex.” Young lawyer Adam Posner has been working late and is the last
person left in the building. From the beginning the reader feels Posner's claustrophobia and
the nightmare he experiences, being stuck in an elevator. Little by little we become aware of
the legacy Adam received from his parents: “The legacy that flowed through his
veins.[…]Adam had often heard the screams of his parents at night. Their own terrible visions
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from a haunted past became his. He had inherited their perceptions of space, and the
knowledge of how much one needs to live, to hide, and to breathe where there was no air”
(5). From this moment Rosenbaum leads the reader through Posner's nightmare becoming
reality. While being stuck in the elevator he envisions himself in a cattle car being deported to
a concentration camp. In the end he is freed from the elevator but still cannot distinguish
between reality and the nightmare he experienced. The gripping description of Adam’s
gruesome experience transitions into the next story, “Remembering the Yohrzeit,” where a
calm environment of mourning is portrayed. A Jewish-American artist tries to commemorate
the passing of his mother by lighting a candle. Like flipping through a photo album,
Rosenbaum takes us to the next page with a different scene.
As mentioned before, the opening story shows Adam heavily traumatized after being
stuck in an elevator. He identifies with his parents’ experiences so much that he cannot
distinguish it from his own situation. Another example of a character immersed in the old
world is college professor Adam in “An Act of Defiance.” His whole room is filled with
books about the Holocaust. His every move influenced by the atrocities his parents
experienced: “Everything about my rage was borrowed. My imagination had done all the
work---invented suffering, without the physical scars, the incontestable proof” (59). Reaching
back becomes his whole life. Every situation about this college professor oozes his obsession
with the Holocaust. He is so far immersed that a survivor, his uncle Haskell, needs to tell him
to live more and not be consumed by what happened to his family:
“A man of my age makes peace with death. There is nothing to fear anymore. You worry too
much Adam. Your father told me about you---too serious, brooding, not able to enjoy life.”
”My father said that? He should talk. Where do you think I learned it from?”
“He was concerned about you. That’s why I am here. Your father had an excuse for suffering.
What reason do you have to carry these sins around like bricks?”(62)
Albeit harsh, Haskell tries to steer Adam away from his Holocaust entrenched life. Haskell
proves to be the very opposite. He shows that by not being obsessed with the Holocaust, life is
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more enjoyable. Haskell tries to guide Adam away from his learned past. In his collection of
stories, in short bursts we catch glimpses of second generation survivors and their connection
to the past. In the wake of the Holocaust the characters struggle to find out what their legacy
means to them.
The characters need to find a way to establish what their past means and how to deal
with it. In Telling the Little Secrets Janet Handler Burnstein addresses a theme which is
prevalent in Elijah Visible too. She discusses fragmented memories and how after the
Holocaust tragedy “one first reaches back” (xii). Many characters in Rosenbaum’s collection
of short stories struggle with reaching back. Their connection to their parents’ past becomes
clear when they try to reach back through postmemory and through religious practices and
traditions.
Rosenbaum shows several protagonists that try to reach back to the past through
religious practices and traditions. In the story “Romancing the Yohrzeit Light” Adam lights a
candle to honor his mother, who died one year before. Although he struggles with the exact
traditions he finds a way to honor his mother, but the flame is doused by Adam’s new
Swedish girlfriend (31). When she extinguishes the flame, and thereby the symbol of his
mother, this leads Adam to wonder where his real home is (32). The last connection to his
mother, symbolically represented by the Jewish candle, is destroyed by a representation of the
new world. The doused flame leaves him to question his own identity. The last piece of
Jewish identity, his last link to the past, is gone. The title-story “Elijah Visible” also presents a
return to Jewish tradition, but it portrays a very Americanized scene of Jewish tradition.
“Elijah Visible” starts out with Adam heavily protesting his family’s unceremonious religious
tradition, a Seder, which turned into a “shande” (91). Over the years Passover at the Posner
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household has become an empty tradition. After their death, the parents are responsible for the
unreligious Seder at their children’s house:
But Adam and his cousins had been raised to ignore the lineage that was unalterably theirs.
There was a calculated silence in all things associated with the past. And for good reason. The
Posners were related not just in blood, but also in experience, in memory. There was a
conscious avoidance of bringing together those who knew, who had been there, with those of
the next generation, who were witness to nothing but the silences, and the screams.(95)
Rosenbaum presents the Posner parents as people who tried no to share their experience with
their children. They kept the past and the present separated as much as they could. The story
takes a turn when a relative, who survived the Holocaust too, wants to come by. One of their
father’s cousins wants to come over from Belgium to talk, but Adam seems the only one
genuinely interested in this proposal. Through this relative Adam learns more about his
parents’ past and feels a stronger connection to his legacy. For him it puts their semi-religious
practice in perspective. The long-lost cousin represents a more true form of reaching back
than the empty shell that their Seder celebration became. The last story that provides an
example of the return, or reaching, back to tradition is in “The Pants in the Family.” When
faced with the news that Adam’s mother is dying, he and his father go to a synagogue to
reflect and pray. In their ultimate time of need they try to cling to old traditions without
exactly knowing how. When Adam and his father face yet another loss they panic, and in
desperation turn to their old religious practices. They return to their old Synagogue but hardly
have a clue what to do.
After the Holocaust many families moved physically, but the parents were imprinted
with the memories of the atrocities in old Europe. Families dealt with their past in different
ways. Although Wang’s study of families cannot be compared directly to Rosenbaum’s
fiction, it provides insight into the way in which families transmit their experiences. Wang
provides several descriptions of families that may help the reader understand how the parents
in Rosenbaum’s fiction influenced their children. In Surviving Survival she mentions four
types of families in which the parents have survived the Holocaust: “the victim family, fighter
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family, numb family and the family of those that made it” (53-55). Examples of the “victim
families” (53) are the young lawyer trapped in the elevator and college professor. They are
immersed in the atrocities experienced by their parents. These children identify strongly with
their parents’ experience. Rosenbaum’s fighter family appears in the story “The Pants in the
Family.” We learn that Adam’s father fought as a partisan against the Nazis in Poland (50).
He shows aggression when taunted and loses himself in a shooting game at the carnival that
he forgets about his son (39). He loses sight of everything around him and is only focussed on
showing he can fight back. The third type of family Wang discusses are the “numb families”
(54). They are in a perpetual state of shock, just like the parents in “The Little Blue Snowman
of Washington Heights.” Young Adam comes home from school and finds his parents naked
in the darkness and shuddering (205). Throughout the story Adam is afraid and his teachers
say that his parents have “turned this poor little boy into a concentration camp survivor, and
he wasn’t even in the camps!” (200). One can only imagine how this will shape a child like
Adam when he grows up. Throughout Elijah Visible it becomes clear that none of the parents
fit Wang’s final category: “those that have made it” (55). None of the parents achieve real
success. The parents in “The Rabbi Double-Faults” play such a minute role that we learn next
to nothing about them; therefore, they cannot be compared to one of Wang’s family category.
Some parents break down when they face a new tragedy, but others we only learn about
through the main characters opinions and reflections. America was a new beginning for the
survivors, but Rosenbaum does not depict a positive picture for them in American society.
Certain stereotypical American influences throughout the book link to negative
experiences. A good example is when, as mentioned before, Adam’s father is lured into taking
a shot at the carnival in Atlantic City. Under the bright lights on the boardwalk he forgets
about his son (38). Another story where a typically American event, namely bingo on holiday,
links to negativity is “Bingo by the Bungalow.” When young Adam almost has a full card and
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wins, he is cut short because of the rain (122). Earlier, in the same story, Adam breaks his
wrist while playing baseball. This American pastime makes an outsider out of Adam. Adam is
weaker than the other kids and resembles his father, who is also presented as frail in the story.
“The Rabbi Double-Faults” presents another situation with a negative outcome linked to
American culture. In a game of tennis the brothers Vered, who are both Rabbis, place a wager
on their tennis match to decide on the future of the religiosity of their sermons. Sheldon Vered
wants his brother Joseph, who visits from Israel, to make God less prevalent in his sermons.
His brother wants Sheldon to include God more. The tennis match leads to the Americanized
Rabbi Sheldon winning and confronting God right there on the tennis court (155). He
defiantly stays on the court while it rains and calls out to God while doing a Hasidic dance
and mumbling in Hebrew (155). This last example combines the decline in religious practices
with American cultural influence. In the story “Elijah Visible” the Seder is accompanied by
an Elvis Costello song in the background (89). The completely Americanized version of the
Jewish tradition is the starting point of Adam’s anger. He reacts vehemently against the
bastardized version of the Jewish tradition. These are all examples of an increasingly
Americanized Jewish identity, that show a negative effect of American influences on these
Jewish-American characters’ lives.
Ofer Shiff, in Survival Through Integration, discusses the tension between Jewish and
American identity: “The universalistic-Jewish ideology faced a different challenge: to devise
patterns of Jewish identity that could reinforce American Jews’ aspirations as middle-class
Americans, without making them choose between the Jewish and American components of
their identity. These patterns found prominent expression in the postwar American Jewish
return to religion” (152). Rosenbaum’s characters move between these parts of their identities
too. For them the American part of their identity seems to be a sturdy base, while they try to
figure out their link to their past and Jewish identity. Rosenbaum uses the theme of religion to
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show that second generation survivors feel the need to connect with the past. Often they
create a new version of religious practices. They use religion to not forget.
College professor Adam, as mentioned before, spends his whole life not forgetting.
His every move revolves around his inherited legacy. The reader sees how he remembers his
legacy and how this relates to his position in American society, when he grades his students’
papers. His students, one more ignorant than the other, show how non-Jewish Americans view
remembering the Holocaust. One student grossly underestimates the sheer number of the
Holocaust deaths and another student relates Jewish suffering to slavery in America (70).
Adam faces a variety of opinions on Holocaust remembrance in the US. Rosenbaum creates a
strong dichotomy between Adam’s immersion in the Holocaust and his students’ ignorance
and indifference. The callousness with which the students express their opinions on Holocaust
remembrance in the US is striking. Where college professor Adam encounters indifference to
his legacy, corporate yuppie Adam finds more understanding. When stuck in the elevator and
losing his mind quickly, two men speak to him over the intercom and recognize the references
he makes to the Holocaust (10). The Russian-American and Irish-American recognize the evil
that Adam talks about and assess the gravity of the situation. They clearly present more
awareness of and understanding for the situation than the aforementioned students.
Elijah Visible most of all is a collection of short stories drenched in postmemory.
Gruesome experiences detail how second generation survivors are influenced by the parents’
Holocaust experience. None of the parents described by Rosenbaum can escape their past, and
live a care-free life in the US. As Burnstein notes, after a tragedy so intense, there is a need to
reach back. The second generation tries to do so by reaching back to religious tradition but
they do this in an Americanized fashion, through which their motives become questionable.
Next to their Americanized versions of Jewish traditions, other stereotypical American
influences are linked to negativity. These American influences and the characters’ struggle
20
with their parents’ past, represent the tension between the American and Jewish parts of their
identities. In Elijah Visible not many non-Jewish Americans seem receptive and
understanding with regard to the problems the protagonists face.
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3. Second Hand Smoke
The first paragraph of Rosenbaum’s Second Hand Smoke leaves no questions. This
novel is about a broken family. The main theme is memory that is handed down, illustrated by
the poignantly chosen title. The start of the novel sets the tone:
It wasn’t so much that as a family they were strange, or that from the beginning they had been
estranged---although each in its own way was true. It was that they were damaged. Irreversibly
ruined. The Katz family of Miami Beach came assembled that way, without manuals or
operating instructions or reassuring warranties. Everything was already broken. Nothing ever
worked right, nothing ever would. The damage is what defined them best. (3)
Elijah Visible deals with numerous stories, but this novel portrays one family situation. The
novel follows Duncan Katz, his mother Mila, and his half-brother Isaac as they try to figure
out their place in Katz family history.
The novel resembles Elijah Visible in that it is slightly fragmented. It switches
between story lines while we follow Duncan on his quest while he tries to find out more about
his past. Throughout the book, passages that portray Duncan’s life are interrupted by musings
of his mother who is in the last stage of her life. Her story provides the reader with
background information on the Katz family. The story takes us deeper into Mila’s past as she
confesses, to relative strangers, what happened to her after the Holocaust. Through her
confessions the reader learns that Duncan has a half-brother, Isaac, living in Poland. Duncan
and Isaac meet in Poland and the two continue to find out more about their shared past. The
book can be seen as a study of the way in which Mila’s influence shapes Duncan and Isaac’s
identity. She controls Duncan in America, but is absent for Isaac in Poland. She left Isaac in
Poland after the Holocaust because she could not take care of him anymore: she needed a new
beginning and left Isaac.
Mila Katz’s influence oozes through every pore of the book. Duncan’s father, Yankee,
is barely mentioned and dies of a heart attack due to nightmares (66). The one interesting
22
detail we learn about Duncan’s father is that he changes his name from Herschel to Yankee
when he arrives in the US. He did this to “be virtually untraceable and unknowable” (6). From
here on Mila becomes the main focus of the book. She is the exact opposite of her absent
husband when we see her control Duncan’s life. She becomes a member of the Jewish mafia
and strong-arms her way through any social situation. When Mila opens up to her nurses
about her past, it becomes clear how she feels her influence shaped her sons’ chances in life.
“Yes, Isaac. Poor little Isaac. He was such a frail baby. Very sickly. Duncan can take care of
himself. Isaac[…] only God knows what happened to him all these years” (150). Her
worrying about her abandoned son shows she feels that without her influence, Isaac is
hopelessly lost. She is not there for Isaac to see and watch over his every move. She feels her
influence over Duncan will make sure he turns out alright. The opposite is true, however,
since Duncan leads an obsessive life due to her never-ending control. While Mila controls
Duncan directly, she influenced Isaac differently. As a baby, Mila gave Isaac a concentration
camp tattoo, to make him believe he is a survivor too. Although Mila’s actions display a
constant control over her sons, and she influences them both negatively, in a certain way the
family is quite successful.
While sociological theory and literature cannot be compared directly, since they are
two different things, Wang’s theory of survivor families does provide a new view in
Rosenbaum’s fiction. According to Wang’s distinction in survivor families, Mila’s family fits
the category that has made it:
These survivors have decided that their own successful lives will be the definitive proof of
victory over the Nazis. This is the group that is most adapted to the reality of their new
country, whose members are highly ambitious and often achieve great social and
political status, fame and/or wealth.(55)
Mila comes to play a part in the Jewish mafia, and she pushes Duncan to become a successful
high school football player (36), class president (41), Nazi-hunter (120) and “big shot” who
23
appears on TV (115). Although Duncan “has made it,” his struggle with life seems to suggest
otherwise.
Duncan is full of rage instilled in him by his mother. Mila forces him to play
aggressively on the football pitch and he imagines “playing against the SS” (36). His rage
leads him later in life to smash a television studio (123). This rage also causes him to lose his
job. While he works for the Office of Special Investigations, he causes a Ukrainian camp
guard to walk free without the government being able to prosecute him for his crimes (268).
He illegally records the camp guards’ statement in an overaggressive attempt to bring him to
justice. Duncan changes when he meets his half-brother Isaac in Poland. Isaac’s lightheartedness brings a new perspective to Duncan and he gradually turns around. Isaac proves
to be the complete opposite and starts a change in Duncan for the better. Although it takes a
while before Isaac can persuade his American brother to view life from a different
perspective, in the end as Richard Lourie notes in the New York Times, “Isaac heals
Duncan.” Isaac is more in touch with the old world. He represents a more balanced view of
life and Holocaust remembrance. This new perspective helps Duncan realize how his mother,
as a representation of the old world, has influenced them both.
Rosenbaum presents American influence as a means of contrasting the old world with
the new. A telling example is the description of Isaac’s Polish cemetery:
The cemetery had become Poland’s answer to the Magic Kingdom---a never-never land minus
the songs and costumes.[. . .] All sorts of package tours had been created, which included the
major sites: the concentration camps, the ghettos, the markets, the monuments, the synagogues
(some now being used as movie theaters), the cemeteries---even the location shots for
Schindler’s List. (107)
This example shows the exploitation of atrocities of the Holocaust in the light of American
influence. By comparing a Polish cemetery to an American amusement park and a movie set,
Rosenbaum depicts the capitalizing on the memory of the Holocaust. Back in the US, another
good example of how Holocaust remembrance is turned into entertainment is the Molly Rubin
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Show. Duncan is invited there to talk about the Holocaust (113). In a stereotypical American
television setting, where Duncan gets cut-off by commercials, he suddenly faces a Holocaustdenying leader of the White Aryan Militia. In a quest for sensation the racist is put opposite of
Duncan to save the dropping ratings of the TV-show. The ratings spike, but the situation
spirals out of control and ends up with Duncan destroying the set (122). Through Duncan’s
rage, and later his evolution to a more calm approach through Isaac, we learn about his
development but also about his identity. He has both feet planted firmly in the old world,
which leads him into conflict with the new world.
Duncan constantly walks the line between the old and the new world. He does not
know who he is: “His own identity wouldn’t sit still, he was always in flux, looking to be
found, a soul in search for an anchoring Web site” (76). This is the introduction to a paragraph
in which Duncan walks through Manhattan and looks at the American way of life and
navigates through it. While Rosenbaum describes museums, Christmas trees and Duncan
eating a pretzl, a stranger walks into Duncan and reacts aggressively. Instantly he falls back
into analyzing himself in the light of his inherited Holocaust experience: “Yet, as always, he
was seeking retribution from the wrong source” (78). He moves between the Jewish and
American part of his identity like Shiff describes in his theory of Jewish Universal Ideology.
On the hand, there is his career and on the other hand, there is the lingering influence of his
mother whose every decision “was overshadowed by Auschwitz” (148). While Mila
influences her son heavily and forces him to obsess with his family’s legacy, others tell
Duncan to step away from his upbringing. His job with the Office of Special Investigations is
an example of how Duncan still has two feet firmly in his Jewish past. He tracks down Nazis
for a living. Mila is also stuck in the old world, which becomes clear when she shares her
history. She lives in the past while Duncan more and more seems to find a place in between
the old and the new world.
25
According to one of his mobster friends Duncan has to “get past this Nazi obsession.
This is America. Jews have power” (79). He can only escape the old world by leaving his
mother’s legacy behind. A tension between the old and new world is present throughout
Second Hand Smoke.
Rosenbaum depicts the struggle with religion as a vehicle to question God. The few
religious references in Second Hand Smoke point to a Jewish American identity that does not
need religion in the post-Holocaust world. Rosenbaum’s recurring character Rabbi Sheldon
Vered takes another stab at God when speaking at Mila’s funeral:
“Such a wonderful woman…,” he droned on, his voice---halting and unrhythmic---coming in
like a badly tuned radio, “so filled with life and yet so familiar with death. This is precisely
why I don’t believe in God.” Most of the mourners were members of his congregation, so
Vered’s wacky rabbinic pronouncements about either a world without a god, or one with a
deviant god, didn’t faze them anymore. [. . .]Rabbi Vered never missed an opportunity to take
a cheap shot at the Almighty.(49)
Vered’s open defiance of God and a Seder void of ritual (291) suggest that religion is not
important. The Seder takes place with mobsters and half-naked supermodels and revolves
around a large sum of money. Duncan’s circumcision is another good example of the
emptiness of religious practices in the Katz family. Mila wants to have her son circumsized by
a Jewish mobster without any sedation, because she wants Duncan to experience pain (16).
She wants Duncan to experience pain to make him stronger. She does not care at all about the
religious ritual. As Novick points out in his sociological study, religion proves to be less and
less important in the Jewish American identity (7). Although this does not relate directly to
fiction, it does show a resemblance. Vered’s unreligious sermon at Mila’s funeral is a
mockery of Jewish faith and focusses solely on remembering the past (49). The rabbi calls out
God and stresses that God was not there during the Holocaust. To him and to the congregation
the Jewish faith is no more than a vehicle to remember.
26
The unreligious Seder mentioned before represents the same as Mila’s funeral. It is a
get-together of people who, through a religious ceremony, try to look back: “Duncan and
Isaac, the only two left seated at the table, turned to each other at the same time. ‘Is this how
American Jews remember when we were slaves? What will happen to the Holocaust one
day?”(292). This question raises a valid point about Holocaust remembrance. The trivialized
celebration of Jewish religious ceremonies depicted in the novel represent in what way these
Jewish people commemorate the past. Mintz also deals with the shaping of Holocaust
memory in the future in his study, but feels it to be too early to assess how this will take place.
Mintz provides an interesting argument next to Rosenbaum’s opinions on Holocaust
remembrance:
How will Americans shape the memory of the Holocaust in the future? Because the Holocaust
has been so much in the forefront of public discussion and media treatment it has been
difficult to think in longer-range terms about the role this event will play in American culture
and in the very different communities that make up our society. One can already observe
within the American Jewish community a growing critique of the “preoccupation” with the
Holocaust.(xii)
People surrounding Duncan tell him what Mintz describes in his theory. Duncan’s
preoccupation with the Holocaust receives critical response since it seems to control his whole
identity. His every move is guided by his inherited Holocaust past. Even his long-lost brother
advises him. Isaac tells his brother he needs to let his mother go (264). This takes place twelve
years after Mila died, and Isaac feels Duncan needs to let his mother go to be able to move on.
Isaac, who was left in Poland right after he was born, claims he mourned her for years and has
let her go. Duncan asks Isaac: “How can you mourn what you never knew?” (264). Isaac
never knew Mila in the way Duncan never knew the Holocaust. This is a key part to second
generation survivors’ problems. Next to mourning that which one does not know, Rosenbaum
discusses why exactly it is important for the children of survivors to remember. In his essay
“Law and Legacy in the Post-Holocaust Imagination,” he explains why the second generation
should try and comprehend what their inheritance means.
27
The parents were survivors of the most unimaginable experiment in mass death in human
history. The children would forever fall short in their own claims to immortality. For them,
everything would inexorably second-hand. Given the legacy of loss---the backstory that would
forever foreshadow the future---the children were required to find some way to comprehend
their inheritance, to invest it so it wouldn’t become wasted, squandered like the profligate
children of parents who had once been far too intimate with evil.(240)
Second Hand Smoke shows the struggle of how to remember the Holocaust. It also illustrates
the American reception of the Holocaust experience in the US by non-Jewish Americans.
The second generation Holocaust survivors live in a different America than the first
generation. As mentioned earlier, right after the war America was not ready to deal with the
problems that Jewish Americans faced after surviving the Holocaust. That changed after
twenty years, according to Berger. He argues that the second generation, whom he refers to as
the children of Job, and their creative work, is responsible for this:
[T]he contemporary children of Job are helping sensitize society as a whole to the implications
of what happened to Jewish people and the world half a century ago. That these secondgeneration witnesses were even born, given Nazism’s murderous assault on Jewish existence,
is a tale that bears import for all humanity.[. . .] Their creative work speaks to the issue of how
Holocaust memory is being shaped in contemporary Jewish and American culture.(11)
In Second Hand Smoke, Rosenbaum presents a new view on the reception of the
Holocaust in contemporary US. In New York, Duncan chases an old Ukrainian camp guard
onto a bus (103). Duncan shouts that the man murdered innocent Jews and that they should
beware of him, but this does not change any of the passengers’ reactions. They do not care
about the other passengers’ past: “So a Nazi is on the M15? Big deal. He’ll blend in well with
the transvestite, the crack addict, the welfare mother, the proverbial midnight cowboy” (104).
Through this comparison the camp guard’s past is trivialized. A gruesome murderer is
compared to everyday people and which is indicative of the indifference of American society
to the atrocities of the Second World War. This is not the first time in the novel that
indifference, or ignorance, is shown regarding to Holocaust legacy. When Mila opens up
about the past to her nurses, they show a lack of awareness altogether: “Before Mila, not one
of these nurses had ever heard of Auschwitz or Birkenau. And why should they have? Even
28
most American Jews thought of camps only as places to send children during the
summer”(148). This illustrates a lack of awareness even from within the Jewish American
community.
Rosenbaum’s second work of fiction is about the tight grip a survivor of the Holocaust
can have on the life of her son. Her horrible experiences in the Second World War drive her to
control her son in every way possible, and leave him an obsessed man whose identity revolves
around the Holocaust. The book deals with the dichotomy between the old world of Mila and
Duncan’s experiences in contemporary America. Jewish-Americans throughout the novel
value memory over tradition since the religious ceremonies are all void of spiritual awareness.
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4. The Golems of Gotham
Thane Rosenbaum’s third novel The Golems of Gotham is a literary work full of
fantasy. It is set mostly in contemporary New York City and ends in Miami. It opens with the
suicides of Rose and Lothar Levin, who are the parents of main character Oliver Levin. Rose
and Lothar both survived the Holocaust but decide to take their own lives many years after the
war is over. They leave Oliver behind without any clue as to why they both took their own
lives. Oliver’s daughter Ariel tries to resurrect the ghosts of her dead grandparents to help her
father work through his family’s past. She brings her grandparents back to earth as Golems, or
ghosts. With the ghosts of her grandparents she accidentally brings to life six other Jewish
historical figures that committed suicide after surviving the Holocaust. Rosenbaum explains
in his preface that he stresses the importance of imagination. In the novel he lets characters
return from the dead, in hope of creating clarity: “The effort here is to recruit the imagination
into the service of answering the unanswerable, to find some logic in numbers that simply
don’t add up, to find an acceptable way to respond to so much collective longing, to seek hope
and reconciliation in a world that had so little reason to do so---but yet we must try” (xi).
In the quest to find out how to live in post-Holocaust America, Rosenbaum leads the reader
through the story via different perspectives. The opening scene depicts how Oliver’s father’s
“Jewish brain” is shot out of his skull in the middle of a synagogue. Through the narrator’s
voice this gripping detail of the suicide paints a vivid picture and grabs the reader’s attention.
The story moves between several other voices, ranging from Oliver and Ariel’s to the
Golems’. Oliver’s parents have a prominent place since it is through their experience the
reader learns about their influence on their son.
30
Rose and Lothar Levin fit the type of family that Wang describes as the “numb
family” (54). They are in shock and rarely mention what happened to them during the
Holocaust. When Ariel revives them as ghosts, they open up more and more. Lothar states
that Oliver never had the chance to be a real boy and that he was always afraid (89). They also
explain how they influenced Ariel indirectly: “And no, we didn’t talk about the Holocaust
much in our home, because we didn’t have to. You don’t speak about it with your father
either, because you realize, just like Oliver did at your age, that it lives inside you. And you
already know that the Holocaust is responsible for everything” (91). So Oliver did not exactly
know what happened to his parents but felt the Holocaust loom over everything. He inherits
his parents’ avoidance of the Holocaust.
Oliver’s writing reflects the avoidance of his past. He never delves into what exactly
happened to his family, but his writing remains superficial. The courtroom legal thrillers he
writes never qualify as “emotionally complex or intellectually challenging” (30). He decides
not to deal with the past and eventually finds himself at a loss for inspiration. When he starts
to write a Holocaust novel, inspiration seems endless (263). He loses himself completely in
the book and eventually breaks down. The immersion in the Holocaust proves to be too much
and Oliver wants to commit suicide like his parents. In the end Rose and Lothar convince him
he cannot do to his daughter what they did to their son.
Ariel knows the Holocaust is ever-present for her family. She is a third generation
survivor and has a remarkable understanding her of father’s problems. She looks out for him
and does not suffer under her family’s legacy. With the knowledge and poise of a grown-up,
fourteen-year-old Ariel reflects on her legacy: “Some family histories are so big, the future
can’t overshadow the past” (42). She appears to be the only member of her family that can
look back to the past and confront it. She represents the past when she picks up an old violin
and, without studying for a moment, can play Klezmer tunes as well as anyone.
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Other American influences in popular music drown out the old Jewish tunes, but when
Ariel plays Klezmer in the street, she causes a new appreciation for the “shtetl” music (12).
The media are subjective in the rendering of the Levin suicides. This way they paint a picture
of America’s influence on daily life. A newspaper headline says, “Holocaust Survivors
Succeed in Shul Suicide” (4). The title suggests a positive outcome and comes across as
sensationalist. Other media reacted too and “the mystery became a spellbinding national
obsession” (4). For a short period America is drawn toward a new sensational news fact,
undoubtedly to move on as soon as something more interesting comes by. Oliver describes the
same when he mentions that Holocaust deniers get airtime on talk shows, while survivor
testimonies “rotted away” (293).
There are also numerous situations in which American media play a more positive
role, but this happens sporadically. Ariel’s violin play generates attention in several
newspapers and she performs in several nation-wide talk shows. She becomes a “pop-culture
phenomenon” (231), but in the end the nation’s appreciation remains superficial. New
Yorkers adore her music, but nowhere does it affect their interaction with, for instance,
Holocaust remembrance. For Ariel, playing the violin is a means to stay connected to her
family’s past. The old Jewish songs are for her the link to her Jewish heritage.
Oliver’s daughter does not struggle at all with her legacy. Ariel seems to be one step
further than Shiff’s theory Survival Through Integration. Shiff discusses people’s struggle
between the Jewish and American components of their identity (152), Ariel beckons her
legacy to return by playing “Invitation to the Dead” over and over again. Her endeavors to
reach back to her past are rewarded with the appearance of her family and with local fame due
to her musical qualities.
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Oliver struggles significantly more than his daugther. He adapts more to what
American society desires from him: more thriller novels. He wants more Jewish themes in his
novels and this causes him to face his family history. The head-on collision with his Jewish
inheritance is the opposite of what his daughter experiences. While Oliver tries to reach back,
he eventually breaks down. Although there cannot be a direct comparison between scholarly
studies and fictional works, it is interesting to note a similar theme. In a sociological study by
Burnstein, she says that the second generation survivors break down when they avoid their
shadows too long (Telling the Little Secrets 8). Oliver’s agent Evelyn is surprised by his
sudden turnaround and notes that she feels he did not even remember he was Jewish (266). It
seems like Oliver avoids his Jewish background. He tries to stay in his American secularized
world and not stray into the old world.
The portrayal of God in The Golems of Gotham is quite negative. The book starts out
with a complaint against his absence in the lives of Lothar and Rose. They commit a cardinal
sin by taking their own lives, but they add an extra layer of defiance by doing it inside a
synagogue:
A Shabbos suicide pact is not exactly what God had in mind for his day of rest. But Lothar and
Rose were Holocaust survivors; God would have no say in this matter. He had become
irrelevant, a lame-duck divinity, a sham for a savior, a mere caricature of a god who cared.
That’s the price you pay for arriving late at Auschwitz, or in this case, not at all; your forfeit
all future rights to an opinion. (3)
Their Rabbi, Rosenbaum’s recurring Rabbi Vered, is so immersed in defying God after the
Holocaust that he feels upstaged by the Levins when they take their own lives in front of God
(6). Another good example of the trivialization and mockery of the Jewish faith is the place
where the Golems hold a service. They find a place where congregants are guided by their
internal spirit more than by tradition (246). Everything about the place oozes mocking of the
Jewish faith. Nothing is described as traditional and anything goes in this shul. This
simmered-down version of Judaism is exactly what the Levins and Golems need. They need
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their own liberal version of religion and not the strict religious variant. Through a service at
this shul Ariel hopes her father finds a new way back to the past (252).
Oliver does not know much about his parents’ past. They do not even leave a suicide
note. The Levins leave their entire history open and force their son to be locked in
postmemory. The only thing left for him is to imagine and create his own idea of what
happened with his parents. Lothar and Rose as Golems are examples of how Oliver fills in
the blanks of his parents’ left open history. The Golems are a finely crafted example of how
the imagination works in comparison to postmemory: “The Golems were all cryogenic
creatures---preserved, not in ice, but in time. Yet since the visions were seen through Oliver’s
eyes and imagination, his memory wouldn’t yield the remote control, restoring and
rearranging the images as he perhaps wanted to see them” (302). The Golems are stuck in
time. They are no more than the memory that Oliver made them to be. The perception of the
Golems is personal. In Oliver’s case this is a result of how his parents transmit, or failed to
transmit, their experience to him. Ariel represents a certain postmemory too. She can play the
violin but she has never had one lesson. Although unschooled, she plays the violin like an
expert: “The teardrop notes that spilled from the child’s violin seemed to recall to listeners
another time that couldn’t actually be recalled at all---just simply felt” (12). She is as
proficient in playing music of the old world as Oliver is in writing his Holocaust novel. There
is no mention in the book of the quality of Oliver’s novel, but the writing process was easy.
Both Ariel and Oliver have information instilled inside them but neither knows exactly how
this happened. Ariel says, “I bet we both now have the magic. The music’s already inside us”
(235). This reflects both generations carry a legacy inside them; the personal legacy of their
parents’ Holocaust experience.
According to Rosenbaum in “Law and Legacy in the Post-Holocaust Imagination,”
“we have a moral duty to remember, to honor, ritualize, and acknowledge our collective and
34
individual losses and pain, and yet we can’t go too far in our obsessions with memory,
because to do so presents risks and obstacles to our ability to engage in and enjoy the fullness
of life, even as we have been so mercilessly robbed of so much of that richness” (244). Oliver
realizes this danger but feels there is not a conscious choice for him (255). He looks back too
much, but in the end cannot help it. His obsession only seems to grow. This resembles what
happens in real life as described by Mintz. He states that “after the public fascination with the
Holocaust wanes, there will still be an immense archive which will hopefully be augmented
by generations to come” (186). Where the outside world loses interest, children of survivors
become more important in remembering the Holocaust. Oliver’s agent Evelyn is very
pessimistic and predicts Holocaust remembrance will follow the same path as religious
traditions. A good example is the reason why Jewish Americans celebrate Passover according
to Evelyn: “And one day the Holocaust will be just another excuse to sit down with family
and have dinner and some disgustingly sweet wine” (268). This pessimistic view on
Holocaust remembrance in the US trivializes Jewish-American memory and leaves no hope
for the future. Evelyn describes Jewish religious remembrance and compares that to
Holocaust remembrance. Contrasting the two, one can look at the Jewish slavery in Egypt and
compare how it is remembered to this day. One of the big differences between JewishAmericans remembrance of the slavery in Egypt compared to Holocaust memory is the sheer
size and quality of the archive. The Holocaust archive contains survivor testimonies and
actual images of the atrocities, which give a more personalized history. Movie directors still
tell Holocaust stories to this day. Whether these films portray a just picture of what happened,
and to what extent their interpretation of a story influences memory in the US is up for debate.
Oliver says Hollywood made the Holocaust less sacred and uses the example of the movie
Life is Beautiful. He states it is a brilliant marketing ploy but a moral disgrace (294). Evelyn
35
goes further and says that American Jews eventually will not have a clue of what the
Holocaust is, because in the end they do not care (268).
Evelyn is quite negative towards Oliver because of the publishers’ reactions to
Oliver’s Holocaust novel. One of the publishers states that Holocaust novels just do not sell.
Publishers expect different novels from Oliver, ones that do not “tread so deep in emotion and
atrocity” (264). The outside world does not seem welcome to his newfound legacy. American
society made its own memory of the Holocaust. Oliver’s father agrees and explains that
Americans do not have the right have to use Holocaust analogies:
Today we call policemen storm troopers, but even the worst cops are not that. The leaders we
disagree with are referred to as Hitlers, but there too the comparison is insulting to those who
were gassed by a monster with a moustache. AIDS and abortion are compared to Auschwitz.
Overcrowded subways are cattle cars.[. . .] We have taken the horror and adapted it for our
modern times, and trivialized and diluted it by comparing it to completely the wrong
situations. It is as if we insist on having the right to analogize. But there is no analogy
here.(190)
Contrasting the Holocaust wi
th such mundane things makes its legacy trivial. Novick also recognizes this theme in real life,
but explains if differently. He states that through this reference to extremity, which seems to
be grossly overstated, anything else looked “not so bad” (255).
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5. Comparison
Thane Rosenbaum’s three works deal with similar issues but packaged in a different
form. Through snapshots of Jewish Americans that deal with their Holocaust legacy,
Rosenbaum guides the reader through Elijah Visible. Second Hand Smoke is a character study
of a mother’s influence on both her sons after the war. The Golems of Gotham focusses on
Holocaust memory in the US and incorporates the third generation survivor into the picture.
Rosenbaum stays close to home in his fiction since the themes he touches on are relevant to
his own family. He explains how his family situation shaped him as a writer: “My parents
never spoke about it. There were no numbers on their hands. My mother was in Majdanek and
my father in Bergen-Belsen. My understanding of [the Holocaust] is more mystical than
intentional. Unintentionally I have also become emblematic of the artistic sensibility to postHolocaust art” (Dinah Selzer). He lives in the postmemory-world that many of his characters
are in too. They have to deal with parents who did not shared their experience, and they try to
figure out what their own position is related to this legacy.
The dichotomy between the two brothers in Second Hand Smoke presents an
important theme in Rosenbaum’s fiction. Duncan has both feet firmly in the old world while
Isaac embraces the new world more. Throughout the novel Duncan tries to move toward
Isaac’s world. In The Golems of Gotham Oliver walks the same path but the other way. He
ends up immersed in the old world through the help of his daughter. Elijah Visible also
presents characters that struggle with their parents’ legacy. In “Cattle Car Complex,” “An Act
of Defiance,” “The Rabbi Double-Faults” and “The Little Blue Snowman” the characters are
so consumed with the Holocaust, that their lives are controlled by it. They experience an everpresent struggle with their legacy.
37
“Romancing the Yohrzeit,” “The Pants in the Family” and the title story “Elijah
Visible” shows people who have the need to reach back to the past but experience difficulty in
doing so. They want to honor the past but do not know exactly how to do this, so they
improvise. In Second Hand Smoke Duncan is immersed in the past. He reaches back through
his job as a Nazi-hunter but his long-lost brother shows him a different perspective on dealing
with their legacy. As the total opposite, Isaac shows Duncan a healthier approach to postHolocaust life. The Golems of Gotham presents Oliver as a symbol of denial. He follows his
parents’ footsteps in total avoidance of the past. His daughter forces him to reach back. With
her klezmer music she brings her grandparents parents back, and piece by piece tries to
recreate history to help her father remember.
Through the Golems’ help, Oliver comes closer to remembering his family’s past. His
avoidance in the first part of the book transitions into an obsession with memorializing the
Holocaust. The Golems discuss the importance of a second generation testimony:
“This is the only way for him to fix himself and heal. He must write about it. There is no safe
place in our universe. What we witnessed is what separates us from anyone else---dead or
alive. It was our duty, and curse, and now it is his.”[. . .] “Why is it so important to us? Let
him write comic books for all we care!”. “Because the world didn’t listen the first time.”[. . .]
“Why would they listen to Oliver anyway?” Lothar asked. “He wasn’t there. He didn’t witness
anything, other than me and Rose, the way we were after Auschwitz. What moral authority
does he have to the story?” “Stories live forever when they are repeated,” Primo said, “and not
necessarily by the same person.” (167)
It is interesting to note the role of the imagination in this example of second generation
Holocaust memory. Primo, one of the other Golems, says that the act of remembering is more
important than the form they are represented in. Oliver learns about his history when his
parents, as Golems, reveal more and more. Duncan in Second Hand Smoke learns about his
past too, but not through his mother but through his what the people around him tell him. Mila
shares her story with strangers as opposed to sharing it with her family. Her old friends and
Duncan’s half-brother in Poland show him more of his own history. Duncan explains to his
brother Isaac that he is stuck in Holocaust memory: “I’m caught in a time warp, trapped in a
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cattle car. Everything is about loss. It feels like there is no difference between my life and
what happened to our family during the war” (263). Isaac does not experience the same
emotion. Mila left him in Poland as a baby, and did not influence him like she influenced
Duncan. Holocaust memory in Elijah Visible broadly consist of second generation survivors
who are, stuck in postmemory, try to reconnect with their legacy, or get a revelation from a
Holocaust survivor. Elijah Visible does not paint a hopeful picture for the parents. None of
them fit Wang’s category of families: “that have made it” (55). Their influence on their
children leads the children to struggle with remembering the Holocaust.
Several stories in Elijah Visible attribute negative connotations to American influence.
They often place the second generation in a state of victimization. The two novels present
more examples of American influence sketching a strong division between the old and the
new world. This dichotomy shows how open American society is to the Jewish community’s
past. In a quest for sensation, newspapers and TV shows are depicted as media that care solely
for the next exciting scoop or riot. The media never depict a world that understands the
difficulties that American Jews experience in relation to their past.
The statements that non-Jewish Americans make about the Holocaust in these stories
are pessimistic and negative. In “An Act of Defiance” college professor Adam deals with
ignorant students who have no clue about the Holocaust. In Second Hand Smoke, passengers
on a bus are indifferent to the war criminal’s past when Duncan points it out. Mila’s nurses
are also unaware of what the Holocaust actually is. Hirsch recognizes this ignorance and
indifference in American society and gives examples of attempts to educate Americans in
Holocaust memory. She mentions the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.:
[T]he museum, I realized, is also dedicated to bridging the distance between memory and
postmemory, and between memory and oblivion. The museum was created not primarily for
survivors and deeply engaged children of survivors like me, but for an American public with
little knowledge of the event. At its best, the museum needs to elicit in its visitors an
39
imaginary identification---the desire to know and to feel, the curiosity and passion that shape
postmemory of survivor children. (249)
Whereas Hirsch describes efforts to honor the dead and remember the atrocities, Rosenbaum
displays characters that do not feel this need. In The Golems of Gotham, Oliver’s agent
Evelyn describes Holocaust remembrance losing importance in American society. The three
books by Rosenbaum discussed here all present an American society not particularly
receptive toward the second generation’s struggle with Holocaust memory.
Rosenbaum’s books portray the way in which second generation Holocaust survivors
deal with their parents’ trauma. All stories show children of survivors and the difficulties they
face with their parents’ transmitted experiences. In the first two books we see children of
survivors experiencing Holocaust memory as it if were their own. In The Golems of Gotham
Oliver also follows his parents’ path, which nearly drives him to commit suicide. The struggle
between the old and the new world is a major theme throughout the novels. Characters
struggle to find out how to deal with the legacy in American society. The books differ in the
way in which they address the issues. Elijah Visible mixes postmemory with the decline in
religious traditions to indicate difficulties with Holocaust remembrance in the US. Second
Hand Smoke offers a clear view on the dichotomy between the old and the new by contrasting
the two brothers. Looming over them is their Holocaust heritage, symbolically represented by
their mother. The Golems of Gotham raises different philosophical questions by extensively
discussing contemporary cultural renderings of Holocaust stories, suggesting Rosenbaum
questions the future of Holocaust remembrance in the US.
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Conclusion
The second generation Holocaust survivors theoretically have a clean slate in America.
Their parents fled Europe after the horrific events of the Second World War, and the US
should be a new beginning for them. Thane Rosenbaum shows in his fiction that the new
world is not necessarily a completely new beginning. Through the memory of their parents,
the children are still rooted in the past. Rosenbaum shows what this past means for them and
for their identity. By doing this, Rosenbaum addresses fundamental themes in Holocaust
remembrance in Jewish-American life.
Postmemory in the wake of the Holocaust is what Rosenbaum touches on in his
work. The survivors lived through atrocities and now have to find their way in a new world,
far from the one in which they experienced persecution. While they physically leave the old
world, psychologically they cannot. Deeply rooted inside them are the atrocities that have
become an integral part of their being. This remains such an important part of their identity
that they, willingly and unwillingly, pass on a part of this legacy on to their children. These
children of survivors often do not know exactly what happened to their parents. Through
imagination and their own creative effort the second generation can form their own viewpoint
of what happened. Several characters in Elijah Visible experience postmemory like Duncan
does in Second Hand Smoke. They are totally immersed in the past and are unable to
differentiate between their own experience and the Holocaust past. Through graphic images
Rosenbaum drags the characters back in history, and confronts them with horrific images of
the past. In The Golems of Gotham, Oliver confronts his past through the ghosts of his dead
parents. Rosenbaum shows through his books that second generation survivors have to face
their past. In Second Hand Smoke and The Golems of Gotham, the main characters overcome
their problems when they immerse themselves in the past, break down, and eventually find
41
more peace in dealing with their legacy. Rosenbaum also questions the merit the second
generation’s testimony has compared to the first generation, since it is not experienced firsthand. Postmemory remains nothing more, and nothing less, than the reaction to a reaction.
The way in which parents experience, and deal with their experience of, the past is what the
second generation reacts to. In a new world with new rules, the second generation seeks to
find an appropriate means to do justice to the past and never to forget.
In Rosenbaum’s fiction, postmemory affects the identity of the second generation. The
main characters described are all second generation survivors who live in the US. In Elijah
Visible the short stories often present the hardships that the second generation has with their
parents’ legacy. How to reach back to the past is a main theme in the three books. Burnstein
points out that the second generation wants to reach back in the aftermath of a horrible event
like the Holocaust. Rosenbaum often depicts characters that through unreligious ceremonies
and traditions try to keep memory alive. These characters balance on the line between the
American and Jewish parts of their identities. When they cling to a part of their Jewish
identity, it presents for them a means of connecting to the past. Novick claims JewishAmericans attempt to differentiate themselves from other Americans, and in doing so JewishAmericans put the Holocaust at the center of their identity. In one way or another, this is true
for Rosenbaum’s characters. While it does not appear to be a conscious choice, for many
characters the Holocaust becomes a symbol of their identity.
Scholars argue that Jewish religious life is on the decline in America. As a result many
Jewish-Americans seek other means of connecting. The Holocaust has proved to be a symbol
everyone could share. Whether it is a symbol that should be placed at the center of a
community’s identity is up for debate. Mintz feels the Holocaust is another victimization
symbol that does not provide a viable Jewish identity. For Rosenbaum’s characters, this part
of their identity is not up for choice. The inevitability of the Holocaust experience haunts
42
them. The extent to which they let it control their lives depends on their handling of the
Holocaust legacy. The parents’ past keeps their ties to their legacy so tight that their whole
being is influenced. From a lawyer that is trapped in an elevator, to a former Nazi-hunter
trying to escape a barrack, to a fiction writer so immersed in the past he is willing to take his
own life, none of them can escape their family’s legacy.
No matter what they do, achieve or strive for, the Holocaust legacy looms over them
and will confront them. Gorko refers to a conscious choice children of survivors have between
immersing themselves in, or trying to forget their past. No such option exists in Rosenbaum’s
world. The past will come back and has to be dealt with. Some characters try to avoid it, but
in the end, facing their legacy is inevitable.
In these three books Rosenbaum gives an account of the struggle of second generation
Holocaust survivors in the US. He moves between images of postmemory and philosophical
questions on remembering the Holocaust. He participates in the discussion on Holocaust
memory in the US when he mentions the difficulties it presents. Some non-Jewish characters
represent the indifference in America toward Holocaust remembrance whereas others
question the moral right they have to create art after the Holocaust. Rosenbaum’s body of
fictional work directly adds to Holocaust remembrance in the US. He actively helps to shape
the canon of second generation survivors’ literature, since he is a second generation survivor,
and at the same time he questions the way in which it takes shape.
Through the experiences of the second generation audiences become aware of what
the Holocaust’s effects are to this day. Right after the War memories were fresh and survivors
themselves could relay what exactly took place. When the first generation dies this creates a
new situation in Holocaust remembrance. The canon of first-hand testimonies to the
Holocaust will be finished. This makes the position of second generation survivor much more
43
important since they can give an account of the way in which the first generation dealt with
the aftermath of the Holocaust in American society. In a way the second generation turns into
a link to the past. They will shape Holocaust memory in the US. Mintz notes that the last two
decades were filled with Holocaust remembrance, ranging from books, movies, to college
classes and the Holocaust Museum. He wonders how America will construct Holocaust
memory in the coming years. Novick and Berger both assign a prominent place to the
Holocaust in American consciousness. Mintz acknowledges this too, but notes that the
Holocaust should not take a central position in Jewish-American identity. He fears a preoccupation with the Holocaust and that is exactly what many of Rosenbaum’s characters
struggle with. A line can be drawn between characters that are immersed in the past and
struggle with their inherited legacy, and characters that try to reconnect with their past to
eventually work through it. The unreligious ceremonies Rosenbaum portrays throughout his
fiction, present trivialized traditions as the current means of looking back.
Young defines memorialization as the process of a community determining their
relationship to their past. He sees this as a purposeful process in which, in this case, JewishAmericans have a conscious choice. Rosenbaum’s fiction does not present memorialization as
a choice but as a destiny. The future of Holocaust remembrance in the US also depends on
what position it takes in American society.
Although some scholars say that the Holocaust is present in American collective
consciousness, others mention the lack of awareness. In Rosenbaum’s fiction the American
reception of the Holocaust survivors is not all that understanding. American influence on and
the American perception of the second generation suggest a society that is rather indifferent to
the Jewish past. Holocaust remembrance therefore is depicted more as a responsibility of the
Jewish-American community than American society as a whole. The question nevertheless
remains how Jewish-Americans will shape their relation to their past.
44
In an American society that is in constant movement, the question is how the JewishAmerican community can make sure that their past is honored and remembered in the way
that does justice to those murdered in Europe during the Holocaust.
Rosenbaum’s fiction presents a clear warning. Postmemory can be a dangerous
concept. There is no clear answer for those struggling with filling in the blanks their parents
left behind. The mind keeps wondering and will not find peace as long as the second
generation survivor dwells on the past. It is up for debate whether a conscious decision is to
be made, but Rosenbaum’s fiction shows that one should confront the past to move on. He
also shows that religion is a vessel to reach back to the past, rather than a code to live by.
Rosenbaum’s characters share the Holocaust as a part of their identity. The Jewish religion
does not have the same importance for them as the Holocaust. Second generation survivors in
America have to deal with their parents’ legacy but should also think about a future in
American society. According to Rosenbaum there is hope.
An interesting topic for further research is the hope for the future that The Golems of
Gotham offers. In this novel Rosenbaum presents hope for the third generation survivors.
Oliver’s daughter Ariel is in touch with her family’s past but does not break under the
enormity of the atrocities her family experienced. On the contrary, she embraces her legacy
and tries to use it to help her father. She welcomes Holocaust survivors into her life and tries
to help her father come to terms with the past. As Oliver’s parents never talked about their
experiences in the Holocaust, his imagination has to fill in the blanks of his legacy. His
avoidance turns into a head-on confrontation with his Holocaust legacy, but his daughter does
not experience these problems at all. Related to this, an interesting field of research would be
the third generation’s reaction to the Holocaust legacy. The second generation’s struggle with
their inherited past has been researched extensively. Like Rosenbaum, many second
generation authors write about the way in which their parents’ lack of sharing caused the
45
children to use their imagination to create an image of what happened. The second generation
fills in the blanks through postmemory, but it would also be interesting to observe what the
third generation experiences. They are one step further removed, in a realm after postmemory.
It is interesting to look at their efforts to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive in
contemporary America.
46
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