This classic joke by Berle: “Anytime somebody orders a corned beef sandwich on white bread with mayonnaise, somewhere in the world, a Jew dies.” How far can we read into this, what are the manifest and latent aspects of it? For some nagging and still non decipherable reason I feel it says something to what I am experiencing with the marketing of my book, I Truly Lament: Working Through the Holocaust. Only a few days ago a blogger responded to my query with this stark sentence: “I don’t read Holocaust books.” In my fantasy I wanted to sentence her to writing this lunacy a million times on a blackboard. Mene mene tekel upharsin came to mind.
Another blogger writes that she doesn’t read Holocaust books because they make her “sad,” the inference being that at least she’s read one or more. [Oh, you fragile, sensitive little posey.] And to be fair, I have known one or more survivors who will not read the literature but their reasons are more valid, for they have endured what the words speak of. I just get vexed by the scrawny little minds who can send off such appallingly ignorant statements of who they are interiorly. As to tact, I authored the book and you imply it was not worth my effort. What they do not understand is that, in a way, it has nothing to do with being Jewish. It has everything to say about what we are as a species. And to deny, to refuse, to be acquainted with what the Holocaust is and says about each one of us is only proof of what morons bloggers can be. Back to Harlequin romances, sweetie. Blog your little carbuncular heart out.
So a part of me dies, in a way, when I come up against this resistance, like Berle’s gentile eating of a kosher sandwich.
Yes, I experience the vapors when I come across such unwillingness, intransigency, soaked in the brine of prejudice and profound ignorance which is always grounded, in my thinking, in callousness, insensitivity, and crudeness.
It makes me want to throw open my window, shove my head out and shout “I’ll teach anyone, anything, free.” Every teacher’s real enemy is ignorance, a killer of self and society in its greater proportions. If I were teaching as I had decades ago, I would have a greater urgency as each class slogged in for another dose of conditioning to make them aware.
When Crusaders juiced with testosterone on their way to the Italian coast to embark to the Holy Land paused long enough to wipe out 45,000 Jews in a pogrom or when about 18,000 captive Jews were marched into Rome and who in essence constructed the Coliseum, and when Allen Dulles, head of the OSS and later CIA, colluded with Werner von Braun and other Nazi scientists to give them a free pass to the American way of life, I am aware. How can the truth set you free if you are unwilling to experience it? Any good writer, I believe, is interested in the following: love and death, time and the infinite intractability of the human species to become aware. For me that is literature. And when I write about the Holocaust all of the latter is subsumed under that title. When you refuse to read or learn about the Holocaust, awareness is crucified.
I have chosen an unpopular subject to write about. And I cannot realistically expect for readers to grab on to it or bloggers to avidly review it. It is a difficult subject. In a way the Holocaust is like Ishmael, banned with his mother to the desert. When I reflect about how I entered the bloodstream of the characters I chose to write about, when I see how I tried to comprehend their minds, and when I see how I imagined their selves and their worlds, that effort in itself was my writer’s task, and what sensibilities I have as a Jew. Not all writers choose, like me, to gnaw on the why; some of us want to glide in their craft. I am not here to condemn or choose about how one sees the craft, but clearly there are serious themes and not so serious themes. I am condemned to hard themes –shoot me!
This blog is a complaint. And like all complaints very personal. My complaint is not that I am not being reviewed or discussed. My complaint is really about not being heard because the mind is dead and the eye is blind. And how did that come about?
One response to “Uncle Miltie and Holocaust Fiction”