The Imaginary Jew and the American Poet

Jews in the Mind of America.

notion: “language can be a homeland and so can literature ... and that’s what [Julian] Tuwim said, Polishness the homeland, but no one ever said that it is the same thing as an actual homeland.” After Maurer left her “actual homeland” of Poland, she had to undergo various processes of cultural and linguistic translations. She has written some of these transformations into her fictional narrator’s life. Maurer maintains that Poland is unquestionably her own and her narrator’s homeland while the United States is forever “a five star hotel”—a place in which a weary traveler rests comfortably. In her stories, then, Maurer both comments on and elaborates her own and her narrator’s multiple identities and their simultaneous, but problematic ‘stepdaughter’ rootedness in Poland. In the context of multiply and complexly situated identities, Maurer’s story “Szkola” (“The School,” 1965), offers a poignant critique of Polish history and ritualized memory in the context of her narrator’s Polish Jewish identity. It illustrates that Maurer is far from idealistic or naïve in designating Poland as her homeland. The stories’ 192 Ibid. 193 I use the edition of “The School” published in Doppelgangers, 16-28. 85 narrator, like Eva Hoffman, “accepted the world around” with a “basic self-assurance” of a child while possessing a strong “sense of [her] Jewish identity.” “The School” begins in wartime Krakow where, as a little girl, the narrator lives with her parents using “Aryan papers.” She attends the public school there, goes to church every Sunday, and, by all appearances, is just an average Catholic child. Growing up in wartime Poland requires of the young narrator a virtually schizophrenic duality. She is constantly concerned with the peril of her own and her parents’ existence at the same time as she contends with “normal” predicaments like adolescent crushes and teenage friendships. Maurer explicitly comments on Polish anti-Semitism when her narrator recalls how she moved her Polish teacher to tears when she performed a fragment of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s patriotic Trilogy (1884-1888). German authorities strictly prohibited the teaching of Polish literature and Maurer scripts this recital as a patriotic act, which makes her teacher weep openly. But when she recalls her recital, the narrator comments on Professor Piaskowska’s open anti-Semitism, teaching her pupils about Jews as an “alien body” in Poland. Though Piaskowska qualifies her statements by calling what the Germans are doing “a crime,” she is clearly in favor of purging the nation of its “impurities.” The narrator sees Piaskowska’s anti-Semitism as the most dangerous because in “criticizing” the Germans, she feels patriotic and absolves herself of any participation in the crimes, implicitly approving of their outcome. As a young girl, the narrator meditates on her teacher’s sentiments and cannot figure out “how we came to such a misunderstanding, that I felt a part of her world, but she talked about me as an 194 See the Polish interviews with Eva Hoffman in Chapter 6. 195 Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916) wrote historical novels. The Trilogy consists of With Fire and Sword (1884), The Deluge (1886), and Pan Wolodyjowski (1888). 86 alien body.” But Maurer’s young narrator refuses to abdicate the Polish part of her identity and, as an adult, wishes that Piaskowska had known the irony of exactly “whom she had to thank for that moment of sentimental nationalism.” In noting the exclusion of Jews as well as those who helped them from the Polish canon of heroes, the narrator asks: “Is it right that in the Polish tradition of resistance and fighting, there is no room for these people? They put their heads down in heroic glory, but did so alone. Is it right that they passed away alone and those who remained passed away from memory while still alive?” Clearly recalling Zegota, the Polish organization that helped her own family escape Krakow, Maurer’s narrator concludes that Jewish victims of the Holocaust in Poland were forgotten because of anti-Semitism and those who helped them were forgotten because such aid found no national support. In “The School,” Maurer’s use of Polish and her representation of the narrator as inseparably Polish and Jewish, despite being rejected by the country to which she pronounces allegiance, speak to the postwar national Polish consciousness. Her use of Polish in writing her stories and her narrator’s patriotic recital bring to mind another Holocaust survivor’s use of German. In “Todesfuge” (“The Death Fuge”), Paul Celan’s use of German and the pronoun “we” as well as his parallels between Biblical figures and German literary characters call Germans to account for their wartime culpability. Similarly to Celan’s use of German, Maurer’s use of Polish and her direct critique of Polish wartime anti-Semitism call into account Poles’ culpability in the Holocaust. There 196 “The School,” 18. 197 Ibid., 21. 198 Ibid., 24. 199 John Festiner, “Translating Paul Celan’s ‘Todesfuge’: Rhythm and Repetition as Metaphor,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution, ed. Saul Friedlander, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992: 240-258. 87 is no mistake that the Germans destroyed Eastern European Jewry, but it is also clear that Maurer refuses to repudiate her Polishness precisely by refusing to let Poles “off the hook.” By using Piaskowska as a stand in for Polish responses to the Holocaust, her work calls Poles to account for their actions long before Gross’s book sparked a debate about it in Poland and the United States. As early as the mid-1960s, Maurer questioned Polish Jewish relations and challenged long-standing notions of Polish wartime heroism. Popular wisdom in Poland still blames the lack of discussion about Polish Jewish relations on pre-1989 communist insistence that there were no distinctly ethnic victims of Hitler’s murderous agenda, but all were Polish citizens and workers slated for slaughter by a genocidal capitalist regime. But there was hardly any debate about Polish wartime culpability even after the antiSemitic purges of the 1950s and late 1960s, when the majority of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust were displaced. Maurer’s stories set in the United States add another dimension to her complexly narrated identity constructions. While in Poland, Holocaust survivors like Maurer’s protagonist negotiate Polishness and Jewishness as markers of national, ethnic, or religious belonging; in the U.S. they become further marked by their immigrant status. In stories like “Polska Idealna” (“Ideal Poland,” 1970), Maurer describes how East European survivors’ wartime past, which becomes irrelevant in the U.S., constructs the immigrant Polish Jewish American identity. In “Ideal Poland,” there are three categories of newcomers from Poland: Jewish refugees who left immediately after the war, visiting scholars from the People’s Republic of Poland, and Jewish exiles who left because of the 1968 anti-Semitic purges. 88 In this story, the narrator, who is a refugee in Germany and then an immigrant in the United States, meets a middle-aged couple who represent Poland’s newest, post-1968 exiles. The couple simultaneously disarms and angers the narrator with “their enthusiasm of new immigrants.” She is disarmed because she can still remember the UNRRA times of looking forward to a promising immigrant future, but at the same time knows, through her own experiences, the illusory nature of those promises. She wants to “inject them with the knowledge of years spent wandering aimlessly, years of illusions, speaking foreign languages like a parrot. Constantly trying to enter an alien society.” And though she realizes the impossibility of actually hiring the man to do a series of lectures at the university’s East European Studies Institute, propelled by a sense of guilt and a certain desire to protect them from inevitable immigrant turmoil, she offers to try to do so anyway. The narrator’s co-immigrant guilt is exacerbated when she sees the place where the new immigrants live. Their apartment bespeaks their utterly marginal position in the ‘New World.’ Reeking of cabbage and soap, the building is decrepit and their apartment filled with junk. Everything about their situation appears familiar, but when she attempts to remember what the future looked like from the perspective of departure and loss, she can no longer access her once naive immigrant innocence and hope. She now identifies with Zahler, another long-term refugee immigrant scholar, for example, because they 200 “Polska idealna [Ideal Poland],” in Doppelgangers, 289-310. 201 Ibid., 291. 202 The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), founded in 1943, provided aid to European countries after World War II ended. UNRRA repatriated millions of refugees and organized displaced persons camps in Germany, Italy, and Austria for about a million people who were unwilling or unable to be repatriated. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum web site (May 10, 2006). http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005685 203 “Ideal Poland,” 291. 89 both speak Polish and because they were both “Hitler’s victims.” She does not feel the same bond with the newly arrived couple. Though they speak Polish and, as Polish Jews, were also Hitler’s victims, their immigrant innocence distances them from her. She is angered and disarmed by their enthusiastic belief that nothing but good can come out of their departure from Poland. What unites these newest exiles is their innocence and confidence that America is the promised haven. Zahler and the narrator, on the other hand, are united by their familiarity with the myths of the New World. As far removed as the narrator feels from the new exiles’ naiveté, she finds even less in common with Sampson, another of the Institute’s leading scholars, who represents the American attitude towards the newly arrived immigrants. Immediately se

Finding Home in Babel: Transnationalism, Translation, and Languages of Identity.

In times of great trauma, news can offer healing, consolation and inspiration. This study applied textual analysis of news items and opinion pieces about the April 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech to explore how collective memory and mythical narratives become part of the healing process that news media offer to society. Many of the items studied involved an ironic hero who survived the Holocaust only to die at Virginia Tech, with frequent references to collective memory of school shootings and the Holocaust, along with narratives based on the hero myth. The ironic hero became the perfect story character to fuse both narrative tools to bring a stronger positive message of healing.

The ironic hero of Virginia Tech: Healing trauma through mythical narrative and collective memory

"I am made by her, and undone" : mother-son relationships in confessional and post-confessional lyric

This essay explores the development of a post-WWII aesthetic in relation to the Pound controversy, beginning with Shapiro’s dissenting vote as a member of the Bollingen committee — a vote he believed ruined his career. This is a two-part story, having first to do with the liberal response to modernism’s infatuation with the extreme right, and then with the poetic and critical reaction to liberalism. Liberal critics defended Pound by characterizing poetry as a form of individual expression. Later critics and poets abandoned the discourse of individualism for the group-specific language of identity. Shapiro makes this shift in reverse. He voted against Pound as a Jew voting against an anti-Semite. But when identity became fashionable he abandoned it as a poetically and politically suspect form of personification. The essay concludes by comparing the lyricism of identity to individualistic verse by considering Shapiro’s relation to Bollingen committee members Auden and Lowell.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.34.3.1

Liberalism and Lyricism, or Karl Shapiro's Elegy for Identity

Anti-Semite and Jew

Jews in the mind of America

The Holocaust changed what it means to be a Jew, for Jew and non-Jew alike. Much of the discussion about this new meaning is a storm of contradictions. In The Imaginary Jew, Alain Finkielkraut describes with passion and acuity his own passage through that storm. Finkielkraut decodes the shifts in anti-Semitism at the end of the Cold War, chronicles the impact of Israel's policies on European Jews, opposes arguments both for and against cultural assimilation, reopens questions about Marx and Judaism, and marks the loss of European Jewish culture through catastrophe, ignorance, and cliche. He notes that those who identified with Israel continued the erasure of European Judaism, forgetting the pangs and glories of Yiddish culture and the legacy of the Diaspora. Born in Paris in 1949, Alain Finkielkraut is the author of eight books, including The Wisdom of Love (Nebraska 1997). Kevin O'Neill is an associate professor of French at the University of Colorado, Denver. David Suchoff, an associate professor of English at Colby College, is the author of Critical Theory and the Novel: Mass Society and Cultural Criticism in Dickens, Melville and Kafka.