JOKE JACOBS
2008-2009
MASTER THESIS
“GUARDIANS OF AN ABSENT MEANING”: TRANSGENERATIONAL TRAUMA AND (DIS)CONTINUITIES
BETWEEN JEWISH AMERICAN WRITERS OF THE SECOND AND THIRD GENERATION.
ART SPIEGELMAN’S MAUS AND JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER’S EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED.
Supervisor: DR. PHILIPPE CODDE
Department of English Literature
Paper submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements
for the degree of “MASTER IN DE VERGELIJKENDE MODERNE LETTERKUNDE”
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. PREFACE
5
II. INTRODUCTION
6
III. THE SECOND GENERATION
9
THE INITIAL TRAUMA
PASSING ON A LEGACY: MEMORIAL CANDLES
THE CHILD AS VICARIOUS WITNESS
“I WASN’T THERE”: A LIFE IN EXILE OR THE ABSENT PRESENCE OF THE HOLOCAUST
THE TRAUMA OF THE SECOND GENERATION
WRITING AS A WAY OF WORKING THROUGH: KEEPING A NON-MEMORY ALIVE
IV. ART SPIEGELMAN’S MAUS AS AN ILLUSTRATION OF SECOND-GENERATION WRITING
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“MY FATHER BLEEDS HISTORY”
“…AND HERE MY TROUBLES BEGAN…”
“PRISONER ON THE HELL PLANET”
WRITING POETRY AFTER [M]AUSCHWITZ IS BARBARIC
3
V. THE THIRD GENERATION: JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER’S EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED
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EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED IN THE LIGHT OF THE SECOND GENERATION AND MAUS
 CONTROVERSIAL NARRATION
 AUTHORIAL PRESENCE AND IDENTITY
 MEDIATION AND LAYERING
THIRD-GENERATION CHARACTERISTICS?

A POETICS OF ABSENCE

THE POWER OF FICTION AND THE FAILURE OF LANGUAGE

POSTMEMORIAL INVENTION

HISTORICAL DISTANCE AND ETHICAL CONCERNS
VI. CONCLUSION
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HISTORY, MEMORY AND POSTMEMORY
IDENTITY ISSUES: HOW THE HOLOCAUST DEFINES YIDDISHKEIT
“THE POST-HOLOCAUST CONDITION”
THIRD-GENERATION TRAUMA?
VII. BIBLIOGRAPHY
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VIII. APPENDIX: ILLUSTRATIONS
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I. PREFACE
I would first of all like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Philippe Codde, for very valuable
corrections and advice, and for his interesting course on contemporary American literature last
semester, which helped me a lot in writing my master thesis. I would also like to thank Dr. Stef Craps
for arousing my interest in trauma studies in his course on postcolonial trauma literature last year. In
general, my acknowledgement goes to the university, especially the departments of English and
Latin, where I have always enjoyed studying the last four years. From the department of Latin, I
would like to mention Prof. Wim Verbaal and Dr. Yanick Maes; I will always remember their classes
and vibrant enthusiasm, both for their field of study as for the students.
I would like to thank my family as well. First and foremost, my parents and grandparents, for
their love and (moral and financial) support during the entire period of my studies. In particular my
father for re-readings of my thesis and advice in general. A lot of thanks goes to my sister, Eline
Jacobs, for being there for me at any time. I also want to thank my close friends and classmates for
all the good times (many of which undoubtedly yet to come) and precious memories. Finally, I want
to thank my boyfriend, Omar García, who, however literally from a distance at times, always believes
in me with unconditional love.
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II. INTRODUCTION
“Schreib und farschreib! Keep writing it down!”
1
The main subject of my master thesis concerns the third generation of Jewish American
writers. With this term I refer to the sons and daughters of the second generation, who are
themselves children of Holocaust survivors who emigrated to the United States after World War II.
My interest goes to the writers of the second and third generation and the way they deal with the
Holocaust legacy in their work. For the theoretical frame of my research I rely on trauma studies,
since my main concern is the way in which the original Holocaust trauma lives on throughout the
generations. How do these writers deal with an event with such an impact and of such magnitude?
To what extent do they still feel personally involved? Why does the Holocaust remain such an
important topic in all sorts of literature, after more than fifty years? And more important, how do
these aspects evolve as they are passed on to the next generation?
The second generation has already provided a lot of food for thought the last decades and a
wide range of scientific literature is dedicated to their pathology and – in the case of novelists – to
their writing. The third generation however, born for the most part from the 1970s onward, has not
yet been that elaborately discussed, or be it by writers discussing the second generation and
assuming that a certain continuity in ‘symptoms’ is passed on to their offspring, but further details
are often not provided.
It is precisely my aim to focus on that third generation, whose work is specifically illustrated
by Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything Is Illuminated, and I will focus in particular on the fact of
(dis)continuity between this generation and the previous. To do so, however, it is necessary to
explore what is known about the second generation. In order to search for similarities or differences
between two phenomena, a good awareness of both separately is needed. Since it concerns a
natural evolution, it makes sense to regard the third generation as a (chrono)logical sequel to the
second. The second generation will therefore always provide a certain frame, keeping in mind that
for the last two decades, the writers of these generations have been active simultaneously.
1
These famous words were spoken by the Jewish historian Simon Dubnow when he was killed by the Germans in Riga. I
found this quote in Geoffrey Hartman’s work Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory (2) and it was also
mentioned by Ephraim Sicher (1998, 44). I am using it here as a motto, since continuing to write ‘it’ down, is exactly what
fundamentally defines the post-Holocaust generations. Moreover, it seemed an encouraging reminder during my own
writing process.
6
The first chapter of my dissertation will thus be entirely dedicated to the second generation; I
will try to define what this term means in general and describe certain recurrent characteristics of
how these individuals deal with being raised by parents who have survived the atrocities of one of
the biggest genocides in human history. In order to obtain a better idea of what it means to be a
second-generation ‘survivor’, I have consulted various scientific and non-scientific literature available
on the topic.
In the second chapter, I will focus on the literary production of this generation – which proved to be
of a high quantity and quality – and more specifically in the United States. Art Spiegelman’s Maus will
serve as an illustration to demonstrate how second-generation trauma is represented and dealt with
in literature.
In the next chapter, I will discuss Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel in the light of the secondgeneration characteristics. It is my intention to see how Foer, being another step further separated
from the initial trauma, writes about the Holocaust in his novel. I will elaborate on the narrative
techniques he uses, how certain themes are dealt with, and more importantly, what remains of the
Holocaust trauma and if it is possible to still speak of a true trauma. It is interesting to see to what
extent Foer’s work definitely differs from Spiegelman’s, but at the same time also shows certain
similarities. Important points of discussion will be the issue of the author and the protagonist sharing
the same name in both works, the way in which both narrate their stories, the creative and
somewhat mythical invention in which Foer engages, the staging of victim and perpetrator in Foer’s
novel, and most importantly, the way in which Spiegelman and Foer relate to the trauma of their
respective parents and grandparents and to what extent they feel themselves personally affected by
this trauma.
In the concluding chapter, I will elaborate on some recurrent themes in the literary works I
discussed and the secondary literature I consulted to do this. To begin with, the importance of
memory, for Jews in particular but also in general; an obsession with the past over the last decades
seems to have created a true memory-cult. It is interesting to see how the boundaries of memory are
being explored when latter generations reflect on the Holocaust. Memory makes place for
“postmemory”, especially in the third generation, as Everything Is Illuminated will prove. A second
theme is that of identity and more specifically the troubles post-Holocaust (American) Jews often
face when trying to define their identity and how they personally relate to ‘Yiddishkeit’. Knowing that
the majority of the Jews have been chased away or killed precisely because of their faith, how do
offspring of Holocaust survivors relate to this faith? And the curious thing about Judaism is that it
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does not seem to imply merely a religion, but an entire identity. Ultimately, I would like to touch
upon the idea of levelling the post-Holocaust with the postmodern condition.
Discussing these themes will provide an interesting view on the evolution from the second to the
third generation and consequently raise questions concerning future generations. Therefore this will
lead me back to the core of my thesis, namely, in what way does the initial Holocaust trauma live on
in latter generations, especially the third. Is it still possible to speak of trauma as such? Or is there, on
the other hand, a form of closure or redemption available? How to explain the continuing obsession
with the Holocaust after half a century? Is the third generation finally able to break loose from its
family’s dark ghost? Is it able to give meaning or find some consolation in the void the Holocaust left
behind? And what is the prospective for future generations? Is it possible to see a certain evolution?
The answers to all these questions are not that obvious of course, and much is yet to be written and
read as novels of the third generation are only just emerging since about a decade ago.
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III. THE SECOND GENERATION
“Their role in a way is even more difficult than ours. They are responsible for a world they didn’t create. They
who did not go through the experience must transmit it” (Elie Wiesel, in Berger 1)
This first chapter will be dedicated to forming a more exact idea of the second generation –
sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors. Only after studying how this generation has been defined
is it possible to have a closer look at the third generation and explore which (dis)continuities are to
be found. As not a lot of systematic research has been done on the third generation until now, it is
necessary to ground my statements for the biggest part in what is known about the second
generation.
For the sake of convention I will stick to the term ‘second-generation survivors’ (and derived
from that, ‘third generation’). In a strict sense these people are not survivors but children of
survivors, although some do consider them as such because of the specific trauma incurred due to
their parents’ survivor’s trauma, which makes them in a way still suffer the original ‘survival’. “They
are, as second-generation novelist Thane Rosenbaum puts it, ‘survivors of survivors,’ witnesses not
to the Holocaust, but ‘to its aftermath’” (Sicher 2005, 134). Since the second generation is thus in the
first place witness to the aftermath of the Holocaust, the trauma they bear is in many ways very
different from their parents’ trauma. In a certain way they do not (always or primarily) suffer what
their parents undergo, but they first and foremost suffer from the fact of having grown up in a
traumatized or so-called dysfunctional family. Ernst Van Alphen in his article “Second-Generation
Testimony, Transmission of Trauma, and Postmemory” notices that “*o+ne might expect the
experiences and memories of Holocaust survivors and of their children to be fundamentally different,
but the expression ‘second generation’ seems to bridge that divide and to introduce the idea of
continuity between the generations. I wish to question the possibility and the nature of that
continuity” (474).
Precisely because of my decision to use this term (‘second-generation survivors’), I make a
contrary statement, namely of assuming a certain continuity between the first and second
generation, and subsequently also the third. In what follows therefore, I will begin with the beginning
– the Holocaust survivors – and explore what happens to their children. The reason why I quoted van
Alphen then, has to do with the fact that it is necessary at all times to stay alert and not assume
certain (dis)continuities without looking into them in a detailed manner. That will be the challenge
for this thesis – to describe the changes in a seemingly very natural evolution, that of the succession
of generations, and figure out the influence of a traumatic experience such as the Holocaust.
9
With the term second generation I specifically refer to sons and daughters of Holocaust
survivors, and not the generation after in general as Efraim Sicher mentions in Breaking Crystal:
Writing and Memory after Auschwitz: “[f]or George Steiner2, those who live ‘after Auschwitz’ are in a
sense survivors of the Holocaust. They cannot escape the complexes of living in the aftermath of the
Holocaust, nor can they escape a past that is for many not within living memory” (19). This haunting
past can indeed be seen as a general influence on the entire Jewish people who are living ‘after’. The
difficulty for contemporary Jews to define their identity in the shadow of the Holocaust, is a
recurrent theme in Holocaust literature. The idea of ‘living after is living with a burden’ is to be found
in the levelling of a post-Holocaust state of mind with that of the postmodern condition.
Helplessness, emptiness and insecurity are typically postmodern phenomena that find their echo in
what the Holocaust has caused for survivors and their family.
My aim is thus in the first place to discuss particularly those who are sons and daughters of
survivors; individuals who have grown up in a home where the traumas of the Holocaust were very
present. As Efraim Sicher sums it up in another one of his works, The Holocaust Novel,
The ‘second generation’ is a term used by clinical psychologists and therapists for the children
of Holocaust survivors who have in various ways been affected by the after-effects of their
parents’ experience of deportation, forced labor, imprisonment in a concentration camp, or
other forms of persecution by the Nazis. A latent damage was inflicted on the survivors’
children through the intergenerational transmission of anxieties about food, fears of
separation, expectancy of over-fulfilment, and constant reliving of traumatic experiences.
(133)
My fascination concerns the way in which these children relate to their parents’ often troubled way
of educating, how in most cases their fate is sadly determined by growing up in a dysfunctional
family and dealing with a past they have not experienced, of which they can only access texts,
documentaries, testimonies – and often without the help of their parents, who want their children to
grow up without the burdensome past. It is interesting to see how these children of survivors go
about with such a family history, how they eventually can even pass it on to their own children.
Since every human being is unique, it is impossible to provide a list of characteristics that all
children of Holocaust survivors share, as Efraim Sicher rightfully points out: “the children of survivors
2
Steiner, George. “A Kind of Survivor.” Language and Silence: Essays, 1958-1966. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969.
119-35.
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are in any case a heterogeneous group, and it is debatable whether they share a common pathology”
(“The Future” 66). Based on different academic works I have read on the subject however, it is
possible to find some striking recurrent elements. For my research on the second generation, I have
mainly relied on Alan L. Berger’s Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the
Holocaust, Dina Wardi’s Memorial Candles, Efraim Sicher’s Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory
after Auschwitz, Geoffrey Hartman’s Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory, Helen
Epstein’s Children of the Holocaust and a handful of useful articles by various authors which I will
mention later on. I will elaborate on the characteristics which find their resonance in the literary
works I am going to discuss. It will become clear that all symptoms eventually lead up to a sort of
‘after-syndrome’, having to live – or rather find a way to live – with the continuous “absent
presence” of the Holocaust. The term “absent presence” or “present absence” finds its origin in
Deconstruction, more specifically in the theory of Jacques Derrida. Gayatri Spivak coined the term
“trace” in her English translation of Derrida’s De la grammatologie. “Trace” refers to “a mark of the
absence of a presence, an always-already absent present".3 This linguistic notion can be applied to
the way the latter generations relate to the Holocaust; it is an event they have not experienced, and
never will experience (and therefore a clear absence), but that they are nevertheless constantly
confronted with – on a personal and religious level (and therefore it is also a clear presence). In the
words of Efraim Sicher: “the past is a trace in the present that haunts the second generation with the
presence of the absent memory, an amnesia in which the only memory is of not remembering
anything” (“The Burden” 30).
THE INITIAL TRAUMA
“The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the
symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess” (Caruth, “Trauma and Experience” 5)
In this chapter I will elaborate on the initial trauma Holocaust survivors suffered. Knowing
exactly what suffering from PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) entails will help in understanding
why it was possible that this trauma has been transmitted across the generations and in what form it
has been passed on.
‘Trauma’ is a very broad and complex notion. Originally meaning ‘wound’, it is the
consequence of a severe experience with such an impact that the brain is not capable of registering it
3
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
11
at the moment of its occurrence. The Holocaust undoubtedly was such an experience for the
majority of the Jewish survivors, and often for perpetrators as well – as is illustrated in Jonathan
Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated.
Because an experience is not fully realized, it fails to be integrated in a framework of
understanding and the memory of the event is not registered in a normal way. As a consequence,
people who have suffered from a traumatic experience, cannot recall it as they do with other
memories because it is not stored as a normal memory; the trauma cannot be imagined or narrated.
It is precisely this fact that makes trauma a very powerful phenomenon, since “the force of this
experience would appear to arise precisely . . . in the collapse of its understanding” (Caruth, “Trauma
and Experience” 7).
Because of this collapse in understanding, the trauma keeps haunting the victim, albeit not as a
memory, but in the form of dreams, delusions, flashbacks, etc. The effect of the trauma is only
belated, is of a compulsive character and stretches over a much wider time span than the actual
event. Cathy Caruth describes this phenomenon as follows:
there is a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the
form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming from the
event, along with numbing that may have begun during or after the experience, and possibly
also increased arousal to (and avoidance of) stimuli recalling the event. (Caruth, “Trauma and
Experience” 4)
The only way for the victim to gain access to the traumatic experience, is by talking about it to
someone else, someone who can witness for the victim, since the trauma of the victim is caused by
his own failure to witness. “*T+he history of a trauma, in its inherent belatedness, can only take place
through the listening of another” (Caruth, “Trauma and Experience” 11). Dori Laub has done some
interesting research about bearing witness, to oneself as well as to someone else. He states that the
victim, at the moment of the traumatic experience, is unable to bear witness for him/herself; the
individual is not able to grasp what is happening at a given moment and by failing to understand it,
cannot integrate the experience as a memory. In the case of the Holocaust, this lack of witnessing
was so widespread that “*t+he Holocaust created in this way a world in which one could not bear
witness to oneself” (“Truth and Testimony” 66). In this sentence, Laub aptly describes the overall
trauma caused by the Holocaust.
It is here that the importance of intimates of the traumatized person begins, and in the case
of Holocaust survivors, these are often the children. The close relation between parents and their
12
children entails that the latter are listeners to their parents’ trauma from a very young age onwards,
i.e. when they have not yet developed an apt framework for understanding and therefore are not
able to be healthy witnesses for such a trauma. The opposite is also possible: an overwhelming
silence that takes the place of the trauma; the parents do not want their children to know about the
horrors and grow up with them. But just by doing so, they leave a big emptiness and a lot of
questions to their offspring. Nadine Fresco for example, makes this conclusion after her
conversations with members of the second generation: the parents “transmitted only the wound to
their children, to whom the memory had been refused and who grew up in the compact void of the
unspeakable”.4
The specific pathology of Holocaust survivors and their relationship with their children will be
discussed in the following paragraphs.
PASSING ON A LEGACY: MEMORIAL CANDLES
“They buried me with the dead while I’m still alive. It’s hard for me to drag their dead around with me all the
time”
5
Offspring of Holocaust survivors often carry a big burden on their shoulders – the burden of
expectations but also the burden to ‘remember’ – not just on a familial level, in the name of all their
family members who did not survive, but also on a broader religious level. As Dina Wardi notes:
The cutting off of the natural processes of intergenerational continuity has imposed on the
second generation both the privilege and the obligation of being the connecting link that
heals the trauma of the cutting off and fulfils the enormous expectations of their parents –
and perhaps not theirs alone, but also, to some extent, those of the entire Jewish people. (6)
A logical ‘strategy’ for survivors in order to make up for the loss of family members during
the war seems to consist of designating their children as so-called ‘memorial candles’. This often
means giving their son or daughter the name of a perished family member. “They were not perceived
as separate individuals but as symbols of everything the parents had lost in the course of their lives”
(Wardi 27). These children represented new life after so much death, replacing the ones who were
lost, but also providing new hope and a new life for the parents. In their children the survivors
4
From Remembering the Unknown by Nadine Fresco, no page numbers provided; a link to the online article can be found in
the bibliography.
5
Testimony of a member of the second generation, quoted in Wardi 36.
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seemed to search for an identity, a raison d’être; they project themselves onto their children and
hope that they may live the life that was taken from them by the Holocaust. In doing so, however,
the parents do not allow their children to gain a unique identity of their own. “The children of
survivors, the ‘memorial candles’ who carry the names of the dead and who bear the burden of
replacing murdered relatives, have to discover their personal and collective identity like anyone else
but they are handicapped by having to match up to their parents’ expectations as children of the
Holocaust” (Sicher, “In the Shadow” 175).
However, the opposite also occurs since every parent-child relationship is unique. As Dina
Wardi noticed in her therapeutic research with people of the second generation: “one of the
characteristic features of survivors’ families is the placing of the role of scapegoat on one of the
children” (30). This is a phenomenon occurring in Maus, where Art’s father seems to blame his son
for the death of his younger brother.
However hard it may be for the second generation to come to terms with their family history and
create an identity for themselves, it is not impossible. Moreover, literature will prove to be one of
the most important instruments to achieve this.
THE CHILD AS VICARIOUS WITNESS
A second negative consequence for children of survivors is mentioned by Alan Berger: that
members of the second generation become vicarious witnesses to the trauma of their parents. This
can occur for two reasons: first, for being confronted from their birth with the stories of their
parents, or second, because the parents rely on their children to communicate their stories. The
second generation after all has a better knowledge of the language of the ‘New World’ and they in
turn will have to convey these stories to their own children and be the bearers of a family legacy.
Language thus plays an important role, as Berger notes that
offspring of survivors frequently ‘parent’ their parents. This ‘parenting’ occurs, at least in
‘survivor’ or ‘numb’ families, on the levels of culture and language. On the level of language,
because English is their native tongue, American children of Job are able to make themselves
understood in a way unavailable to most of their parents. This means that the second
generation feels that it has a mission to bear witness for its parents. (Berger 186; my
emphasis)
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The ‘numb’ families mentioned by Berger are the other extreme: parents who do not want to talk
about their experiences, never mention them or even deny them. “Holocaust is a taboo in the
childhood home, a secret knowledge that is silenced and that forms a bond between the survivor
parents which excludes the child” (Sicher, “In the Shadow of History” 173).
Although these two extremes – an overflow of stories about the Holocaust or an absolute
silencing of the events – concern very different situations, both lack one of the most essential
elements of working through a trauma, namely that of bearing witness, of testifying in a mournful
and not a melancholic way. Dori Laub distinguishes between three levels of witnessing, “the level of
being a witness to oneself within the experience, the level of being a witness to the testimonies of
others, and the level of being a witness to the process of witnessing itself” (“Truth and Testimony”
61). The failure of witnessing on the first level is what causes the initial trauma – as I have explained
above. When one is unable to bear witness to oneself during some sort of extreme experience, there
is no correct processing of that event in one’s mind. The way to work through such a trauma would
be by a belated witnessing, which can only be achieved in the form of a testimony. In telling his story
in a specific therapeutically correct way to an empathic listener, the trauma victim can witness for
the first time the experience that was not fully understood when it happened. The testimonial
process is thus a kind of forced return to the trauma itself, where the traumatized individual is again
confronted with the experience in order to understand it and be able to mourn and work through it.
This is a very precarious undertaking, as Dori Laub comments: “if one talks about the trauma without
being truly heard or truly listened to, the telling might itself be lived as a return of the trauma – a reexperiencing of the event itself” (“Bearing Witness” 67). The role of the listener is therefore very
crucial for the testifying survivor. The listener is often someone whom the victim trusts and confides
in; this can be a therapist, a good friend or the victim’s child. Bearing witness to a victim’s trauma
nevertheless entails some risks: “*t+he listener . . . has to be at the same time a witness to the trauma
witness and a witness to himself” (Laub, “Bearing Witness” 58). What Laub means is that listening to
someone’s testimony can be a very unsettling affair. “There are hazards to the listening to trauma.
Trauma – and its impact on the hearer – leaves, indeed, no hiding place intact. As one comes to know
the survivor, one really comes to know oneself; and that is not a simple task” (Laub, “Bearing
Witness” 72). By listening to a victim’s trauma, the listener is not only a witness on the second level
(cf. supra), to the testimony of someone else, but also on the first level, to oneself within the
experience. Not seldom do listeners appropriate the victim’s trauma. In doing so, he is no longer an
apt listener, but a vicarious witness.
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It is clear that much of the trauma of the second generation is related to this (un)willingly
bearing witness to the trauma of their parents, which puts them even more at risk of appropriating
their trauma. As Dominick LaCapra writes:
[O]ne may experience aspects of trauma or undergo secondary traumatisation, at least
through the manifestation of symptomatic effects such as extreme anxiety, panic attacks,
startle reactions, or recurrent nightmares, without personally living through the traumatizing
event to which such effects are ascribed. . . .this is the case in the intergenerational
transmission of trauma, notably through processes of identification with the (actual or
imagined) experience of intimates. (“Trauma Studies” 114)
It is thus possible for children of Holocaust survivors to identify with their parents and appropriate
their trauma in such a way that they subsequently become traumatized.
“I WASN’T THERE”: A LIFE IN EXILE OR THE ABSENT PRESENCE OF THE HOLOCAUST
“Our past is literally a foreign country we can never hope to visit” (Hirsch, Family Frames 244)
One of the most frustrating feelings for individuals of the second generation consist of the
fact that they are constantly confronted with a past that is not their own. Their lives are determined
for a great part by an atrocious event they have not even witnessed but from which they see their
parents suffer every day. This idea of ‘not being part of it’ is even more stressed in the case of
American Jews, since the Holocaust also took away the ‘old country’, the world of ‘shtetls’ their
parents have grown up in; children of survivors get to know their family history as something they
were essentially not a part of. Marianne Hirsch, in her book Family Frames: Photography, Narrative
and Postmemory, describes this feeling as a “sense of exile from a world we have never seen and
which, because it was irreparably changed or destroyed not by natural or historical evolution over
time but by the sudden violent annihilation of the Holocaust, we will never see” (242). In a wider
perspective, this feeling of absence is spread over Jewish post-Holocaust generation. Alain
Finkielkraut notes in his book, The Imaginary Jew that “*w+hat makes me a Jew is the acute
consciousness of a lack, of a continuous absence: my exile from a civilization which, ‘for my own
good,’ my parents did not wish me to keep in trust” (114). This is a consequence of the diasporic
nature of Judaism which was already a fact in the pre-war ages, but evolved into extremes after the
Holocaust. Survivors of the Holocaust had lost their homes and often the majority of their family;
16
they wanted to leave the Europe of destruction and death behind them and start a new life. This was
the case for many Jewish American immigrants. As I have already mentioned, the survivors wanted
their children to grow up without this past. This is not a realistic goal however, since a child always
searches for its roots, the story of its family, etc. But all the second generation could find was a big
black hole, a void, “both the gaping hole of genocide and the gaping hole of silence” (Laub, “Bearing
Witness” 65).
Postmemory, a term coined by Marianne Hirsch, is one of the strategies of the second generation
(and as will become clear, also of the third) to cope with this ‘present absence’ of the Holocaust.
…postmemory is distuingished 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. This is not to say that memory itself is
unmediated, but that it is more directly connected to the past. Postmemory characterizes the
experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose
own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by
traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated. (Family Frames 23)
The writer Henri Raczymow, just like Hirsch a member of the second generation, has described the
same feeling of exile by the term “mémoire trouée”, a “memory shot through with holes”. He
explains: “I attempted to explore the ‘next-to-nothing’ in my own memory. A memory devoid of
memory, without content, beyond exile, beyond the forgotten” (100). Raczymow too testifies to a
feeling of not belonging, of not possessing the memory of an event that for many was so lifechanging and that determined the identity of the second generation to a great extent. There is a
sense of constant frustration to be found in the testimonies and writings of the second generation;
“*w+e cannot even say that we were almost deported” (Raczymow 104).
Nadine Fresco, in her text Remembering the Unknown in which she explores characteristics of
second-generation survivors, also pays much attention to this feeling of not having been there, of
being left with a void, a nothingness. She also speaks of a sense of exile: “the Jews I am speaking of
here feel their existence as a sort of exile, not from a place in the present or future, but from a time,
now gone forever, which would have been that of identity itself”.6 Fresco further accurately
describes the consequence of the Holocaust for the second generation, how they are constantly
6
No page numbers available; a link to the online article can be found in the bibliography.
17
haunted by the past and are frustratingly unable to fully understand it since they cannot ‘remember’
it, but only ‘imagine’:
What the Nazis had annihilated over and above individuals, was the very substance of a
world, a culture, a history, a way of life. The success of their enterprise of eradication lay
ultimately in that colonization of life by death, in that anachronistic hold of the present on the
past. The pre-war Jewish world had been retrospectively annihilated, made non-existent. Life
was now the trace moulded by death. (my emphasis)
7
My main interest however, goes to the way Marianne Hirsch defines the term postmemory and how
she applies it to second-generation Jewish literature and art. One of her discussions concerns
Spiegelman’s Maus, on which I will elaborate in the next chapter. Postmemory will also be of great
relevance in discussing Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, since he takes the “recollection . . . through an
imaginative investment and creation” to a further level, namely by creating his own family history.
THE TRAUMA OF THE SECOND GENERATION
“I believe it has to do with the feeling all of us have, deep down, of having missed a train” (Raczymow 105)
After having discussed the trauma of the first generation – the Holocaust survivors – and
what happens to their children, I can now try to formulate an answer to the question: ‘in what way is
this trauma transferred to the second generation?’ A few deciding factors are to be discerned in the
transmission of trauma to the next generation.
First, there is a second-generation trauma caused by intergenerational transmission. With
this I mean the kind of trauma that children inherit directly from their parents. Dominick LaCapra
notes that
the intergenerational transmission of trauma refers to the way those not directly living
through an event may nonetheless experience and manifest its posttraumatic symptoms,
something especially prominent in the children or intimates of survivors or at times
perpetrators who are possessed of, and even by, the past and tend to relive what others have
lived. (“Trauma Studies” 108)
7
Id.
18
This is the ‘purest’ form of inherited trauma since the second generation ‘copies’ the initial trauma.
Through the process of vicarious witnessing they are suffering almost the same fears and posttraumatic symptoms as their parents do. As Victoria Elmwood concludes in her article on the
transmission of trauma between the generations that “*t+he trauma will be reinflicted if the second
generation identifies excessively with trauma that affects them indirectly” (718).
Second, the consequences of growing up in a dysfunctional family. As will be illustrated in my
discussion of Maus, Art’s trauma is to a great extent caused by his mother’s suicide and by his
troubled relationship with his father. Both elements are due to how his parents are unable, because
of their personal traumas, to fulfil their parenting relationship – his mother is depressed and his
father sees educating as ‘teaching to survive’ – and not because Art has appropriated their trauma.
Art’s biggest troubles are caused by the frustration of not understanding his parents.
This brings me to the third point, the so-called ‘living-after-syndrome’. This is where the
particularity of second-generation trauma lies: being confronted every day with a past they have no
direct access to, the feeling of an “absent presence” I mentioned earlier. Moreover, secondgeneration survivors are often tempted to experience this absence as a loss, although they have
never ‘had’ the experience and thus strictly considered could not have lost it either (LaCapra,
“Trauma Studies” 116). The children of survivors have the task to cope with post-Holocaust Jewish
identity in its most fragmented form. They are confronted everyday with the past that defines their
identity. There is no way of ‘going around’ the Holocaust; it demands confrontation precisely
because of its incomprehensibility. So the third constituting fact in the trauma of the second
generation lies in historical determination; the frustration of never being able to fully ‘know’ the
past.
With this I would like to conclude that there is a certain transmission of trauma to the second
generation, but that often the particularity of second-generation trauma lies in the fact of being
brought up by Holocaust survivors. This means that the second generation does not always suffer the
same trauma experienced by their parents, but that they develop their own pathology, their own
specific form of trauma. In a sense there is thus a certain transgenerational trauma, albeit not in the
same form; the second generation seems to suffer more from being born after the Holocaust than
from the Holocaust trauma itself. The literary works I will discuss therefore testify to a very personal
‘working through’ by the author and will precisely focus on this particular second (and third)
generation trauma instead of merely wanting to tell the ‘Holocaust story’. “*C+hildren of survivors do
not presume to speak instead of the witnesses. Rather, they give their voice to the Holocaust’s
continuing impact on Jewish identity” (Berger 10). Art Spiegelman, for example, wants to tell his
19
father’s story but at the same time also narrates (and depicts) very explicitly the writing/drawing
process and how the author is literally drawn down by this experience. Jonathan Safran Foer on the
other hand turns away from the factual events and invents himself a family history.
WRITING AS A WAY OF WORKING THROUGH: KEEPING A NON-MEMORY ALIVE
“Writing was and still is the only way I could deal with the past, the whole past, the only way I could tell myself
about the past – even if it is, by definition, a recreated past. It is a question of filling in gaps, of putting scraps
together” (Raczymow 103)
Narration and telling one’s story has been widely recognized as one of the best ways to try to
work through a trauma. “Narrative is a way of making sense, of putting one’s life in order, doubly
difficult after the Holocaust left blanks and disorder” (Sicher, “Introduction” 6). The importance of
the testimonial process entails that the trauma victim tells his or her story. It is an attempt to make a
narrative memory of a traumatic experience which until then had been stored in the victim’s mind as
a fragmented memory, appearing at any time in the form of dreams, flashbacks, etc.
Second-generation writers, often even more than actual survivors, feel the need to convey
the Holocaust legacy in their literary works. It gives them a way to ‘come to terms’ with the past (of
their parents). Often these writings do not take the form of testimony (like in Maus for example,
where Spiegelman narrates the testimony of his father), but of fiction. Fiction provides a way for
members of the second generation to ‘imagine’ their version of the Holocaust through a
postmemorial process. It is ironically by an imaginative effort that healing can be achieved in real life.
As Efraim Sicher comments on the healing power of narration for the second generation:
Telling the story is a form of working through trauma, which ideally ends with the separation
of the second generation from the dead and their connection to a real past, to a family and
people in which they are a living link, transmitting a heritage to future generations. It is
storytelling above all that shapes collective and personal memory in that transmission, and
the way the story is told, the issue of narrativity itself, therefore must be central to any
discussion of the situation of the post-Holocaust generation, which is positioned between
history and memory and is removed from the experience by fifty years and more.
(“Introduction” 13)
The particular healing aspect of narrativity as emphasized by Sicher, is one of the main subjects in the
literary works I will discuss. Both in Spiegelman’s Maus and in Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, the
20
specific techniques of narration will prove to be very significant; Maus as a graphic novel, and
Everything Is Illuminated as a pre-eminently postmodern novel.
As mentioned before, narrative in the form of testimony is very crucial for trauma victims in
the process of working through. They need the ability to bear witness belatedly to the traumatic
event that they were unable to witness at the moment it occurred. Chronologically telling or writing
down their memories can therefore be a healing process. Later generations however, do not have
this access to the Holocaust past through memory. Nevertheless, they often feel an equally big or
even bigger urge ‘to tell their story’, albeit by using fictional approaches and historical research. As
Sara Horowitz states in her article “Auto/Biography and Fiction after Auschwitz”:
Post-Holocaust writing becomes less clearly témoignage and more historicized or more
imaginative as the writers become more distant from the events of the Holocaust. Whether
literally and narrowly defined as writing by children of survivors or figuratively and broadly
defined as writing by those who were not there, second-generation writing is no longer a
matter of eyewitnessing. Survivors write out of a compulsion to bear witness – for oneself, for
one’s losses and one’s survival, and for other. The second generation, to borrow from the
poet Paul Celan, bears witness for the witness. (278)
Writing fiction about an event like the Holocaust has raised some questions, mostly rooted in
Theodor Adorno’s infamous statement that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”8. Although
Adorno later revised his radical conclusion, this sentence had a reverberating effect during the last
decades. Is it ethically just to write stories about an event that caused the death of so many?
Especially when the author himself has not lived the Holocaust himself.
A second implication of Adorno’s statement is that “*t+o write ‘after’ is to be aware that
something vitally human has gone forever . . . that culture can exist alongside barbarism” (Horowitz
298). The existence of culture alongside barbarism had a twofold meaning during the Holocaust; first,
the fact that the majority of civilization simply turned away from the knowledge of what was
happening to the Jews, and second, that “*w+e know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the
evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning”
(George Steiner9 in Sicher, “The Holocaust” 298). What is the value of culture in this respect? Of art
and literature? These are post-Holocaust doubts that find their resonance in postmodern discourse,
as I shall elaborate on later.
8
9
Adorno, Theodor W. “Cultural Criticism and Society.” Prisms. Cambridge (Mass.): MIT Press, 1988. 18-34.
Language and Silence: Essays, 1958-1966. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969. 15.
21
Considering the question “to write or not to write?”, there is of course a certain ‘danger’ of
the creation of more sentimental and mainstream Holocaust narratives that attempt to be too
redemptive or want to provide a sense of closure, to provoke a kind of “all’s well that ends well”effect. These concerns however, are of little importance compared to the healing effects narration
can have for Holocaust survivors, and for the later generations. They do not write out of a need for
closure, but are rather stimulated by the imperative to ‘never forget’. Holocaust survivors and their
offspring are confronted with the necessity to pass on their legacy (un)willingly to the next
generations and to the world in general, be it only out of a feeling of responsibility towards all those
who passed away and to make sure it never happens again. In the words of Alain Finkielkraut: “*o+f
course we return to the past, good people, it’s this very obsession that keeps us modern: it’s our way
of assuring that such a past will never return” (53).
In the following chapter, I will show how Spiegelman comments on the ethical concerns raised by
Adorno with his graphic novel Maus.
22
IV. ART SPIEGELMAN’S MAUS AS AN ILLUSTRATION OF SECOND-GENERATION WRITING
“Samuel Beckett once said: ‘Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.’ . . . On the
other hand, he said it” (Spiegelman 205)
With Maus, Art Spiegelman has written one of the most classic and most controversial works
of Jewish American literature of the second generation. Classic because it accurately depicts the
trauma of the second generation, controversial because it uses an unprecedented style and narrative
technique to deal with the Holocaust.
Maus consists of two parts: the first one is titled My Father Bleeds History, the second one And Here
My Troubles Began. The idea for Art Spiegelman was to write a book about his father’s story of how
he had survived the Holocaust. Not only does he relate his father’s story, but he also depicts the
testimonial process – ‘depicts’, since Maus is a so-called graphic novel, a comic book. In conveying
not only the Holocaust story, but also the present-day story of how Vladek Spiegelman tells this story
to his son Artie and how the latter makes all this into a book, Spiegelman has created a multilayered
work.
Precisely because of its visuality, Maus manages to show the survivor’s story and at the same
time it is able to depict the particular aspects of second-generation trauma I have discussed above.
Elements such as troubled parent-child relationships, the child who is unable to comprehend or fully
grasp the events of the Holocaust but has a need to know, the child’s urge to write himself into his
parents’ story, etc. It is also useful to take a closer look at the way Spiegelman has narrated his story
since this will be one of the points of comparison between his work and Foer’s. Maus, apart from
being a comic book, uses a cat-and-mouse metaphor to depict Germans and Jews. This daring
decision brings with it many ethical questions stimulated by the so-called ‘Adorno-debate’, whether
it is ‘responsible’ or ethically right to write poetry/fiction after and about Auschwitz or the Holocaust
in general. A part of my discussion of Maus will therefore be dedicated to the controversy
Spiegelman caused by narrating his story as an animal fable in comic book form.
“MY FATHER BLEEDS HISTORY”
In the first part, My Father Bleeds History, Spiegelman presents his intentions to the reader;
the book begins with a visit to his father and already on the second page Art mentions: “I still want to
draw that book about you…The one I used to talk to you about.. About your life in Poland, and the
23
war” (14). This immediately shows Art’s10 urge to know about the past, to know about the events
that determined also his life.
Consequently, Vladek starts telling his story from the beginning. The first part of the book remains
very faithful to the structure of Art paying visits to his father and the latter telling about his
experiences. The reader gets to know father and son as mutually unable to comprehend each other;
Vladek as a grumpy and miserly old man with a heart condition, Artie as the middle-aged chainsmoking cartoonist who cannot cope with his father’s character very well. Throughout the book it
becomes clear – as they spend more time together – what the annoyances and sensitive issues are in
this father-son relationship. For example, when Art spills ashes on the carpet: “But look what you do,
Artie”’ “Huh?” “You’re dropping on the carpet cigarette ashes. You want it should be like a stable
here?” “Oops. Sorry.” “Clean it, yes? Otherwise I have to do it. Mala could let it sit like this for a week
and never touch it” (54)11.
It quickly becomes clear that Art’s father in a way does “bleed history”, in the sense that Vladek –in
addition to the actual story he tells his son – cannot stop talking or referring to the Holocaust and to
the camps. Already in the first scene that Spiegelman includes as a kind of prologue, we see that Art
has grown up with the Holocaust, as a dialogue between the 11-year-old Art and his father shows:
“[w]hy do you cry, Artie?” “I-I fell, and my friends skated away w-without me.” “Friends? Your
friends?... If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week…. Then you could see what it
is, friends!” (6). Another similar scene takes place at the dinner table when Vladek wants Art to finish
his plate, and Art – a grown man by now – answers,
Y’know, Mala *Vladek’s second wife+, when I was little, if I didn’t eat everything mom served,
pop and I would argue ‘til I ran to my room crying… Mom would offer to cook something I
liked better, but pop just wanted to leave the leftover food around until I ate it. Sometimes
he’d even save it to serve again and again until I’d eat it or starve. (45)
Efraim Sicher describes this father-son relation as follows: “*t+he artist feels castrated by his
father’s very ability to survive. His father’s role model as survivor makes him feel small and
incompetent” (“The Burden” 50). Vladek does not even trust his son with simple things like counting
out his pills (Maus 32). Art complains about this situation to his wife Françoise:
[h]e loved showing off how handy he was… And proving that anything I did was all wrong. He
made me completely neurotic about fixing stuff. I mean, I didn’t even own a hammer before
10
I will speak of ‘Art’ when I mean Art Spiegelman as the protagonist, and ‘Spiegelman’ when I am talking about Art
Spiegelman as the artist, the author.
11
In the quotes from Maus I include, the words that are put bigger and bold, I here put in italics to convey an equal effect.
24
we moved into this place! One reason I became an artist was that he thought it was
impractical – just a waste of time… It was an area where I wouldn’t have to compete with
him. (99)
The book is full of indications of how Art’s identity is built on what his parents experienced in
the war. For example, when Vladek tells the story of a vision he had that came true i.e. that on
‘parshas truma’, a specific day of the year, he would be liberated from the prisoner of war-camp, and
Art asks him: “You mean your ‘parshas truma’ dream actually came true?” “Yes – this is for me a very
important date… I checked later on a calendar – it was this parsha on the week I got married to Anja.
…And this was the parsha in 1948, after the war, on the week you were born!.. And so it came out to
be this parsha you sang on the Saturday of your bar mitzvah!” (61). Art’s birth and bar mitzvah (the
coming of age ceremony for Jewish boys) are thus – at least in Vladek’s mind – inextricably bound to
his father’s experiences during the Holocaust.
“...AND HERE MY TROUBLES BEGAN...”
And Here My Trouble Began is the title of the second part of Maus as well as the third
chapter of that second part. It is a (somewhat ironic) sentence uttered by Vladek when he is talking
about the transfer from Auschwitz to a camp in Dachau near the end of the war, mainly because in
Dachau he suffered from typhus. By using this sentence not only as a title for this particular chapter,
but also as the title for the entire second part, Spiegelman also makes the phrase refer to himself. In
Maus II (published eight years after Maus I), Spiegelman foregrounds himself as a character much
more than in the first part. The reader learns more about how Art thinks and the consequences of his
parents’ traumatic experiences for him personally; how his “troubles” began. In the beginning for
example, he has a three-page long conversation with Françoise on this subject: “Depressed again?”
“Just thinking about my book… It’s so presumptuous of me. I mean, I can’t even make any sense out
of my relationship with my father… How am I supposed to make any sense out of Auschwitz?... Of
the Holocaust?...” (174). In the same conversation he somewhat ironically denies an obsession with
the Holocaust that is in a way typical of the second generation:
Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t obsessed with this stuff… It’s just that sometimes I’d fantasize
Zyklon B coming out of our shower instead of water. I know this is insane, but I somehow wish
I had been in Auschwitz with my parents so I could really know what they lived through!... I
guess it’s some kind of guilt about having had an easier life than they did. (176)
25
It is precisely this feeling of guilt that forms an important part of Art’s trauma. In the same
conversation, Spiegelman takes the metafictional level of Maus to a new height by emphasizing the
writing and drawing process:
Sigh. I feel so inadequate trying to reconstruct a reality that was worse than my darkest
dreams. And trying to do it as a comic strip! I guess I bit off more than I can chew. Maybe I
ought to forget the whole thing. There’s so much I’ll never be able to understand or visualize.
I mean, reality is too complex for comics…So much has to be left out or distorted.” “Just keep
it honest, honey.” “See what I mean… In real life you’d never have let me talk this long
without interrupting”. (176)
The same doubts return in the second chapter of Maus II (201-6; see fig. 112) as we see him seated at
his drawing table (not with the head of a mouse but merely a mouse mask) and subsequently in a
consultation with his shrink, discussing the publication of Maus I. These few pages are very
significant in Maus, since they depict Art’s troubles.
By staging himself as an author, the telling of the story becomes part of the story itself;
Spiegelman writes himself into a book that originally would be about his father. Victoria Elmwood
describes this as “the author’s need to write himself into a family from whose founding trauma he
was absent” (691). Spiegelman does not only do this by specifically staging himself as the author as I
just described; he also achieves this effect in a more subtle way, namely by literally breaking the
frames of his comic strip. For example when Art is lying at his father’s feet, listening to the story
about Vladek fighting in the Polish army, Art’s body is divided over two frames (47; see fig. 2). Or
rather, his legs break into the previous frame where we see his father as a soldier, while the upper
part of his body is in the next (unframed) drawing, on the carpet of Vladek’s living room. Another
example is when Art is taking a walk with his father while the latter tells about how he had to move
to the Jewish ghetto of a village called Srodula (107; see fig. 3). They are literally walking into the
frame of the picture that depicts the entrance of the ghetto. Further on, when Vladek is telling about
Anja’s fear of rats when they were hiding in a Polish woman’s house, the last two frames on the page
show on the one hand Anja and Vladek in a cellar in Poland and on the other hand Art and his aged
father in Rego Park, New York. The two scenes are separated by an enlarged barrel from the Polish
cellar and so it seems as if Art and his father are only hiding on the other side of the barrel, as if they
are present in every corner, constantly commenting on the story (149; see fig. 4).
12
I have included the illustrations from Maus that are particularly important or depict visual effects in the appendix.
26
Spiegelman also does the reverse – a ‘warframe’ that intrudes into a present day-frame –
with an unmistakable effect: there is a scene where the last frame on the page depicts a tower from
the Auschwitz crematorium Vladek was sent to, and the frame above is Art smoking and listening to
Vladek. The Auschwitz tower however breaks out of its frame and intrudes into the bottom of the
frame above in such a way that Art’s cigarette smoke seems to come out of the crematorium tower,
implying that Art constantly ‘inhales’ the fumes of Auschwitz, the fumes of the past (229; see fig. 5).
All these scenes illustrate the visual techniques Spiegelman uses constantly to mix past with
present, to tell not only his father’s story, but also very clearly his own story. In doing this,
Spiegelman emphasizes how the present is haunted by the past. In the words of James Young, “*i+n
Maus, not only are past and present linked, but they constantly intrude and occasionally even
collapse into each other” (“The Holocaust” 682). In a significant scene, Vladek, Françoise and Art are
driving while Vladek tells about four young girls who were hanged after having tried to revolt in
Auschwitz. While he is telling this, we see their car passing some trees from which eight legs in
striped uniform are dangling (239; see fig. 6). Froma Zeitlin, in her article on Maus, interprets this
linking of past and present to be a consequence of “belatedness” (6), of the determinacy of ‘coming
after’. Since the second generation can never experience in real life the trauma their parents lived,
they can try to achieve this effect in their art or writing. In doing so, Spiegelman writes a so-called
“received history”, a term coined by James Young that is closely related to Marianne Hirsch’s
postmemory, since he describes it as “a narrative hybrid that interweaves both events of the
Holocaust and the ways they are passed down to us” (“The Holocaust” 669). Young even goes as far
as to say that “*t+he historical facts of the Holocaust . . . include the fact of their eventual
transmission. This is why the ‘autobiographical history of the survivor’s tale’ necessarily begins, then,
not in the father’s experiences but in Artie’s own” (“The Holocaust” 678). With this he argues for a
progressive view on the Holocaust history. It is true that, while survivors themselves are slowly
disappearing – and have by now almost entirely disappeared – that the second generation is almost
the only, be it indirect, access we have to the Holocaust testimonies. Moreover, it is indeed part of
the ‘Holocaust story’ to be aware of how such an incredible event is passed on and remembered.
This is where the historical importance of writings by the second and third (and future) generations
sets in.
At the end of his story, when he is reunited with Anja, Vladek says: “[m]ore I don’t need to
tell you, we were both very happy, and lived happy, happy ever after” (296). Upon finishing Maus,
the reader knows that at that moment perhaps the most difficult task was yet to come for Vladek
and Anja: starting a normal life again. Which, as Spiegelman has shown, was quite impossible – his
mother committed suicide, his father feels as if he is still in constant struggle to survive and Art, as
27
their child, has to bear the consequences. Victoria Elmwood states that “*t+he last page’s fairytale
‘happy, happy ever after’ ending provides a formulaic close to a narrative in which the characters
demonstrably do not live happily ever after” (712). This is especially true for Art, which is emphasized
by Vladek saying in the last scene “[s]o… Let’s stop, please, your tape recorder… I’m tired from
talking, Richieu, and it’s enough stories for now…” (296). He calls Art with the name of his dead
brother, Richieu; a painful reminder that Art as a son constantly stands in the shadow of his brother.
This closing scene is an indication that even after the whole writing process of Maus, an
important aspect of Art’s trauma remains, since he is confronted again with the fact of being merely
a kind of ‘substitute’ for the child that died in the Holocaust; the child in the picture with whom he
felt he had to compete with all his life. There is only one scene in which Art talks about his “ghostbrother”, again at the beginning of the second part, when he is in the car with Françoise:
“I wonder if Richieu and I would get along if he was still alive.” “Your brother?” “My ghostbrother, since he got killed before I was born. He was only five or six. . . . I didn’t think about
him much when I was growing up… He was mainly a large, blurry photograph hanging in my
parents’ bedroom.” “Uh-huh. I thought that was a picture of you, though it didn’t look like
you.” “That’s the point. They didn’t need photos of me in their room… I was alive!... The
photo never threw tantrums or got in any kind of trouble… It was an ideal kid, and I was a
pain in the ass. I couldn’t compete. They didn’t talk about Richieu, but that photo was a kind
of reproach, he’d have become a doctor, and married a wealthy Jewish girl… the creep. But at
least we could’ve made him go deal with Vladek. …It’s spooky, having sibling rivalry with a
snapshot!” (175)
Precisely this snapshot is included in Maus, at the beginning of Maus II (which, as mentioned earlier,
focuses more on Art’s trauma). What is more, above the photograph it reads “for Richieu” and below
“and for Nadja and Dashiell” (see fig. 7). Nadja and Dashiell are Spiegelman’s own children. In putting
them alongside Richieu under a picture of Richieu, Spiegelman makes a clear statement of
connecting past with present. In doing so he also ‘burdens’ his children already with his own trauma,
with the past of his and consequently their family (Hirsch, Family Frames 36-37). It may be seen as a
harsh reality but also in a positive way as an appeal to the future generations to ‘never forget’. In
Dominick LaCapra’s words, “Maus is not simply about the past or the relation between the present
and the past but also about the future” (History and Memory 173).
“PRISONER ON THE HELL PLANET”
28
Prisoner on the Hell Planet is a story Spiegelman wrote before Maus about his mother’s
suicide. It is embedded in the first part of Maus. This story stands in shrill contrast with the rest of
Maus, since the characters are not animals as in the rest of the book, but more human,
expressionistic figures with faces full of pain and sorrow; “they seem, even more than the other
drawings in Maus, to be haunting, unworked-through traces of trauma of the outlines of still open
wounds” (LaCapra, History and Memory 159). Although these characters seem to be more
humanlike, they cause a more estranging effect than the mouse-characters. In four pages the story of
his mother’s suicide is told and the traumatic experience this was for Art. He blames his mother for
the trauma he has to live with due to her death: “*w+ell, mom, if you’re listening… Congratulations!...
You’ve committed the perfect crime….You put me here… Shorted all my circuits…Cut my nerve
endings…And crossed my wires!.... You murdered me, mommy, and you left me here to take the
rap!!!” (105; see fig. 8). About this scene, Marianne Hirsch notes that
Art remains imprisoned in his camp uniform and in the black-bordered spaces of his psyche.
Drawing Maus, it is implied, represents his attempt both to get deeper into his postmemory
and to find a way out. In “Hell Planet” the two chronological levels of Maus merge, and in this
convergence between past and present, destruction and survival, primary and secondary
trauma – incarnated by Anja’s suicide – lies the root of Art’s (perhaps temporary) insanity.
(Family Frames 32)
Anja’s story appears to be the “negative center of gravity” (Young, “The Holocaust” 686) in Maus, she
is the big absence in the whole narrative. She is given a voice only by Vladek or Art, there is no source
of her personal testimony available, and that explains to a great extent why Art is so angry at his
father for burning Anja’s diaries. Art realizes that his silenced mother will never enable him to come
to terms with the traumatic past that keeps haunting him.
This embedded story is the most direct reference in Maus to Art’s personal trauma caused by his
mother’s suicide, and therefore stands on the same level as the picture of Richieu. It is no
coincidence that three real pictures are included in Maus and that all three refer to Art’s secondary
trauma. The three pictures depict – in that order – Art as a child with his mother (see fig. 9), at the
beginning of Prisoner on the Hell Planet; second, Richieu’s picture as a dedication before Maus II (see
fig. 7), and third (near the end), the picture of Vladek posing in a camp uniform (see fig. 10). These
three pictures represent the core of Art’s trauma; his relationship with his mother, blaming her as
29
well as feeling guilty for her death. The sibling rivalry with his “ghost-brother” and the troubled
relationship with his father with which we are confronted throughout the testimonial process.
All three photographs “break the frame” in a certain way, just as in Maus the past is constantly
breaking the frames of the present and vice versa (Hirsch, Family Frames 40).
The picture of his mother is part of a story that is isolated from the rest of Maus in content and style
(even when the book is closed, the black pages are clearly visible). The picture of Richieu is not
included in Maus (or at least not as a real picture; on page 288, the reader sees the same picture but
in the mouse-like comic book form), but as a kind of dedication before the second part begins. And
the third picture breaks the frame literally. Marianne Hirsch concludes that
[t]hese photographs connect the two levels of Spiegelman’s text, the past and the present,
the story of the father and the story of the son, because these family photographs are
documents both of memory (the survivor’s) and of ‘postmemory’ (that of the child of
survivors) . . . They affirm the past’s existence and, in their flat two-dimensionality, they signal
its unbridgeable distance. (Family Frames 21-3)
“WRITING POETRY AFTER [M]AUSCHWITZ IS BARBARIC”
As mentioned above, I will discuss here the ways in which Maus challenges the ‘limits of
representation’ of the Holocaust. Not only is Maus a comic book, it is also an animal fable that
consists of different layers of mediation and transgresses the boundaries of fiction and testimony. It
is clear when reading Maus that Spiegelman was very aware of the modes of representation he uses
and the difficulties and questions these raised.
Art Spiegelman’s Maus constantly draws attention to the difficulty of writing about the
Holocaust in its self-reflexive framing devices and authorial comments, foregrounding the
production of the text to question the cultural, semantic, philosophical, and commercial
values ascribed to it, while its author boosts the commodification of the book as a Holocaust
text in publicity hype, interviews, exhibitions, and a CD ROM. (Sicher, “The Holocaust” 306)
Although the term ‘comic book’ seems to be defined essentially by humour or a certain
‘comic’ element, Art Spiegelman has been known to prefer the term ‘commix’ instead of comics.
With this he emphasizes the commingling, “mixing together words and pictures to tell a story”
30
(Spiegelman13 in Young, “The Holocaust” 672). In the case of Maus, Vladek provides the words and
Art the pictures, “one provides most of the verbal narrative, the other the visual; one gives testimony
while the other receives and transmits it” (Hirsch, Family Frames 34). A process of transmission thus,
on a literary-artistic level and on a literally traumatic level. It is however not so clear-cut that Vladek
provides the words and Art the pictures since we also see Art the character/Spiegelman the author
depicted by himself. This causes a confusion for the reader between ‘Art Spiegelman’ as author and
protagonist. A layered and mediated narrative is created which is not always easy to understand;
who is speaking here, the character or the artist? Spiegelman probably intended to do this in order to
question the ways of representation and mediation when it comes to Holocaust testimony. He
achieves the same effect by including real photographs next to the mouse-photographs (274-76).
Marianne Hirsch concludes that
By placing three photographs into his graphic narrative, Art Spiegelman raises not only the
question of how, forty years after Adorno’s dictum, the Holocaust can be represented, but
also the question of how different media – comics, photographs, narrative, testimony – can
interact to produce a more permeable and multiple text that may recast the problematics of
Holocaust representation and definitely eradicate any clear-cut distinction between
documentary and aesthetic. (Family Frames 25)
A second representational oddity is the way Spiegelman depicts humans as animals, the Jews
are mice and the Germans cats. In doing this, Spiegelman emphasizes the prey and predator roles to
which the Holocaust could be narrowed down. It is also a clear reference to the Jews being put in the
role of rodents during the war; of annoying creatures that had to be exterminated. Spiegelman
alludes to this by including two quotes. Maus I opens with Hitler’s quote that “*t+he Jews are
undoubtedly a race, but they are not human” (10). Maus II opens with another quote, now more
specifically referring to the image of mice, from a newspaper article which condemns the Disney
character Mickey Mouse:
Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed.... Healthy emotions tell every
independent young man and every honourable youth that the dirty and filth-covered vermin,
the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal....
Away with Jewish brutalization of the people! Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika
Cross! (164)
13
Spiegelman, Art. "Commix: An Idiosyn-cratic Historical and Aesthetic Overview." Print 42 (Nov.-Dec. 1988).
31
A clear connection is thus made between Jews and Mickey Mouse on the ground of being both
mouse(like). Nevertheless, Spiegelman does make his characters explicitly human; only the head is
an animal’s head, and the reader is capable of responding empathically to these mouse-like
characters.
Spiegelman loves to play with these different levels of representation, as he also includes real
mice and cats in his story. For example, on the inside of the back cover there is an image of Art in his
mouse-appearance who is holding a rat in his hands while in the background there is an image of
Mickey Mouse (see fig. 11).
A second implication of the use of the mouse-image, is the way in which it questions identity,
and more precisely Jewish identity. Vladek for example is a Polish Jew, but when they are hiding
during the war, he and Anja have to put on pig masks (the Poles are depicted as pigs) to not be
recognized (Maus 127). This emphasizes the fact that they are in the first place Jewish and not Polish,
that being Jewish (partly due to the Holocaust) does not only constitute a religious conviction but a
total identity. In the second chapter of Maus II, where Art is depicted as the artist questioning his
success, he is wearing a mouse mask on a human head (see fig. 1). I think that the use of the mask
here, as it is accompanied by a monologue in which Art constantly links past and present
occurrences, has the meaning of Art trying to construct an identity for himself. In some way he does
not manage to do so, precisely because he continues to consider his life and present events in the
light of past events. This scene is crucial in representing Art’s trauma, namely of being unable to
arrive at a proper self image, haunted by the past as he is seated on a pile of mouse-corpses.
Meanwhile the literal ‘time flies’ are circling around the artist, confronting him with the fact that
time really does fly (as eight years passed between the publication of Maus I and II and his father in
the meanwhile has passed away) but that at the same time he remains ironically troubled by the
past. Therefore it can be said that Maus clearly denies a sense of closure, of coming to peace with
the past and its unknowability.
32
V. THE THIRD GENERATION: JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER’S EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED
“The great thing about fiction is that it has very little to do with the circumstances of our lives, it has much
more to do with the things that are deep, deep down inside of us” (Foer, Wereldgasten)
In this chapter I will discuss Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything Is Illuminated as an
example of Holocaust fiction written by third-generation survivors. My aim is to explore how Foer
‘uses’ the Holocaust in his narrative; whether it is possible to speak of a change in the approach to
history between the second and the third generation. In what way is the Holocaust present in this
book? How is it represented?
The novel is essentially postmodern in its narrative techniques. Three storylines run next to
each other, mixing realism, myth, autobiography and letter writing, and using techniques such as
stream of consciousness, chapters from other fictional books, embedded stories, etc. “The result is
an extreme postmodernism that could have been a spoof of the genre, except that it is about the
Holocaust” (Kohn 245). It is precisely with these extreme postmodernist techniques that Foer
achieves the novel’s effects; I will show how absence and the question of truth are thematized
precisely by using certain narrative oddities. It will become clear, as Daniel Mendelsohn notices, that
Foer “has put his narrative prestidigitation in the service of some very serious themes”.
Everything Is Illuminated consists of three different narrative strands that constantly interact
and finally come together in the events of the Holocaust. The first is narrated by Alex, Jonathan’s
Ukrainian translator, who tells the story of Jonathan’s trip to the Ukraine to find the small town of
Trachimbrod where his grandfather is from, and also to find Augustine, the woman who allegedly
saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Alex tells the story in a kind of self-studied English that causes
a lot of hilarity: “My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all of my many friends dub me Alex,
because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name” (1). Apart from Alex, Jonathan is
accompanied by Alex’s grandfather (the ‘blind’ driver) and his dog, Sammy Davis Junior, Junior (the
grandfather’s “seeing-eye bitch”).
The second narrative is written by Jonathan. He narrates the history of the Jewish shtetl
Trachimbrod. He clearly stages himself as the author inventing a mythical tale of origins, beginning in
1791 “when Trachim B’s double-axle wagon either did or did not pin him against the bottom of the
Brod River” (8). After this accident a child floats to the surface of the river, a baby girl who appears to
33
be Jonathan’s great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, named Brod after the river. Brod’s birth in
1791 marks the beginning of Jonathan’s family lineage, founded in a traumatic, mythical event.
Both novels (Jonathan’s and Alex’s) come together in the end and “*a]t the quite devastating climax
of the book, you realize how the two tales are related, a connection that forever sunders Alex from
Jonathan” (Mendelsohn).
The third line of narrative in the book consists of letters that Alex writes to Jonathan, in
retrospect, about the search for Trachimbrod. It becomes clear that Alex sends the different chapters
of his story along with the letters. Conversely, Jonathan does the same with his story; he sends his
chapters to Alex. However, Jonathan’s letters are remarkably absent from the novel. The reader only
gets to know Jonathan from what Alex tells about him – in Alex’s Trachimbrod-story as well as in his
letters – and from what Jonathan himself tells in the mythical tale of Trachimbrod’s and his family’s
origins. Therefore, while Jonathan is the protagonist and was even given the name of the author,
Jonathan at the same time appears to be the most mediated and least accessible character of the
two. It is remarkable that the character with which the reader is ‘forced’ to empathize most, is Alex,
the grandson of a perpetrator, and not Jonathan, the grandson of survivors. This undoubtedly is an
important point of discussion, a decision with which Foer challenges ethical boundaries; a decision
that seems to be understandable only when considering Foer’s substantial distance from the
historical events. However, it is – quite paradoxically – his personal connection – as a member of the
third generation – that ‘allows’ him to do this.
In the following paragraphs, I will first discuss characteristics that Everything Is Illuminated
has in common with Maus, as concerns the literary techniques and the content; viz. how they
represent the Holocaust in their own specific way. An important element in this discussion is their
controversial narrative techniques: Spiegelman’s comic book style and meta-narrative, Foer’s
humoristic and very postmodern approach.
Secondly, the sometimes ambiguous authorial presence, caused by the fact that the protagonists in
both Everything Is Illuminated and Maus have the same name as the author. In what way are author
and protagonist alike? What are the consequences of this for the readers when trying to
comprehend the narratives?
The third point of attention derives from the above, namely the mediated nature of both books.
When comparing Everything Is Illuminated to Maus, it becomes clear that Foer and Spiegelman often
use the same techniques but reach totally different results.
34
To conclude, I will focus on particularities that stand out in Everything Is Illuminated. For
example, one could say that Foer creates a true ‘poetics of absence’14 illustrated by his play with
language and typography. By thematizing absence and loss and engaging in a more extreme form of
postmemorial invention, Foer takes the way of dealing with the troubling ‘absent presence’ of the
Holocaust to another level.
This poetics of absence, together with the ethical and political questions he raises (e.g. concerning
the perpetrator’s view and historical truth), could be seen as third-generation characteristics. I will
try to demonstrate that Foer offers the reader a different experience when it comes to reading about
the Holocaust. In a way, he distances himself as a writer from the more emotionally involved second
generation and puts the responsibility for making an all-encompassing narrative in the reader’s
hands. He does so by engaging in a game of language and postmemorial invention.
Ultimately, in the concluding chapter, it is left for me to ask whether it is still possible to speak of
‘trauma’ when talking about the third generation.
EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED IN THE LIGHT OF THE SECOND GENERATION AND MAUS
 CONTROVERSIAL NARRATION
“*H+umorous is the only truthful way to tell a sad story” (Foer, Everything Is Illuminated 53)
Both Spiegelman’s and Foer’s work have caused a certain controversy with respect to their
way of handling the subject of the Holocaust. This controversy is reflected in the following questions
pertinent to their novels: “can you make a comic book about the Holocaust?” and “is one allowed to
‘laugh’ with a novel that is about the Holocaust?” The weird thing is, however, that the power of
both works of literature lies precisely in their controversial uses of narrative. By depicting himself as
inhaling the fumes of Auschwitz, Spiegelman achieves an unequivocal effect of mixing past and
present. Foer, by contrasting humour, the absurd or the grotesque with sadness, provokes a greater
reaction and creates a greater sense of tragedy. In the words of the Dutch journalist Dirk-Jan
Arensman, Everything Is Illuminated is “*e+en roman die je met frisse ogen naar de geschiedenis laat
kijken en laat gieren van het lachen, tot het drama tot je doordringt”15. For example, when he tells
14
A term I borrowed from Dr. Codde’s discussion on Everything Is Illuminated.
“A novel that offers you a fresh look on history and makes you laugh your head off until the drama sinks in” (my
translation).
15
35
about his newlywed grandfather Safran having his first orgasm at the same time when Trachimbrod
is bombed by the Nazis for the first time:
And then something extraordinary happened. The house shook with such a violence as to
make the day’s earlier disturbances seem like the burps of a baby. KABOOM! in the distance.
Approaching KABOOM! KABOOM! Light poured in through the cracks between cellar door
planks, filling the room with the warm and dynamic radiance of German bombs exploding in
the nearby hills. KABOOOOM! Zosha howled in fear – of physical love, of war, of emotional
love, of dying – and my grandfather was filled with a coital energy of such force that when it
unleashed itself – KA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM! KA-BOOBOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOM! KA-KA-KA-KA-KA-KABOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM! – when he tripped over the precipice of
civilized humanity into the free fall of unadulterated animal rapture, when, in seven eternal
seconds, he more than made up for the sum of what was now more than 2,700 acts without
consequence, when he flooded Zosha with a deluge of what could no longer be held back,
when he released into the universe a copulative light so powerful that if it could have been
harnessed and utilized, rather than sent forth and wasted, the Germans wouldn’t have had a
chance, he wondered if one of the bombs hadn’t landed on the marriage bed, wedged itself
between the shuddering body of his new wife and his own, and obliterated Trachimbrod. But
when he hit the rocky canyon’s floor, when the seven seconds of bombing ended and his head
settled into the pillow damp with Zosha’s tears and drenched with his semen, he understood
that he was not dead, but in love” (257).
In this way, his grandfather is being closely connected to the Nazi bombing, and no further
factual description of the events is given. What is more, the events of the war throughout the novel
(or rather at the end, because only then they appear, in a climactic way) are only mentioned
between brackets:
Shtetl meetings were held daily, news reports (NAZIS KILL 8,200 ON UKRAINIAN BORDER) examined
with the care of editors, plans of action drawn up and crumpled up, large maps spread out on
tables like patients waiting to be cut open . . . They wrapped Menachem’s jumbo trout in
newspaper (NAZIS APPROACH LUTSK) and carried beef briskets in wicker baskets to picnics under
tall tree canopies by the small falls (262) . . . The travelling journalist Shakel R held the Lvov
Daily Observed (NAZIS MOVE EAST) over his head (266) . . . One end of white string tied around
the volume knob of a radio (NAZIS ENTER UKRAINE, MOVE EAST WITH SPEED) on the wobbly
bookcase in Benjamin T’s one-room shanty . . . white string connecting freelance journalist
36
(GERMANS PUSH ON, SENSING IMMINENT VICTORY) to electrician over the tranquil and anticipating
palm of the River Brod. (267)
Following this scene, is the bombing of Trachimbrod and the invasion of the shtetl by the Nazis. The
bombing itself is obliterated from the book by an entire series of dots (“…………”) covering a page and
a half (270-71). The next page begins immediately after the bombing: “*a+fter the bombing was over,
the Nazis moved through the shtetl” (272). The event of the bombing is narrated by a stream of
consciousness from a predictive dream Brod had and that was recorded in a book in which
Trachimbroders collected their dreams (and which reflects the stream of consciousness of Alex
narrating his grandfather’s testimony a few pages earlier):
“A young soldier tossed the nine volumes of The Book of Recurrent Dreams onto the bonfire
of Jews, not noticing, in his haste to grab and destroy more, that one of the pages fell out of
one of the books and descended, coming to rest like a veil on a child’s burnt face:
9:613 – The dream of the end of the world.
bombs poured down from the sky exploding across trachimbrod in bursts of light
and heat those watching the festivities
hollered ran frantically . . .
...
my safran
picked up his wife and carried her like a
newlywed into the water . . .
...
into the brod that river
with my name I embraced them with open
arms come to me come I wanted to save
them all to save everybody from everybody the bombs rained from the sky . . .” (272)
By connecting the bombing to Brod through this dream, the circle is complete; with Brod the reader
is brought back to the beginning of the story, but the bombing means the ‘end’, both literally and
figuratively: the end of the book and the end in the sense of the Holocaust.
These examples illustrate that Foer also engages in a certain kind of visuality. By playing with
different typographies and lay-outs he wants to achieve certain effects. For example, the Holocaust is
an event for which there literally are no words, and he represents it by a series of dots. This
37
transgression of typographical boundaries is a general characteristic of Foer’s writing, since in his
second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, he also uses similar techniques. As he explains in
an interview with Robert Birnbaum:
I was raised with a different kind of television and music. Music for example that depends
very much on borrowing from different traditions, sampling pieces of other music and
overlaying different rhythms and melodies and I think that is reflected in my writing. . . . I
think that comes across in the typography and in the style in the combination of voices. The
world is more of a collage everyday [sic]. It seems like there is less unity of voice everyday
[sic]. (Foer, Identity Theory)
As Deborah Solomon notes, Foer “wants to offer us not just a reading experience, but a visual
experience as well, as if words alone can no longer be trusted to tell our life stories” (Foer, NY Times
Magazine).
His use of visual techniques is opposed to that of Spiegelman in intentions: he does not engage in
literally describing the events of the Holocaust, while Spiegelman does precisely that. Spiegelman’s
main interest lies in a depiction of the experiences of his father in the most precise and detailed way.
He was able to do that by the combination of his father’s testimony and his rigid historical research
on chronology and facts, of the war in general and of the camps specifically. Spiegelman wanted to
fill in the gaps he cannot remember himself; his work is mostly made out of frustration and personal
need.
Foer on the other hand, seems to be more at peace with the fact that the Holocaust can never be
fully known and works this out to the extreme; he makes it a preliminary condition since everything
in his novel is based on absence, void and loss. Foer is rather trying to explore the consequences the
Holocaust still has on his generation, both for offspring of survivors and of perpetrators.
What both books certainly have in common, is that they defy a sense of closure or
redemption. Art at the end of Maus is more than ever confronted with the roots of his trauma when
his father calls him “Richieu”, and in Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan cannot arrive at forgiving
Alex’s grandfather or Alex himself. As Saul Friedländer remarks: being ‘truthful’ is more valuable than
striving for closure, since “*c+losure . . . would represent an obvious avoidance of what remains
indeterminate, elusive and opaque” (“Trauma” 261).
38
Both Jonathan Safran Foer and Art Spiegelman prove that any form of redemption is impossible
when it comes to the Holocaust. ‘Living after’ is characterized by the difficulty of living with history
and absent memory.
 AUTHORIAL PRESENCE AND IDENTITY
The protagonists of both Everything Is Illuminated and Maus bear the name of their
respective creators, Jonathan Safran Foer and Art Spiegelman. Both works are also to some extent –
Maus more than Everything Is Illuminated – based on autobiographical facts. Spiegelman goes as far
as to even stage himself as the author contemplating Maus while he is writing it. It is sometimes
difficult for the reader to distinguish between the character and the author. As far as Foer is
concerned we know that he has actually visited the Ukraine prior to writing his book, in search of the
town where his grandfather came from, named Trochenbrod. It is known for a fact that Trochenbrod
was swiped of the map by the Nazis: “[i]n August and September 1942 the Nazis and their helpers
murdered the people of Trochenbrod-Sofiyovka . . . there had been none but Jews in Trochenbrod,
no one was left there, and all traces of the town soon were erased from the face of the Earth”16
Foer actually was guided to the site of Trachimbrod, but all that was left was a memorial stone
(which also appears in the novel) and he always mentions in interviews that the trip was rather a
disappointment. Almost all other elements therefore – Alex and his grandfather, the search, the
encounter with Augustine/Lista, etc. – are fictional, together with the second ‘novel’ in the book
about Jonathan’s family history.
When asked if the character of Jonathan is autobiographical, Foer answered: “I tried to use
other names. Even at the end I did one of those search-and-replaces, *but+ it didn’t feel genuine. This
is how I am honest, by beginning with the life of my circumstances” (Foer, Newsweek). Thus, by using
his own name, Foer blurs the boundaries between autobiography and fiction. “Discussing what
constitutes the autobiographical pact, Philippe Lejeune notes, ‘The deep subject of biography is the
proper name’” (Horowitz 286). Using one’s own name for a fictional account automatically means
that the author is playing with the concept of identity. Just as Spiegelman does when he makes his
characters animals or at times just humans wearing mouse masks (especially when depicting himself
as the author).
16
From the website “Beit Tal – Trochenbrod and Lozisht Community.” http://bet-tal.com/index.aspx?id=2411.
39
Efraim Sicher notes that “*n+arrative recreates different identities and acts out in fantasy form
repressed stories which test the freedom or dependence of the individual vis-à-vis the past but also,
in the writing of the memoir, form a relationship with the parent” (2001, 81). This attempt at forming
a relationship with the parent is particularly present in Maus, as well as the relation Art has with the
past. Everything Is Illuminated is a nice example of how for Foer narrative “acts out in fantasy form
repressed stories which test the freedom or dependence of the individual vis-à-vis the past”. As he
often repeats in interviews, he did not set out to write a so-called ‘Jewish’ book, he did not even
undertake the journey to the Ukraine with the intention of ‘discovering the past’. Only in the course
of writing did he realize the kind of religion and history he carried with him: “My God, I was
interested in Jewish things? I had no idea! Here’s a piece of evidence of what I actually was. It’s like
looking at a picture of yourself and realizing you were pudgier than you thought” (Foer, Newsweek).
In a Dutch interview with Dirk-Jan Arensman, he says
[d]e daad van een boek creëren zag ik altijd als een manier om tot het antwoord op vragen te
komen, problemen op te lossen. Maar wat ik ben gaan inzien, is dat je juist vragen en
problemen oproept. En met die vragen verander je jezelf. Toen ik Alex schiep, heb ik tijdens
dat proces bijvoorbeeld heel veel nagedacht over communicatie en medeleven, eerlijkheid en
schuldgevoel. En bij het bedenken van de geschiedenis van Trachimbrod realiseerde [ik] me
pas dat ik joods was.
17
Here we learn that Foer became fully aware of his position and identity as a member of the third
generation during the writing process only.
As is shown by both Maus and Everything Is Illuminated, identity, and Jewish identity in particular, is
a very important aspect of post-Holocaust writing.
 MEDIATION AND LAYERING
Both Everything Is Illuminated and Maus are strongly mediated and layered works that defy a
straightforward interpretation. This is for a great part due to the fact that both authors engage in
‘postmemorial invention’. As I have explained, postmemory lies between memory and history and is
characteristic for the generations ‘after’ because these generations want to remember something
17
“I used to consider the act of writing a book as a way to beget answers to certain questions, to solve problems. But what I
have come to realise, is that by writing you create questions and problems. And with these questions you change yourself.
When I created Alex for example, I thought a lot about communication and empathy, about honesty and guilt. And only by
inventing the history of Trachimbrod, I realised that I was Jewish” (my translation).
40
that they have not experienced and thus have no memory of. For the second and third (and later)
generations, the only easy access to the events of the Holocaust is through history. History however,
because of the “deep personal connection” (Hirsch) these individuals feel to their family’s past, does
not suffice in providing them with an idea of the events. Therefore, in both Maus and – to a greater
extent – Everything Is Illuminated, the act of recalling takes place somewhere between memory and
history. In Maus, Art Spiegelman relies both on history (in the form of research) and on memory
(both his and his father’s). As a result, he has made a work that tells not only the tale of the
Holocaust, but also how it lives on in the second generation, and how Art’s depiction of the war as
remembered by his father is inevitably influenced by what Art already knows from history. For
example, when Vladek tells about how he and Anja walked away from Srodula in the direction of
Sosnowiec, the road has the form of a swastika, predicting what Art already knows, viz. that no
direction will save his parents from the Nazis (127; see fig. 12).
Jonathan Safran Foer takes postmemorial invention much further than Spiegelman, given
that he engages almost solely in invention. I am referring in particular to the ‘novel’ that the
character Jonathan is writing about the mythical origins of Trachimbrod. As I have mentioned,
Trachimbrod was a real Jewish shtetl from which his grandfather originated and that was completely
destroyed by the Nazis in 1942. These are the actual events that frame Jonathan’s story; the rest is
invented. It is Jonathan’s intention to re-create his family’s history. He does so however by only
discussing in detail two members of the genealogy, his great-great-great-great-great-grandmother
Brod, named after the river in Trachimbrod in which she was born, and his grandfather Safran. In
doing so, Jonathan sees himself clearly connected with two important moments: the origin of his
family, born from a traumatic, mythical event (Brod’s birth) and the Holocaust, which means the end
of Trachimbrod and of the whole family lineage as it was founded by Brod. Surprisingly, Jonathan
sees the bombing of Trachimbrod as both a beginning and an end; the title of the last chapter is “The
Beginning of the World often Comes, 1942-1791”, but Brod’s predictive dream which is recounted in
The Book of Recurrent Dreams is embedded at the end of this last chapter and is titled “The dream of
the end of the world” (272). This can be seen as Foer’s way of mixing past with present, of stating
that his novel is not so much about the past as it is about the resonances of the past in the present.
Because of this, Everything Is Illuminated seems to have the Holocaust as its main topic, but actually
– and the same goes for Maus – it is about the aftermath, of how the next generations find ways to
deal with the past. Jonathan does this by inventing his family history; Art also reconstructs his
family’s past, but based on actual testimony and historical facts.
41
Both Foer and Spiegelman engage in their re-membering by staging a protagonist who is named after
themselves. In doing so, the authors are put in a vulnerable position, since the reader will constantly
confuse the protagonist with the author. Another consequence of this technique is that the author is
blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality.
Throughout his book, Foer stresses the novel’s fictionality. He wants the reader to wonder
whether it is the author or the character speaking. He explores the boundaries and possibilities of
fiction and writing. For example, Alex in his letters refers to changes Jonathan proposes for the story
Alex is writing (about the search for Augustine and Trachimbrod) and the reader is forced to wonder
to what extent these events took place. In the first letter the reader is already made aware of this
when Alex says: “*y+ou must know that I have performed the corrections you demanded. I apologize
for the last line, about how you are a very spoiled Jew. It has been changed, and is now written, ‘I do
not want to drive ten hours to an ugly city to attend to a spoiled Jew’” (24). In this case it only
concerns a mere choice of words, but in his second letter, Alex already admits that “I also invented
things that I thought would appease you, funny things and sad things. I am certain that you will
inform me when I have traveled too far” (54). And further on, clearly after Jonathan has shown his
dislike of the grandfather’s dog Sammy Davis Junior, Junior, Alex tries to convince Jonathan by saying
that the dog “is a very distinguished character” and that Jonathan should not be so hasty in
dismissing her from the story: “*l+et us view her evolution and then resolve” (55).
Also in the mythical storyline, the omniscient narrator intrudes, especially towards the climax, into
the bombing of Trachimbrod: “(Here it is almost impossible to go on, because we know what
happens, and wonder why they don’t. Or it’s impossible because we fear that they do)” (270).
At the end of the novel the reader is completely confused. Alex’s last letter to Jonathan only contains
the translation of his grandfather’s suicide note: “[d]ear Jonathan, If you are reading this, it is
because Sasha found it and translated it for you. It means that I am dead, and that Sasha is alive”
(274). Further on in this suicide note, Alex’s grandfather goes on to tell how Sasha (this is how Alex is
called by his grandfather) rebelled against his father. In the middle of the book however, Alex reads a
part from Jonathan’s notebook for his story about Trachimbrod, and finds exactly the same lines:
He told his father that he could care for Mother and Little Igor. It took his saying it to make it
true. Finally, he was ready. His father could not believe this thing. What? he asked. What?
And Sasha told him again that he would take care of the family, that he would understand if
his father had to leave and never return, and that it would not even make him less of a father.
He told his father that he would forgive. Oh, father became so angry, so full of wrath, and he
told Sasha that he would kill him, and Sasha told his father that he would kill him, and they
42
moved at each other with violence and his father said, Say it to my face, not to the floor, and
Sasha said, You are not my father. (160, 274)
To sum up, this passage is written by Jonathan in his notebook, in a story narrated by Alex, and is
repeated in a suicide note written by Alex’s grandfather and translated by Alex himself. All this of
course, is invented by Foer.
Everything Is Illuminated is all about writing – Jonathan writing his novel, Alex writing his,
Alex also writing letters (as well as Jonathan, but the reader never sees them), and the characters in
Jonathan’s story who also seem to spend most of their time writing letters, novels, notes and entries
in The Book of Recurrent Dreams and The Book of Antecedents.
The reader gets to know the overall story of the novel (in as far as there is only ‘one’ story) in a
mediated way, not told by one voice, but by different voices that together constitute the book. As
Marion Spies remarks, “*w+e as a reader are asked to construct the final narrative” (258).
THIRD-GENERATION CHARACTERISTICS?
In this chapter I will arrive at what I set out to research: to focus on certain aspects in Foer’s
novel that could be – compared to the second generation – characteristic for the third generation in
general. I can however only suggest these characteristics and not draw any certain conclusions, since
I have based my findings only on two works of literature while there are obviously many left to be
read and discussed.
Points of interest include what Foer does with the ‘absent presence’-feeling, how he makes a
strength of his weakness as it were. Further, how Foer plays with language and repeatedly questions
the power of language as well as its constant failure since Everything Is Illuminated is full of acts of
failed communication.
Thirdly, I will return to discussing Foer’s postmemorial invention in detail, the effects achieved by
creating the Trachimbrod storyline. Ultimately, my attention goes to the ethical and political
questions Foer is able to raise in his work due to his increased distance to the facts of the Holocaust.
 A POETICS OF ABSENCE
“An absence haunts the rhetoric of postwar Jewish identity” (Finkielkraut viii-ix)
43
As I have already touched upon, the idea of absence is ‘present’ throughout Everything Is
Illuminated. To such an extent that it could be said that Foer writes according to a certain ‘poetics of
absence’(Codde, 2009). “I think creativity almost always arises out of a need” (Foer, Wereldgasten)
he says in an interview. This is something he likes to repeat, as he says in another interview:
“[s]chrijven heeft voor mij te maken met iets wat afwezig is. Met iets wat ik wil, maar niet heb”18
(Foer, Libelle). Specifically about how Everything Is Illuminated came into being, he explains:
[i]k ben maar drie dagen in Oekraïne geweest en heb daar letterlijk niets aangetroffen. Nou ja,
op de plaats waar Trachimbrod zich ooit bevond, staat nu een gedenksteen. Die wordt ook in
het boek genoemd. Verder was die reis eigenlijk één groot gat: er was niets. Het schrijven van
het boek was voor mij zoiets als het opvullen van dat gat met allemaal woorden. Dus niet
scheppen maar vervangen: het vervangen van de leegte door woorden. Dat klinkt misschien
als een onbeduidend verschil, maar voor mij veranderde het de manier waarop ik tegen
19
dingen aankeek totaal. (Foer, De Volkskrant)
In the novel itself there are also literal references to this, for example in a scene with Jonathan’s
grandfather and the Gypsy girl he is in love with: “She told him of ship voyages she had taken to
places he had never heard of, and stories he knew were all untrue, were bad not-truths, even, but he
nodded and tried to convince himself to be convinced, tried to believe her, because he knew that the
origin of a story is always an absence, and he wanted her to live among presences” (230; my
emphasis).
Less literal references are recurrent throughout the book, like the absence of Jonathan’s letters or
the ‘absence’ of the Holocaust as mentioned before. Characters in this novel constantly decide to
‘not’ do things, negations and absences are all around. For example when Yankel, Brod’s adoptive
father, falls in love with his “never-wife”, the mother he invents for Brod:
[h]e would wake from sleep to miss the weight that never depressed the bed next to him,
remember in earnest the weight of gestures she never made, long for the un-weight of her
un-arm slung over his too real chest, making his widower’s remembrances that much more
convincing and his pain that much more real. He felt that he had lost her. He had lost her. At
night he would reread the letters that she had never written him. (48-9)
18
“Writing for me has to do with something that is absent. With something that I want but do not have” (my translation).
“I was in the Ukraine for three days only and have found absolutely nothing there. Where Trachimbrod used to be, there
is a memorial stone, which is mentioned in the book. The trip was actually one big void: there was nothing. Writing the
book had something to do with filling that void with words. So not creation but replacement: replacing emptiness with
words. That might sound like an insignificant difference, but for me it changed the way I looked at things” (my translation).
19
44
Further, when Brod does not want her husband, the Kolker, to go to the flour mill: “[t]his is love, she
thought, isn’t it? When you notice someone’s absence and hate that absence more than anything?
More, even, than you love his presence?” (121). How, when the Kolker gets the saw blade in his head
and becomes very violent, they have to make love through a hole in the wall: “[t]hey lived with the
hole. The absence that defined it became a presence that defined them. Life was a small negative
space cut out of the eternal solidity, and for the first time, it felt precious – not like all of the words
that had come to mean nothing, but like the last breath of a drowning victim” (135). And later on,
when the Kolker dies and Brod cuts the hole out of the wall to wear it on a necklace: “[t]his new bead
would remind her of the second man she had lost in her eighteen years, and of the hole that she was
learning is not the exception in life, but the rule. The hole is no void; the void exists around it” (139).
Many more examples of such ‘absent presences’ can be found throughout the narrative. The whole
history of Trachimbrod is based on something that ‘might not even have really happened’: “*i+t was
March 18, 1791, when Trachim B’s double-axle wagon either did or did not pin him against the
bottom of the Brod River” (8).
Furthermore, nothing in the novel seems to be ‘whole’; everything consists of fragments, of bits and
pieces, memories of things that once were but that are now out of reach forever. For example,
Augustine’s/Lista’s boxes of memorabilia she collected from the inhabitants of Trachimbrod after
everyone but herself had died. Or how Brod – and consequently Jonathan’s entire family – is born
out of fragments, namely a whole collection of memorabilia of a past life that came to the surface of
the river Brod together with her.
Characters constantly decide to not do things, even in extremis when the Nazis are approaching the
shtetl, the villagers are overcome with the urge to remember:
Activity was replaced with thought. Memory. Everything reminded everyone of something . . .
Memory took the place of terror. In their efforts to remember what it was they were trying so
hard to remember, they could finally think over the fear of the war. The memories of birth,
childhood, and adolescence resonated with greater volume that the din of exploding shells.
So nothing was done. No decisions were made. No bags packed or houses emptied. No
trenches dug or buildings fortified. Nothing. (258, 262)
A climax of absence is reached with the suicide of Alex’s grandfather. He had survived the Holocaust
and was therefore an eyewitness to inform later generations of what happened. Alex and Jonathan,
and the reader as well, however, never get to know everything. A lot about the grandfather’s past
45
remains unknown and will stay that way due to his death. Even his suicide note ends with an
incomplete sentence, with an absence: “I will walk without noise, and I will open the door in
darkness, and I will” (276).
Because of these absences and uncertainties, the reader fails to reconstruct the entire story. The
cover text of Everything Is Illuminated reads “What they *Jonathan, Alex and his grandfather+ are
looking for seems elusive – a truth hidden behind veils of time, language and the horrors of war”.
And this truth appears to be as elusive in the end as it was in the beginning, as elusive for the reader
as it is for the characters. The question of truth, more specifically historical truth is problematized
throughout the novel, as I will illustrate in the next chapter.
In the end it seems that the truth does not exist; there is only a void, an undecidedness that denies
closure. In this way, as Dr. Codde pointed out, Foer manages to put the reader in his position, that of
the third generation survivor, who is ‘left behind’ with only questions and no answers.
To conclude, in Maus we have seen that Spiegelman foregrounds a feeling of frustration and
incomprehensibility when trying to cope with the Holocaust. He has an urge to know exactly what
happened to his parents and constantly considers his own life in the light of their experiences.
Foer on the other hand seems to have a completely different way to deal with the ‘absent presence’
of the Holocaust. He appears to be at peace with the fact that the Holocaust can never be fully
known, that the event that changed the life of his grandparents and consequently also his, is too
elusive to allow a full understanding. What is more, Foer goes as far as to create a certain aesthetics
of absence; in Everything Is Illuminated, absence seems to be a preliminary condition for all
emotional thinking and interaction. This could be seen as a logical evolution, considering
Spiegelman’s closer connection to the Holocaust (as a member of the second and not the third
generation).
 THE POWER OF FICTION AND THE FAILURE OF LANGUAGE
A typical postmodern aspect of Everything Is Illuminated is the way Foer plays with language,
not only in the story itself but also on a meta-level, by having his characters say certain things or by
the narrator making specific comments. The author both wants to stress the importance and the
potential of language but at the same time wants to point out its constant failure. As Foer himself
says in an interview: “My books are about loss but I think, I hope that they’re about different kinds of
46
loss. They’re about historical loss but they’re also about the loss that one feels when you can’t
communicate properly” (Foer, Zomergasten; my emphasis). In a Dutch interview, Foer says,
[w]e lachen om Alex, deels omdat we bepaalde zaken in hem herkennen. Niemand zegt
bijvoorbeeld ooit precies wat hij wil zeggen: we zijn allemaal tot op zeker hoogte mislukte
communicatoren. Wanneer je om Alex lacht, is dat niet omdat je op hem neerkijkt en blij bent
20
dat je niet bent zoals hij. Het is hilariteit die voortkomt uit de herkenning. (Foer, De
Volkskrant)
Just by having Alex speak like this, the reader is forced to think about language, translation and
communication. Another example is found in The Book of Antecedents, when invented words like
“ifice” and “ifact” are explained. The entry of “ifactifice” reads:
Music is beautiful. Since the beginning of time, we (the Jews) have been looking for a new
way of speaking. We often blame our treatment throughout history on terrible
misunderstandings. (Words never mean what we want them to mean.) If we communicated
with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in
music to understand. This was the origin of Torah chanting and, in all likelihood, Yiddish – the
most onomatopoeic of all languages. It is also the reason that the elderly among us,
particularly those who survived a pogrom, hum so often, indeed seem unable to stop
humming, seem dead set on preventing any silence or linguistic meaning in. But until we find
this new way of speaking, until we can find a nonapproximate vocabulary, nonsense words are
the best thing we’ve got. Ifactifice is one such word. (203; my emphasis)
This book confronts the reader with the problem of how language can never approximate life: “The
Book of Antecedents, once updated yearly, was now continually updated, and when there was
nothing to report, the full-time committee would report its reporting, just to keep the book moving,
expanding, becoming more like life: We are writing . . . We are writing . . . We are writing . . .” (196).
A page and a half of this chapter is indeed filled with “. . . We are writing . . .” (212-13).
Next to the failure of language and communication, Foer explores the possibilities of fiction.
He touches upon, in the words of Daniel Mendelsohn, “an issue of considerable urgency in Holocaust
literature: the seemingly hopeless split between history and narrative, between what happened and
what can be told”.
20
“We laugh with Alex partly because we recognise certain things in him. For example, nobody ever says precisely what he
wants to say: to a certain extent we are all failed communicators. When you laugh with Alex, it is not because you look
down on him and are glad that you are not like him. It is hilarity that comes from recognition” (my translation).
47
In fiction everything can be told, one can create a whole new world, adapt what one wants to adapt,
leave out what one wants to leave out. Since both protagonists, Jonathan and Alex are engaged in
the act of writing a novel, a lot of thought is given to what the possibilities of fiction are. Especially in
Alex’s letters, we see how Alex is constantly exploring the boundaries between the real and the
invented. He sees storytelling as a way to present a better version of life:
I think that this is why I relish writing for you so much. It makes it possible for me to be not
like I am, but as I desire for Little Igor to see me. I can be funny, because I have time to
meditate about how to be funny, and I can repair my mistakes when I perform mistakes, and I
can be a melancholy person in manners that are interesting, not only melancholy. With
writing, we have second chances. (144)
Later on he repeats (and comments like this keep returning), “I do not think that there are any limits
to how excellent we could make life seem” (180).
Jonathan on the other hand, writes a rather tragic novel about absence, sadness, memory,
impossible loves, death, etc. Alex’s view on writing is influenced by Jonathan’s novel, as he is trying
to make sense of the excerpts that Jonathan sends him. As the book evolves, it becomes clear that
Alex’s narrative also becomes less light-hearted and more sincere, with a climax when he gets to
know his grandfather’s past. The text mirrors this in the last parts of the story, when we see how Alex
is constantly mediating what he tells the reader (Jonathan in particular) by what he puts between
brackets:
“You *Alex+ do not have to present not-truths to me *Alex’s grandfather+, Sasha. I am not a
child.”
(But I do. That is what you always fail to understand. I present not-truths in order to protect
you. That is also why I try so inflexibly to be a funny person. Everything is to protect you. I
exist in case you need to be protected.)
“I do not understand,” I said. (I understand.)
“You do not?” he asked. (You do.) (227)
With his story, Alex had set out to make life more beautiful than it is, but as he learns what the actual
truth might be, he lacks narrative control to recount it. When he is telling about what his grandfather
did during the war, he does so in a long fragment in parenthesis that stretches over six pages and
ends in a stream of consciousness in which he ends up wondering if he is still guilty for what his
grandfather did (namely pointing out his friend Hershel as a Jew to the Nazis).
48
The two narratives come together in the events of the Holocaust and at that moment there is little
humour left and the real questions arise. Does Alex still have to feel guilty about what his
grandfather did? Can we judge his grandfather for what he did? And, in what way is it possible to
speak of a historical truth? There seems to be no simple answer available; only more questions arise.
The reader is again confronted with the irony that everything is far from illuminated and he or she
comes to realize that “fiction, even fantastic or apocryphal or anachronistic fiction, can compete with
the official record as a vehicle of historical truth” (McHale21 in Kohn 247).
Various versions and stories exist about the Holocaust and if the reader learns one thing from Foer’s
novel, it is that not one of these stories or versions tells the entire truth. This unsettling fact can be
explained as a second characteristic of third-generation writing, namely the fact that grandchildren
of survivors, to a greater extent than children of survivors, “grow up dominated by narratives that
preceded their birth” (Hirsch, Family Frames 23). Being constantly aware of the fact that eye
witnesses of the Holocaust are slowly disappearing, the third generation is confronted with the fact
that in no time only texts will be available (Codde, 2009). Texts to testify of human suffering, to
recount their family’s history, to try to fill the void that the Holocaust left behind.
 POSTMEMORIAL INVENTION
As mentioned earlier, Jonathan Safran Foer takes the act of postmemorial invention further
than Art Spiegelman does. I understand postmemorial invention as defined by Marianne Hirsch: “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” (Family
Frames 22). In Maus, Spiegelman made his story out of a combination of his father’s testimony and
historical research, but nonetheless in the way that he imagined the events. As a result, past and
present are intertwined all the time. Foer, on the other hand, based on the fact that his grandfather
came from a town called Trachimbrod which was destroyed during the war, invents an entire family
history. His family lineage appears to be filled with traumatic and tragic events: Brod’s birth, her
rape, Yankel’s death, the Kolker who gets a saw wedged in his head, and ultimately, the Holocaust.
As Menachem Feuer notes in an article about Everything Is Illuminated: “*i+t is worth noting here that
each link in this line of Slouchers marks another meditation on trauma, loss, perversion, and broken
love, which Jonathan no doubt inherits” (39). Especially this last part, “which Jonathan no doubt
21
McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 1989.
49
inherits,” is of importance. The way Jonathan narrates the story seems to confirm this. The main
events are brought down to Brod’s birth and the Holocaust. Throughout the narrative there are
constant references to the initial trauma from which Brod was born. This event is memorialized
during the annual Trachimday festivities when the accident is re-enacted. It is also on Trachimday
that the Nazis invade the shtetl. Feuer notes that
[t]his allegory [of the origin] no doubt denotes a beginning born of trauma, wherein the
subject of the trauma is floating in fragments. And if we look at this as a reflection of its
author, it could imply that not just his lineage, but his task as a writer begins after the
disaster: his role is to take fragments, in the form of words, representations, and memories of
the past, and bring them together into a narrative (albeit a fragmented one). (37-8)
Although the Holocaust events are mentioned later on in the novel, the birth of Brod could be seen
as a kind of symbol of the Holocaust: it affected all citizens of Trachimbrod, it is an event
memorialized every year and it is an important constituent of identity for later generations of
Jonathan’s family (especially his grandfather and Jonathan himself) since it is mentioned over and
over again, even after almost two centuries have passed.
In this way, Foer emphasizes the influence of the past on the present. He creates the sense of a
circular, mythical time as opposed to historical time. A way of doing this is by linking dates and
events in his titles, for example “A Parade, a Death, a Proposition, 1804-1969,” or “The Dial, 19411804-1941” and the last chapter “The Beginning of the World often Comes, 1942-1791,” which, as
mentioned earlier, takes us back to 1791. The titles of the different chapters are meandering across
the pages, thus, as Dr. Codde pointed out in his class, visualizing a flow of time and opposing the
straight, linear titles of Alex’s chapters.
The idea of cyclical time recurs in different scenes. For example, in The Book of Recurrent Dreams,
there is a dream that goes as follows:
The dream that we are our fathers. I walked to the Brod [!!], without knowing why, and
looked into my reflection in the water. I couldn’t look away. What was the image that pulled
me in after it? What was it that I loved? And then I recognized it. So simple. In the water I was
my father’s face, and that face saw the face of its father, and so on, and so on, reflecting
backward to the beginning of time, to the face of God, in whose image we were created. (41)
It is no coincidence that the reflection is seen in the river Brod from which Jonathan’s very greatgrandmother originates.
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Further, when Yankel dies and Brod makes love to the Kolker for the first time, “her belly lit up like a
firefly’s bulb” (98). The next scene, in the year 1969, relates Jonathan’s mother and grandmother
watching the landing on the moon. It is suggested that the light of Brod’s belly – and the light caused
by the collective orgy in which the shtetl subsequently engages – is seen from the moon by Neil
Armstrong. But more important in this scene is when Jonathan writes that:
*s+he *Jonathan’s grandmother+ puts her hand on my mother’s hand and feels her own blood
flow through the veins, and the blood of my grandfather (who died only five weeks after
coming to the States, just half a year after my mother was born), and my mother’s blood, and
my blood, and the blood of my children and grandchildren. (98)
In this way the author stresses a strong connection between generations, not only past generations
but especially future ones. Foer implicitly says that just while he had not expected to write about the
Jews or the Holocaust, it is something that is omnipresent, something offspring of survivors cannot
hide from. He cannot, and nor will his children or his grandchildren. A continuity is suggested and
most importantly, an imperative to remember.
The importance of memory is stressed throughout the novel; all Trachimbroders engage in
remembering. As a scene in the beginning already announces: “*t+he what, Didl said, is not so
important, but that we should remember. It is the act of remembering, the process of remembrance,
the recognition of our past” (36). Foer appears to state that although his generation does not have an
easy access to the past, it is nevertheless important to keep remembering. With his novel, he shows
that ‘remembering’ can take various forms, even that of mythical invention. As Efraim Sicher points
out: “’*a+bsent memory’ might be a trope for much writing that is impelled by the violent eradication
of a past culture or of an entire generation, so that ‘invention replaces recall’” (“The Future” 64).
This evolution from recall to invention is often a point of critique in discussions on Holocaust
literature. For example, one of the negative reviews of Everything Is Illuminated reads: “*t+he
generation that witnessed it [the holocaust] and, to a certain extent, the generation that came
directly afterward have treated it as a real, solid, ugly fact of all our lives. To Foer, born more than
thirty years after Auschwitz, it is merely the unremembered past, ripe for reinvention and
reinterpretation by the artist” (Allen; my emphasis).
As generations pass, the task of remembering the Holocaust will ultimately remain in the hands of
those who can only rely on history, testimonies and other texts. Just because of this absence of the
real event, postmemorial invention is a way of coping with an ‘unlived’ burden.
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 HISTORICAL DISTANCE AND ETHICAL CONCERNS
This fourth characteristic may be the most important, namely the fact that Foer, because of
his increased historical distance to the facts, is able to reflect on the Holocaust in a ‘healthier’ way.
He is not stuck in too deeply wrought personal troubles (as was the case with Art in Maus) but is able
to foreground ethical questions concerning guilt and responsibility. As Efraim Sicher points out: “The
perpetrator just beneath the skin of the victim and the proximity of collaboration and complicity are
persistent themes in post-Holocaust writing by those who were not ‘there’” (“The Burden” 71). In
Everything Is Illuminated, the character contemplating his guilt is Alex. Towards the end of the novel,
Alex discovers the secrets his grandfather has lived with all the time. When the Nazis came to his
village, they lined up all inhabitants (as happened in Trachimbrod) and asked them to point out the
Jews. In order to save himself, as well as his wife and child, from the Nazis, Alex’s grandfather
pointed out his Jewish friend Herschel. As mentioned before, this is narrated by Alex in a stream of
consciousness that ends as follows:
. . . he said these things to us and Jonathan where do we go now what do we do with what we
know Grandfather said that I am I but this could not be the truth is that I also
pointedatHerschel and I also said heisaJew and I will tell you that you also pointedatHerschel
and you also said heisaJew and more than that Grandfather also pointedatme and said
heisaJew and you also pointedathim and said heisaJew and your grandmother and Little Igor
and we all pointedateachother so what is it he should have done
hewouldhavebeenafooltodoanythingelse but it is forgivable what he did canheeverbeforgiven
for his finger for whathisfingerdid for whathepointedto and didnotpointto for
whathetouchedinhislife and whathedidnottouch he is stillguilty I am Iam Iam IamI?) (252; my
emphasis)
Alex feels guilty for what his grandfather has done; this is represented by the traumatic retelling of
the events in the form of a stream of consciousness. In his letters, Alex asks Jonathan several times to
forgive not only his grandfather but also himself. He constantly stresses the fact that his grandfather
“is a good person, alive in a bad time” (145). Also when reflecting on Brod’s fate: “I have been very
dispirited for Brod. She is a good person in a bad world” (103). And when he comes to narrating his
grandfather’s testimony, the conversation goes like this: “’I am not a bad person,’ he *Alex’s
52
grandfather] said. ‘I am a good person who has lived in a bad time.’ ‘I know this,’ I *Alex+ said. (Even if
you were a bad person, I would still know that you are a good person)” (227).
He wants Jonathan to forgive him through his writing, wants him to use the power of fiction to alter
events: “[g]randfather interrogates me about you every day. He desires to know if you forgive him
for the things he told you about the war, and about Herschel. (You could alter it, Jonathan. For him,
not for me. Your novel is now verging on the war. It is possible) . . . I beseech you to forgive us, and to
make us better than we are. Make us good” (145). His plea for forgiveness is present throughout his
letters: “*p+lease be truthful, but also please be benevolent, please” (26), “as always, I ask for your
forgiveness” (55), and finally, just before the last part of his story where he recounts his
grandfather’s testimony, “*f+or the first time in my life, I told my father exactly what I thought, as I
will now tell you, for the first time, exactly what I think. As with him, I ask for your forgiveness” (242).
Contrary to what might be expected, the reader is forced to empathize more with Alex than
with Jonathan. Mostly because of the fact that Alex’s voice is more present throughout the novel, in
his letters and in the story he tells, but also because Alex is made, in the words of Dr. Codde, the
“moral centre” of the book. The reader never really gets to know Jonathan’s reaction to the
confession of Alex’s grandfather, and no sign is given that Jonathan answers Alex’s pleas for
forgiveness. Even in the end, as Marion Spies notes, “forgiveness for Nazi murderers is implicitly
denied by the grandfather’s taking of his own life” (258).
Ending the novel with the grandfather’s suicide note makes Jonathan’s silence even more obvious.
The reader learns how for the Holocaust survivor, who was forced to make an immoral decision, the
past is unbearable. But why should it still be for his grandson? Alex vents his frustration by saying
that “*e+verything is the way it is because everything was the way it was. Sometimes I feel ensnared
in this, as if no matter what I do, what will come has already been fixed” (145).
Froma Zeitlin on the contrary, writes that “now in the third generation ‘afterward’ represents
liberation and not a guilty bondage to the terrible past” (31). This is precisely what Foer wants to
question: does Alex still have to feel guilty? And does Jonathan have the right to not forgive after all
these years? Foer stimulates critical reflection on the aftermath of the Holocaust, on the
consequences for offspring of survivors, by making the perpetrator’s descendent the moral centre of
the novel. The reader is tempted to choose his side but history seems to demand otherwise.
The reader is left to make a decision of his own since once again Foer provides no clear
answers, he only raises more questions. On the other hand, that may be all that is left for the later
generations; questions without answers.
53
VI. CONCLUSION
In this concluding chapter, it is my aim to look back and reflect on what I have read and
discussed above in order to try to formulate an answer to the question of particularities in the
writing of third generation Jewish-American novelists in the light of the second generation. Next to
these literary characteristics, it is my main concern to discuss how the Holocaust trauma – which, as
is known, clearly lives on in a certain way in the second generation – is dealt with in the third
generation, and if it is after all still possible to speak of a trauma as such.
I would like to come to my conclusion by first exploring three themes I was confronted with
time and time again; in Maus and Everything Is Illuminated as well as in the secondary literature I
read. I want to mention these themes because I think that as they are increasingly present when
comparing the second with the third generation. I therefore would like to argue for the fact that,
while the trauma clearly diminishes and even disappears – it is almost impossible to say that
Jonathan Safran Foer is traumatized as such – other concerns get more attention. In contrast to
Spiegelman, Foer as a member of the next generation has found a way to part from a too personal
involvement. He is still struggling with important issues linked to the Holocaust legacy, which for a
great part fall under the themes I will elaborate on, and still feels very closely connected to the
Holocaust (as his postmemorial invention proves), but clearly does not experience the existential
difficulties and traumatic memories Spiegelman has. Foer is able, in Dr. Codde’s words, to deal with
the Holocaust in a ‘healthier’ way. The way in which below discussed issues are dealt with – memory,
(Jewish) identity and the postmodern – further testify to this statement.
HISTORY, MEMORY AND POSTMEMORY
Jews Have Six Senses.
Touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing . . . memory. While Gentiles experience and process the world
through the traditional senses, and use memory only as a second-order means of interpreting events,
for Jews memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the
blood it pulls from the finger. The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. It is only by
tracing the pinprick back to other pinpricks . . . that the Jew is able to know why it hurts. When a Jew
encounters a pin, he asks: What does it remember like? (Foer 199)
54
The last few decades, a general fascination and even obsession with the past could be
discerned. Evidence is to be found in numerous films, plays and books that deal with the recent and
distant past, both factual and mythical. Also outside of art or historical discourse, there is an
increased interest in documenting every single event. As Pierre Nora notes in his text Between
History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire: “*n]o society has ever produced archives as deliberately
as our own, not only by volume, not only by new technical means of reproduction and preservation,
but also by its superstitious esteem, by its veneration of the trace” (13). By doing this, we create a
certainty for ourselves, we attempt to get a grasp on the past and help define “what we are in the
light of what we are no longer” (Nora 18). The act of clinging on to the past could be linked to the
postmodern individual’s search for ‘master narratives’ since “we now live in an era in which
legitimizing ‘master narratives are in crisis and in decline” (Butler 13). Master narrative in this sense
would refer to a certain ideology or religion, e.g. Marxism or Christianity, that upholds certain values
to live by and explains social and existential questions. Holding on to something like this has however
become more impossible due to an increased intellectuality and cultural and political plurality in the
contemporary globalized world. It seems to be a natural reaction then, that people search for these
narratives in the past; this would explain the endless writing, re-writing and adapting of history,
especially in art. Linked to this is the importance of memory which provides, as opposed to history, a
very personal access to the past and therefore a much more valuable one for the individual. As Nora
states: “*m+emory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present;
history *on the other hand+ is a representation of the past” (8). It is exactly in this fact that the
strength of the third generation lies. Because of their temporal distance to the Holocaust or its
survivors, their grandparents, they have no direct access to it through memory. An historical
approach however, would be too distancing since they still feel very personally connected to the
events. Therefore postmemory, as I have shown earlier, offers the ideal solution. In the words of
Marianne Hirsch, “*f+ull or empty, postmemory seeks connection. It creates where it cannot recover.
It imagines where it cannot recall” (“The Generation” 664). Thus, while Spiegelman did possess his
own (traumatic) memories, he used them in combination with historical research and his father’s
testimony in order to reconstruct the events of the Holocaust. He therefore put his own existential
doubts in the shadow of his father’s experiences. The difference with Foer is very clear; the historical
events and the act of reconstruction are out of his reach or simply do not provide a satisfying
approach. Engaging in postmemorial invention and creating his own story of something he was so
clearly not a part of, offers a much bigger consolation than digging into history and being confronted
every time again that he was not there and that he can never know.
55
IDENTITY ISSUES: HOW THE HOLOCAUST DEFINES YIDDISHKEIT
A second theme I want to discuss is that of identity and Jewish identity in particular. The
issue of identity is present in both Maus and Everything Is Illuminated but in a very different way.
Spiegelman struggles with his identity in a traumatic way; he has a troubled relation with his father,
blames himself for the death of his mother, always had to compete with his dead brother and feels
very helpless not having experienced what his parents did and therefore never being able to fully
‘know’. Spiegelman’s main concern is giving himself a place and identity within his own family. As
Berger mentions, “*c+hildren of survivors also understand themselves and their connection to the
Jewish tradition in terms of their parent’s Holocaust experience” (3).
Foer on the other hand, although he clearly writes about his family too, does not engage in such a
personal narrative. He touches upon the issue of identity in a more ethical way. As I have mentioned
in my discussion of his novel, Foer focuses on the question of guilt concerning the later generations
(in the Trachimbrod-narrative told by Alex) as well as what it entails to be a Jew (esp. in the mythical
storyline). Menachem Feuer, in his article on Everything Is Illuminated, concludes that “*t+his fluid
revision of the past is an exposure of Jonathan Safran Foer’s deepest fantasies and fears with respect
to his identity and his history” (36).
It could be said that struggling with identity as being part of and finding a place in the Jewish culture
and tradition in a post-Holocaust age, is one of the main concerns of contemporary Jewish novelists.
As Froma Zeitlin states:
There are a number of reasons why writing about the Holocaust has so gripped the modern
imagination – of author, critic and reader alike. But one cogent reason may be that by its very
definition the genocidal project of the Holocaust decreed a collective destiny for every
individual Jew, who could no longer lay claim to any other identity except that of a Jew and
whose right to existence, without exception, was revoked. (36)
Consequences for Jewish faith after the war were twofold; on the one hand there was a turning away
from the past and from religion, a sense of having lost faith in God, since what god would have let
this happen? On the other hand, there was an even stronger clinging on to faith just because of the
evil that was overcome at the end of the war and in order to pay tribute to the dead. Alain
Finkielkraut, in his book The Imaginary Jew tries to look for an alternative way for Jews to relate to
their religion and its burdened past: “Finkielkraut’s project is . . . both critical and redemptive: to
shatter the illusory plenitude of postwar Jewish postures while redeeming the richness of Jewish
heritage from the triviality of a media-saturated age” (ix). For those who were born after the
56
Holocaust, the crisis of faith could be considered to be even stronger because of “*t+he generational
difference between Jews growing up in the postwar era and their predecessors in the heroic,
antifascist struggle” (Finkielkraut xi). In Everything Is Illuminated, more than in Maus, we see how
Foer is struggling with this issue of Jewish identity in the way he stages his character Jonathan and his
relation with Alex, as well as in his narrative about the history of the Jewish shtetl Trachimbrod.
“THE POST-HOLOCAUST CONDITION”
Putting the so-called “postmodern condition”, after the book with the same name by JeanFrançois Lyotard, on the same level as the doubts and concerns offspring of survivors experience, is
something I have repeatedly come across in my reading. Like Efraim Sicher says, “our concept of the
human condition has been badly shaken, and it should not be surprising that postmodernism refers
to the Holocaust as theme and argument for the loss of meaning, loss of faith, and loss of humanity”
(“The Holocaust” 305). It would certainly be a good explanation for the success of Jewish-American
novels of the second and third generation since they testify of a search for identity, a search within a
religion, a tradition and a family, and feel the need to write their individual history, to look for
oneself in the light of past events. The postmodern individual in general seeks the same certainties,
be it not in relation to an enormous event like the Holocaust. In the words of Finkielkraut: “everyone
looks for the meaning that contemporary life so cruelly lacks” (39).
The danger however, of levelling post-Holocaust with the postmodern – as Dr. Codde also pointed
out in class – is trivialization, by stating that every human being is a victim because of the historical
time in which we live in, since the postmodern discourse “has created a culture in which many were
encouraged to see themselves as victims” (Butler 59). Everyone today is a ‘survivor’ in some sense of
the word.
It is clear nevertheless that Jonathan Safran Foer is embedded in a strong tradition of the
postmodern novel when it comes to his use of language (and pointing out the failure of it) and
narrative techniques. He plays with the idea that there is no general truth available, there are no
explanatory metanarratives, as I mentioned above. Every story that attempts to explain history is
“just another form of fiction” (Butler 15). As I pointed out in my discussion, different versions of one
story, mediation and invention or adaptation of so-called truths is certainly something Foer loves
playing with in his novel. Therefore, it can definitely be said that Foer is indebted to postmodern
theories and tradition when it comes to expressing his own post-Holocaust doubts.
57
THIRD-GENERATION TRAUMA?
I have discussed above themes to help me reach an answer to the question whether it is still
possible to speak of trauma when it comes to the third generation of Jewish-American Holocaust
survivors. Everything Is Illuminated is definitely a trauma novel, since it narrates traumatic
experiences represented in a language that reflects the trauma itself. For example, the stream of
consciousness in which Alex tells what his grandfather has done; both the grandfather’s trauma as
Alex’s trauma is reflected in this passage, since the narrative technique shows that these experiences
are not yet worked through, by Alex nor by his grandfather.
However, it can not be concluded after reading the novel that the author is suffering from trauma or
that this is the primary reason for writing. He does definitely have doubts and issues he raises in his
book, viz. concerning the above paragraphs, but he does not have the need, unlike Spiegelman –
although he also stages himself as a character and novelist – to write in a too personally involved
manner.
My conclusion therefore would be that the trauma has made place for other, more general concerns,
which were already present in Maus but were less urgent for Spiegelman to deal with since his
personal troubles gained priority and disabled him to see the bigger picture – which does not make
his work any less good of course, but only results in a very different approach to the Holocaust.
Later generations – the second, third, and probably also the next – keep answering to the impetus ‘to
never forget’, to remember and keep telling the story, be it (in the case of the third generation)
merely a story, a very personal story, and put the Holocaust and all its consequences – which are
obviously still felt – up for discussion. The void of the Holocaust, of the past that they have not
experienced but that has influenced their family to a great extent, keeps fascinating, keeps fueling
the imagination and keeps raising questions. Therefore, in Saul Friedländer’s words, “*w+orking
through may ultimately signify, in Maurice Blanchot’s words, ‘to keep watch over absent meaning’”22.
Since, although they themselves may not experience the trauma as such, the third generation is still
telling the story of the Holocaust survivors which inevitably also has become their own story. In a
way they therefore keep working through although they are not traumatized themselves, since they
continue putting the traumatic events into a narrative.
22
Friedländer, Saul. “Trauma, Transference, and ‘Working Through’ in Writing the History of the Shoah.” History and
Memory 4 (Spring-Summer 1992): 41. Quoted in Young, “The Holocaust” 669.
58
59
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VIII. ILLUSTRATIONS
Fig. 1.
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Fig. 2.
Fig. 3.
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Fig. 4.
Fig. 5.
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Fig. 6.
Fig. 7.
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Fig. 8.
Fig. 9.
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Fig. 10.
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Fig. 11.
Fig. 12.
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71