Heartbeats of Madness Overheard

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Heartbeats of Madness Overheard

History, Remembrance and Second-Generation

Identity in J. J. Steinfeld’s Post-Holocaust Fiction

Master’s Dissertation Literary Studies Programme: Writing, Editing and Mediating Department of English Language and Culture

University of Groningen

Daniël Muller S1933728

Supervisor: Dr. I. Visser

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Acknowledgements

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Introduction

Since the pioneering publication of Helen Epstein’s Children of the Holocaust (1979), the children of Jewish Holocaust survivors have received increased public attention in the United States. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, there has been a growing literary output by second-generation writers, most famously Art Spiegelman’s Maus series. However, while the study of

Holocaust remembrance has been largely devoted to public manifestations of cultural memory, the substantial body of second-generation literature, particularly the works related to the impact of the Holocaust’s psychic legacy, remains comparably underexplored (Grimwood 4). Second-generation writing consists of texts written by children of Holocaust survivors who, as a result of their parents’ experiences, feel indelibly marked by a history that they did not

personally live through and as such inherit a “scar without the wound” (Sicher 27).1 Erin McGlothin thus suggests that one of the most significant aspects of these texts is “the distinct sense of being marked by an unlived narrative, of carrying the trace of the Holocaust past within the present” (8). Rachel L. Baum has further noted in this regard that second-generation writing discloses “the tension between the redemptive claims of memory, that memory can honor the

dead and teach the living, and the experience of an unredeemed memory, which perpetuates the horror of the past” (94). Second-generation literature therefore particularly engages with the complexities of growing up with the history of the Holocaust and the precarious balance between the injunction to remember the past without allowing historical trauma to become a wholly incapacitating factor in the contemporary post-Holocaust world.

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Whereas in the last two decades several important studies have appeared on Jewish American second-generation literature, significantly less attention has been given to Canadian Jewish writing of the second generation and its particular social-historical context. This is particularly striking since, as S. Lillian Kremer states, “among the Commonwealth nations, Canadian Holocaust literature is most abundant, perhaps because of Canada’s own substantial immigrant Jewish population and its cultural links to the United States” (Rosen 131). Although various Canadian Holocaust works have received close scrutiny, there are still barely a handful of articles and book chapters devoted to the work of the Canadian Jewish author J. J. Steinfeld. This thesis therefore explores how Steinfeld’s work engages with the psychic reverberations of the Holocaust upon subsequent generations and how this traumatic aftermath relates to the construction of contemporary Canadian Jewish second-generation identity. J. J. Steinfeld was born in a post-war Displaced Persons Camp in Munich, Germany on 11 December 1946 to Polish Holocaust survivors, Leon and Esther, his mother having survived Auschwitz and his father having hid in the forests of eastern Poland. Steinfeld took a B.A. from Case Western Reserve University and a M.A. in history from Trent University. He subsequently pursued two years of Ph.D. studies in history at the University of Ottawa before leaving graduate school in 1980 and moving to the secluded harbour of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island where he currently resides as a fiction writer, poet and playwright. He has published fourteen books, including short story collections such as Dancing at the Club Holocaust (1993), Should

the Word Hell Be Capitalized? (1999), Anton Chekhov Was Never in Charlottetown (2000),

Would You Hide Me? (2003) and A Glass Shard and Memory (2011) as well as the poetry

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Okanagan Short Fiction Award (1984, 1990), Toronto Jewish Book Committee (1990), Theatre Prince Edward Island Playwriting Competition (1997, 2000) (Greenstein 1221). Michael Bryson indicates that Steinfeld was also the recipient of the Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Literary Arts on Prince Edward Island and the winner of Regina Little Theatre’s 2003 National Playwriting Contest (“TDR Interview”). Bryson further indicates that “as of summer 2014, more than 300 of Steinfeld’s stories and 700 poems have appeared in anthologies and periodicals internationally, and over forty of his one-act plays and a handful of full-length plays have been performed in Canada and the United States” (“Fiction #52: J. J. Steinfeld”).

Yet, despite this voluminous literary output, Steinfeld’s work deserves broader critical attention in that it is, as Alan L. Berger has stated, “especially strong in [its] grappling with the

Shoah’s psychic legacy, detailing the emotional pain of those who inherit the Holocaust… In one

protagonists’ words, second-generation Holocaust memories are “inherited like eye colour or facial features” (“Starring at Auschwitz,” 138)” (75). In his review of Steinfeld’s Would You

Hide Me? (2003), Michael Greenstein notes that “Steinfeld hides and exposes the Holocaust in

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MacLeod, is one of Canada’s most dedicated practitioners of the short story form” (“J. J. Steinfeld’s Would You Hide Me?”). Steinfeld’s short stories might be generally positioned in the context of American second-generation Holocaust literature alongside Carl Friedman’s

Nightfather (1994), Melvin Jules Bukiet’s Stories of an Imaginary Childhood (1992) and While

the Messiah Tarries (1995) as well as Thane Rosenbaum’s Elijah Visible (1996).2 Steinfeld’s work can, however, also more specifically, be placed in a larger body of Jewish-Canadian Holocaust writing from A. E. Klein’s Hath Not a Jew (1940) The Hitleriad (1944), The Second

Scroll (1951), Henry Kriesel’s The Betrayal (1964), Leonard Cohen’s Flowers for Hitler (1963),

Beautiful Losers (1966), Mordecai Richler’s St. Urbain’s Horseman (1971) to Anne Michaels’

more recent Fugitive Pieces (1996). Steinfeld’s writing can even more particularly be contextualized alongside other contemporary Canadian second-generation writers and poets such as Gabriella Goliger, Judith Kalman, and Robert Majzels. Other comparable authors are Joseph Sherman, Ken Sherman, Adam Sol, B. Glen Rotchin, Bernice Eisenstein, Lily Bret and Elaine Kalman Naves.3

This thesis thus analyzes Steinfeld’s short stories “The Apostate’s Tattoo,” “Ida Solomon’s Play” and “Dancing at the Club Holocaust” from his Dancing at the Club Holocaust (1993) as well as “The Never-Again Man” from his Anton Chekhov Was Never in Charlottetown (2000). In the last chapter of this thesis I also examine Steinfeld’s poems “In Times of Abomination and Loss” and “Historically Speaking” from his An Affection for Precipices (2003) as well as “The Memory Travellers: Two Photographs,” which was first published in Letters and Pictures from

the Old Suitcase (Edited by Ellen S. Jaffe and Lil Blume, Pinking Shears Publications, 2011).

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Steinfeld’s engagement with the psychic and spiritual aftereffects of the Holocaust can be linked in particular to Rosenbaum’s work while his absurdist and surrealist themes can be compared to Bukiet’s postmodern “crackpot realism’ and its profoundly cynical, absurdist approach to the Holocaust.

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escape” (“TDR Interview”).4

However, Martin Waxman states that “Steinfeld’s characters rarely escape” unless it is “to a deeper form of captivity” (“The Pain of Remembrance”). Steeves notes that “Steinfeld employs his understanding of the social and psychological repercussions of the Holocaust to juxtapose the vulnerability, even absurdity, of our modern lives with the resilience of the human spirit” (“J. J. Steinfeld’s Would You Hide Me?”).

This thesis argues that the characters of Steinfeld’s Holocaust-inflected short stories and poems attempt to configure a morally robust and spiritually resilient post-Holocaust Jewish identity by directly confronting transgenerational trauma, guilt and outrage through a re-exploration of Jewish history and tradition, both as a means of rendering justice to their parents’ ever-receding yet ever-present past and mending their own fragmented self. In order to explore the transgenerational dimension of trauma and remembrance, I use Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” as well as Dominick LaCapra’s work on the trauma-theoretical concepts of “acting-out” and “working-through” as a conceptual framework that illumines the psycho-social, affective and performative aspects of remembrance in Steinfeld’s writing. Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” characterizes the relation of the second generation to their parents’ traumatic experiences that they “remember” only through the

narratives, images and behaviors present in their upbringing, but which they nevertheless absorbed in such a profound manner as to experience them with the affective intensity of actual

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Steinfeld further comments concerning his work as it relates to his identity and worldview: “Growing up as the only child of Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors, and with the knowledge that I had been born in a Displaced Persons Camp in Germany, I was confronted very young with difficult if not unanswerable historical questions about suffering and the destruction of lives that has affected my world view and caused me to search for purpose and meaning through creativity. While my writing deals with many aspects of the human condition, certain themes weave through my imagination’s desire to confront what had happened to my family and the Jews during the Second World War: The influence of the past and memory on the present, especially on how the Holocaust affects

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self-defining “memories” (Generation of Postmemory 106). In his theoretical work on trauma and history, LaCapra draws a non-binary distinction between “acting-out” and “working-through” as two interconnected modes of relating to traumatic experiences. By “acting-out” LaCapra refers to a process whereby the past is relived and compulsively repeated as if it were fully present. LaCapra states in particular: “…in post-traumatic acting out… one is performatively caught up in the compulsive repletion of traumatic scenes—scenes in which the past returns and the future is blocked or fatalistically caught up in a melancholic feedback loop” (Writing History 22). By “working-through,” however, LaCapra refers to a self-reflexive process in which one attempts to gain some critical distance from the past, which in turn allows for a renewed engagement in the present and the envisioning of future possibilities (History in Transit 45). However, “working-through” is often resisted by because one feels a “fidelity to trauma,” which sees any process that leads to a reengagement with life in the present as a betrayal of the past (Writing History 22).

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Chapter I “The Heavy Hands of History”:

The Canadian Jewish Response to the Holocaust

and the Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma

This chapter will first explore the response of the Jewish-Canadian community to the Holocaust and the resurgence of postwar anti-Semitism in Canada. This socio-historical section will be followed by an overview of various clinical studies on several recurring psychosocial themes in the lives of children of Holocaust survivors. Finally, I will conclude by relating the previous material to Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” and Dominick LaCapra’s work on the trauma-theoretical concepts of “acting-out” and “working-through,” which in turn will serve as a framework for the analysis of the nature of second-generation memory and its relation to the construction of a post-Holocaust Jewish identity in the work of J. J. Steinfeld.

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contends in his Delayed Impact: The Holocaust and the Canadian Jewish Community (2000) that the Holocaust did not become effectively incorporated into Canadian culture until the period between 1973 and 1985. In his examination of the belated impact of the Holocaust in Canada, Bialystok delineates this development in three periods: from 1945 to 1960, from 1960 to 1973 and from 1973 to 1985.

During the immediate postwar decade, the Holocaust and the experience of survivors were not one of the primary concerns for the majority of Canadian Jews. The post-war efforts of the Canadian Jewish community were largely restricted to helping displaced Jews in Europe as well as lobbying the federal authorities to allow refugees and facilitating their arrival. Unfortunately, Jewish leaders had a disproportionate sense of their influence and obscured the Jewish community’s difficulties in integrating the refugees. This created the widespread perception that the Canadian Jewish community had done everything to aid European Jewry. However, it was precisely the Jewish community’s disproportionate self-perception that made it difficult for them to comprehend the utter immensity of the Holocaust despite the fact that they generally knew about it. As a result, a prolonged “collective amnesia” ensued until the 1960s (Bialystok 7, 66). While the Canadian Jewish community had a fairly limited response to the Holocaust due to their relative lack of social aid to survivors in the immediate postwar years, it is also important to note that their exertions to facilitate the new immigrants were strongly constrained by Canada’s immigration policy from the early 1930s to the late 1940s. In their seminal None Is Too Many:

Canada and the Jews of Europe (1982), Irving Abella and Harold Troper documented how “even

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Tulchinsky indicates that as a result of Canada’s exclusionary immigration policy less than five thousand Jews were allowed in Canada during the period of 1933 and 1948 (460). While Canada barely allowed Jewish immigrants from 1933 to 1948 due to widespread antisemitism, this slowly changed after 1948 with the creation of the state of Israel (Abella and Troper 285).

Throughout the 1950s there was a great influx of Holocaust survivors in Canada leading to the greatest expansion of the Jewish population in any period of its history. In the decade between 1951 and 1961, the Jewish community expanded by more than 60,000. This period saw the coming of 40.000 immigrants of whom about 36,000 remained on Canadian soil. By the middle of the decade, approximately 15 per cent of Canadian Jews were Holocaust survivors whose children were born in refugee camps in Europe (Bialystok 73). Tulchinsky further indicates that the number of Jewish immigrants in Canada was proportionally far greater than that of America (422). Whereas in 1990 about 8 per cent of the Jewish-American population were Holocaust survivors, in Canada survivors comprised between 30 and 40 per cent of the Jewish community. Given that of all Western nations Canada was the least inclined to allow Jewish immigrants, it is interesting that “today some 40 per cent of the Canadian Jewish Community are Holocaust survivors or their descendants, probably the highest percentage outside Israel” (Tulchinsky 460).

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Draper remarks in this regard that “their anguish and survival were ongoing, as they attempted to create new lives, new families, and indeed new identities, in Canada. Yet the burden of memory keeps them forever strangers” (Tulchinsky 407).

The greatest difficulty for Holocaust survivors in Canada during the immediate postwar years, however, was how to deal with their memories within their own new families. Bialystok notes that “Mike Englishman remarked that he could not speak about the Holocaust, ‘no, not even in my house,’ even though he was married to a survivor” (87). Most survivors associated with other survivors in local fraternal and mutual aid societies called landmanschaften, which provided a safe atmosphere in which they could share their painful memories (Bialystok 88). Since most Canadian Jews were primarily concerned with becoming proper Canadians, they increasingly distanced themselves from their European past. Canadian Jews thus were not always willing to understand the experiences of survivors, while survivors were often not inclined to talk about their experiences. This situation would change in the early 1960s in which several developments eventually led to a heightened awareness of the Holocaust (Bialystok 94; Robinson 99-100). The main reason for the sudden increase in Holocaust awareness in the early 1960s was the perception of a resurgence of antisemitism in Canada as well as internationally. A chain of anti-Semitic events disrupted the Canadian Jewish community and particularly shocked Holocaust survivors who did not expect to find such public displays of antisemitism in their new country.5 Triggered by the desecration of a number of synagogues in Germany on December 25 in 1959, an unprecedented outbreak of similar daubings swept over other Western countries, including Canada. While the initial response of the Jewish Congress to the neo-Nazi swastika outbreak was to endorse caution, several survivors urged them to take more aggressive action (Robinson 105).

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Dissatisfied with the cautionary approach of the Congress, some groups of survivors organized themselves in the Association of Survivors of Nazi Oppression to accentuate their concern about neo-Nazi activities in Canada (Tulchinsky 460). Although these anti-Semitic incidents involving the desecration of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries were widely publicized in the media, they did not constitute an actual physical threat to the Canadian Jewish population. Canadian Jews were nevertheless psychologically affected in that these events led to increased feelings of vulnerability. In this manner the revival of antisemitism indirectly lent a greater significance to Holocaust remembrance (Bialystok 101).

Concurrent with these anti-Semitic incidents was the global publicity around the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, which was unprecedented in raising consciousness of the Holocaust among the general public. The trial also had a profound impact on Canadian Jews who heard eyewitness accounts of “ghettoization, deportation, mass murder, and Jewish armed resistance” (Bialystok 107). The significance of the Eichmann trial lay in that it confronted the Jewish community in a strikingly personal and affective manner with shocking oral testimony that helped to inform Canadian Jews about the sheer magnitude of the tragedy. Thus, both the anti-Semitic outbreaks and the Eichmann trial further raised public awareness of the Holocaust (Bialystok 119).

Throughout the 1960s, Canadian Jews were shocked by the emergence of several neo-Nazi groups and the continuing growth of anti-Semitic propaganda. These developments reached a critical juncture in June, 1965, when the Association of Survivors directly confronted the neo-Nazi rally at Allan Gardens in downtown Toronto with 5,000 other protestors.6 Bialystok suggests that this incident was “arguably the most significant event in the post-war Toronto

Jewish community,” because it brought to the forefront the differences between the Jewish

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establishment and the more radical approach of several groups of survivors (121-122). This event eventually led the Jewish Congress to put pressure on the government to establish a Hate Crimes Commission, which resulted in anti-hate legislation in 1970 (Robinson 106).7

In the late 1960s, concerns about the threat to the security of the state of Israel also contributed to the Canadian Jewish community’s changing perspective on the Holocaust. As a reaction to the events, the Jewish Congress established a Holocaust memorial in 1971 and created a Holocaust education committee in the subsequent year (Tulchinsky 460). Whereas the 1965-1973 was a transitory period in relation to the incorporation of the Holocaust in the collective memory of the Jewish community, it would take another decade before the Holocaust would be seen by Canadian Jews as a ground for their ethnic identity (Bialystok 176).

In the period from 1973 to 1985, there were several factors that contributed to the legacy of the Holocaust becoming a basis of ethnic identification for most Canadian Jews. The first factor is that survivors were now joined by others in establishing projects that disseminated knowledge of the Holocaust in the form of commemoration and education. They also were actively involved in urging the government to investigate and prosecute suspected Nazi war criminals and Holocaust deniers such as Ernst Zundel and James Keegstra in the 1980s (Bialystok 178, 230). The second important factor was the portrayal of the Holocaust in the popular media, particularly the widespread impact of the 1978 miniseries Holocaust. Around the same time, the Holocaust also received increased attention from the scholarly world. By the late 1970s, various conferences began to be organized and several courses were devoted to exploring the Holocaust at Canadian universities. Particularly the publication of None Is Too Many about Canada’s exclusionary immigration policies during the war created a national uproar (Bialystok 179).

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The final factor is that by the 1970s the post-war generation of young Canadian Jews born in the 1930s and 1940s had lost a connection with their past and felt estranged from their traditions. These young adults had no memories of pre-war Europe and found it difficult to learn about it from their parents who were sometimes more resolved to move beyond the past rather than keep it in constant remembrance. Many survivor parents had great difficulty in verbally expressing their Holocaust experiences, even as J. J. Steinfeld’s father who remained silent about the Holocaust (Berger 75).8 Describing this situation of increased cultural alienation, the executive vice-president of the Canadian Jewish Congress stated that “there was a Jewish Emptiness” (Robinson 110). Many Canadian Jews had abandoned their Jewish roots or these had not been transmitted to them by their parents.

However, as they learned more about the annihilation of Jewish life in Europe during the Holocaust as well as about contemporary hate mongers, Nazi criminals and Holocaust deniers, many young postwar Canadian Jews once again felt a new vulnerability.9 Many of Steinfeld’s stories also involve protagonists who actively despise their Jewish identity. However, after having been existentially confronted with the history of the Holocaust, they often reclaim their original Yiddish name or absorb themselves in Jewish history and tradition as a way to connect with and honor the lost pre-Holocaust world of their ancestors.

Many young Canadian Jews of the postwar generation, like several of Steinfeld’s characters, came to consider the Holocaust “the end point of the earlier civilization and therefore a defining event in their lives. In fact they were creating a historical memory without historical experience”

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In Steinfeld’s early short story “The Chess Master” a young Jewish boy, a child of Holocaust survivors, develops a friendship with Mr. Kruger who turns out to be a former Nazi. At one point in the story, Mr. Kruger states: “You have inherited painful feelings from your parents. The past can be transmitted from generation to generation, even through any silence or deafness” (Dancing at the Club Holocaust 9).

9_{In Steinfeld’s short story “The Never-Again Man,” the protagonist is obsessed with searching for Nazi war}

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(Bialystok 165). Thus, the cumulative effect of the antisemitism of the 1960s, the exposure to the Holocaust in the 1970s, the endeavors of the survivors as well as a search for identity by the second generation eventually resulted in the fact that by the mid-1980’s the Holocaust became solidly ingrained in the Jewish collective memory and appropriated as a ground of ethnic identity by many post-war Canadian Jews (Bialystok 247).

Having delineated the socio-historical process of the collective appropriation of the Holocaust by the Canadian Jewish community, it is now possible to better comprehend some significant psychosocial aspects in the lives of children of Holocaust survivors. From the middle to the late 1970s onwards, an increasing amount of work has been published on the psychological effects of the Holocaust on survivors and the possible transmission of their traumatic experiences to their children. While the transmission of Holocaust trauma is an extremely complex and controversial subject, the most contentious issue is related to whether children of survivors display a higher degree of psychopathology than others. Despite the significant diversity in the lives and experiences of children of Holocaust survivors, some of their psychosocial problems tend to relate to four general problem areas (Kellerman 72).

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experience their lives as having been made possible by the deaths of others, they are frequently haunted by and feel a profound responsibility towards a dead relative or even the many millions of dead during the Holocaust of which they have no first-hand experience (Schwab 125). Many of Steinfeld’s characters also manifest a similar vicarious appropriation of parental Holocaust

experiences. For example, various protagonists obtain their parents’ concentration camp tattoo or engage in other performative acts of remembrance as a way to commemorate the dead.

The second problem area is related to cognition, with the focal point being a “catastrophic expectancy,” which is primarily expressed in a pervasive anxiety about a possible future repetition of the Holocaust. Many children are therefore imaginatively transposed to their parents’ traumatic history when they are exposed to stimuli that symbolize the Holocaust (Kellerman 73-74). The innerworld of many children of survivors is thus heavily dominated by the need to inhabit their parents’ Holocaust past and vicariously share their traumatic experiences (Kogan 26). Auerhahn and Laub have indicated in this regard how “massive psychic trauma shapes the internal representations of reality, becoming an unconscious organizing principle passed on by parents and internalized by their children” (372).

This has been further studied by Robert M. Price who examined the Holocaust as a source of (un)conscious symbolism as well as the influence of the imagery of the Holocaust and the world of pre-war Europe on the identity on children of survivors. He noted, for example, how several subjects in their dreams and daydreams were inclined to strongly identify with the victims, to express deep anxiety about loss and to attempt to exert mastery over Holocaust symbols. Price relates how some subjects described “having daydreams about Nazis who had escaped

punishment and then killing them” (75, 88-91).10

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The third area is connected to affectivity, which expresses itself in “annihilation anxiety,” oppressive nightmares, depressive feelings of loss and mourning, conflicts concerning anger and guilt as well as being highly vulnerable to stressful situations (Kellerman 74). Aaron Hass suggests in this context that guilt and anger are closely related: “Those made to feel guilty invariably grow to resent that onerous burden. Themes of anger and the mishandling of that emotion have been commonly observed among children of survivors” (28). The themes of guilt and anger also appear in many of Steinfeld’s short stories, in particular “Ida Solomon’s Play” and “Dancing at the Club Holocaust”.

The final area is that of interpersonal functioning, which manifests itself in exaggerated family attachments or exaggerated independence as well as difficulties with establishing close relationships and dealing with interpersonal conflicts (Kellerman 75). Speaking about the excessively strong bonds in survivor families, Has notes that survivors’ cautious and guarded attitude towards a malignant world has invariably led them to be overprotective of their children (Price 116). As a result, many children of survivors have struggled to maintain their connection to their parents as well as distancing themselves from them and develop an independent identity, a process which was further complicated by their profound sense of responsibility for psychosocial care for their parents (Kellerman 79; Hass 30, 43).

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did he not want to think about who he considered important to him, but that he also experienced anger when the interviewer asked him to do so” (110-111).

Besides these possibly debilitating psychic effects, it is also important to note several more positive attributes of the second generation. Hass found that many children expressed profound compassion towards human suffering as well as high levels of resilience in the face of adversity, precisely because they had vicariously experienced so much psychic pain (47). Kellerman thus suggests that the second generation continually struggles with “a contradictory mixture of vulnerabilities and resilience very similar to their Holocaust survivor parents” (70).

Since these psychosocial themes in the lives of children of Holocaust survivors, especially the tendency to vicariously experience their parents’ painful past, connect with issues such as the complex process of (over)identification, I will use this discussion as a social context for a more informed appreciation of Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” as well as Dominick LaCapra’s work on the concepts of “acting-out” and “working-through”.

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therefore does not simply refer to temporal delay, but rather denotes “an uneasy oscillation between continuity and rupture” (Hirsch, Generation of Postmemory 106). Postmemory is not so much a method, but rather “a structure of inter- and transgenerational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience. It is a consequence of traumatic recall but (unlike posttraumatic stress disorder) at a generational remove” (Hirsch, Generation of Postmemory 106). While the second generation’s relation to their parent’s past approaches the vividness of actual memories, it is important to emphasize that this connection is not characterized by recollection but rather “imaginative investment, projection and creation” (Hirsch, Generation of Postmemory 106). The manner in which postmemory functions is thus mainly preconditioned by what Aby Warburg considered as a broad cultural “storehouse of pre-established expressive forms,” or the “space between thought and the deepest emotional impulses” (Hirsch, Generation of Postmemory 108). Steinfeld’s post-Holocaust writing seriously engages with questions of history, memory and identity and can thus be considered as being motivated by the work of postmemory.

Marita Grimwood indicates in this regard that narrative, memory and biological inheritance together shape “postmemorial identities”. She notes that many children of Holocaust survivors find themselves “dominated” or buried by their parents’ past. As such, identity cannot be reduced

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How much more ambivalent is this curiosity for children of Holocaust survivors, exiled from a world that has ceased to exist, that has been violently erased. Theirs is a different desire, at once more powerful and more conflicted: the need not just to feel and to know, but also to re-member, to re-build, to re-incarnate to replace and repair. (Hirsch, Family Frames 242-243)

Particularly this diasporic dimension of postmemory manifested in a profound sense of exile and displacement is also a significant feature of Steinfeld’s work. His fiction is thus partly motivated by what Hirsch calls “an aesthetics of postmemory,” which is “a diasporic aesthetics of temporal and spatial exile that needs simultaneously to rebuild and to mourn” (Hirsch, Family Frames, 245). The work of postmemory is thus importantly motivated by the desire to imaginatively reconnect with the past, particularly to mobilize the creative imagination in service of reparative and restorative aims in relation to the revenant aftereffects of traumatic historical events which occurred before one’s birth. It is precisely this restorative aim of postmemory, with its need to both “rebuild and to mourn” that might be fruitfully related to Dominick LaCapra’s work on the trauma-theoretic concepts of “acting-out” and “working-through”.

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inscription, and it hauntingly returns as the repressed” (LaCapra 70). An important aspect of “acting-out” is thus being absorbed or caught up in compulsively reliving traumatic experiences from the past as if they were occurring in the present, resulting in the obliteration of any clear-cut temporal distinctions (LaCapra 21, 66). In contrast, “working-through” is “an articulatory practice” that enables a traumatized subject “to distinguish between past and present and to recall in memory that something happened to one (or one’s people) back then while realizing that one is living here and now with openings to the future” (LaCapra 22). However, it is important to emphasize that “acting-out” does not always necessarily inhibit the process of “working-through,” since while one may still be caught in repetitive conflict with the past, this ultimately result in the adoption of a more critical perspective that might contribute to “working-through” (LaCapra 70). Nonetheless, LaCapra also acknowledges that “especially with respect to an event of such incredible dimensions as the Holocaust, it may also be impossible for those born later ever to transcend this event fully and to put it in the past, simply as the past” (LaCapra 152). Kaplan and Wang further indicate that “acting out is a melanchology possession of the subject by the repressed past, on the model of the dissociated self. Dialectically, working through is an attempt of breakout” (Broderick 181). It is thus a significant similarity between LaCapra’s

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genocide generation respond psychologically and imaginatively to the legacy bequeathed?” (Sicher 185). The following chapters will explore the manner in which J. J. Steinfeld’s work responds to the seemingly endless psychic reverberations of the Shoah on subsequent generations and how this relates to the construction of a viable post-Holocaust Jewish identity.11

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Chapter II ‘’Disfigurement of the Spirit’’:

Holocaust Tattoos and Second-Generation Identity

J. J. Steinfeld’s collection of Holocaust-inflected and Jewish-themed short stories Dancing at the Club Holocaust (1993) is populated with young alienated protagonists who, often in a series of tragic-absurdist scenarios, vicariously appropriate or re-enact their parents’ Holocaust experiences in search for comprehending a seemingly inscrutable past and constructing their own identity. Many of these characters belong to the relatively privileged strata of Canadian society and are virtually free from the sense of imminent threat and acute vulnerability that is the abiding companion of the previous generation of Jews. Yet, precisely this absence of anxiety in the younger generation seems to collapse into another form of Jewish angst, namely an anxiety of absence, in which they experience excruciating guilt towards Holocaust survivors when they compare their own luxurious sheltered lives to the terrible existential conditions of the Shoah. Steinfeld’s characters’ anguished guilt and devastating sorrow tends to manifest itself in a sense of apocalyptic outrage at the void of life in the wake of the Holocaust, which in turn only serves to exacerbate their Jewish identity anxiety. A particularly powerful motif in relation to this second-generation guilt and anguish is the Holocaust tattoo as an icon of remembrance. The concentration camp number is, especially for the second generation, one of the most evocative and indelible symbols of the Holocaust, because it is often one of the strongest images in their childhood memories of their parents and wider family.12 Since the concentration camp tattoo is a pervasive motif in Steinfeld’s post-Holocaust fiction, this chapter will explore its significance in relation to Holocaust remembrance and the construction of second-generation Jewish identity.

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In this chapter I will therefore analyze Steinfeld’s short stories “The Apostate’s Tattoo” from

Dancing at the Club Holocaust (1993) as well as the more recent “The Never-Again Man” from

Anton Chekhov Was Never in Charlottetown (2000), because these stories are particularly

effective in their exploration of the abiding tension between commemorating the past via the bodily tattoo and the tendency to mimetically repeat historical trauma. Whereas Steinfeld’s characters strive to acquire their parents’ Holocaust tattoo in order to find some form of cathartic relief or spiritual redemption, their acts of remembrance go tragically awry and lead instead to increasingly terrible forms of violent self-wounding.

In Steinfeld’s early short story “The Apostate’s Tattoo,” Sam Morgan, a thirty-six year old History Professor, after having recently visited Europe, experiences a personal transformation that leads him to reclaim his Jewish identity and obtain his mother’s concentration camp number. In framing the protagonist’s quest to acquire his mother’s tattoo as a pilgrimage to a holy shrine, Steinfeld suggests that Sam’s journey is motivated by a quasi-religious devotion to a sacred past as well as a search for spiritual redemption from the horrific aspects of that very same history. Throughout his compulsive trip to the tattoo shop, it becomes evident that Sam is monomaniacally focused on acquiring his mother’s number in that his gaze is fixated on “some faraway, mystical landmark”, which he thinks will help him “to rehabilitate my soul” (12, 13).13

Given Sam’s feverish, virtually mystical veneration of the image of the concentration camp number, it might be illuminating to briefly note Oren Baruch Stier’s insightful distinction between what he terms “Holocaust icons” and “Holocaust idols”.14

By “Holocaust icons” Stier refers to “those representations which, though complex and inspiring a certain level of

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Jane Caplan notes in her “’Indelible memories’: the tattooed body as theatre of memory’” that “tattoos have a strong affiliation, almost forgotten until recently, to religious commitment and to pilgrimage, which fed into their later and more familiar secular denotations of mobility and memorialization” (Tilmans, Van Vree and Winter 125).

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discomfort, nonetheless communicate something of the meaning of the past without overly distorting it,” whereas “Holocaust idols” are representations that “offend not so much because they cross some line of propriety… but because they demand allegiance more to the image itself and its own mode of presentation than to what it purports to represent” (32). Stier further remarks concerning the potential of “Holocaust icons” turning into “Holocaust idols”: “When the icon’s memorial trajectory is turned in a different direction—inward or toward some contemporary, immediate form of redemption—idolatry rears its ugly head. Icons are dynamic; idols static. A religious icon is a medium for worship; an idol is itself the object of worship” (32).15 Stier’s distinction between “Holocaust icons” and “Holocaust idols” elucidate Sam’s obsessive devotion to, if not festishization of, the image of the concentration camp number itself. Since Sam has wholly equated his own identity with that of the six-digit number, this suggests that he has vicariously appropriated, in an almost literal fashion, the specific historical experience and position of the concentration camp inmate. It is thus noteworthy that Sam “knew the number as well as his own name; perhaps the number was his own name – or even more indelible than a name” (18). This complete equation between number and name is evocative of the experience of Holocaust survivors who have indicated that, once they entered Auschwitz, they had no other ‘name’ than the filthy six-digit number of their concentration camp tattoo.16

Sam turns the “icon” of the concentration camp number into an “idol,” because he primarily desires to obtain the tattoo for its purported ability to offer him immediate cathartic relief. When

15

Stier further notes: “In embodying memory, icons act as true mediators for memory’s enactment, while idols serve as false gods in the quest for memorial embodiment” (32).

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Sam finally shows his tattooed forearm to his wife Sylvie, he exclaims “Voilá!” with “his voice strong with redemption” while subsequently insisting on his rehabilitation: “Now I will be fine. This act was essential, believe me, Sylvie” (19). It is precisely Sam’s expectation of virtually instantaneous historical closure or what Stier calls a relatively easy “contemporary, immediate form of redemption” that makes his quest for his mother’s tattoo a form of idolatrous remembrance (32). Despite his declaration that “Ancestors are everything. No more deaf ears to the past,” Sam’s act is ironically idolatrous in that “Holocaust idols” erase “the voice of the past in favor of the more audible noise of the present” (Stier 32). Sam’s act of commemoration and identification thus effaces the distinction between past and present and is as such a form of remembrance that rather tends to elide the past in attempting to establish a relationship to it.17 Sam’s commemorative and identificatory gesture foregrounds a tragic-absurd paradox of historical remembrance in that his recent reclamation of his Jewish heritage in honor of his parents stands in tension with his bodily tattoo, which is a violation of orthodox Judaic law. When Sam informs the tattooist about his desire to obtain a tattoo of his mother’s concentration camp number, he tells him that he never had such a request in seventeen years while “glancing suspiciously at Sam’s skullcap” (17). For Sam, his memorial act is thus simultaneously a

transgressive as well as transformative undertaking, both a desecration of the body and a sacred

form of embodied memory. Steinfeld therefore highlights the tension in second generation remembrance between honoring the past in ways that pay homage to the socio-cultural dimensions of the Jewish heritage and commemorative strategies in the contemporary world, which often stand in stark opposition to more traditional Jewish forms of remembrance.

17

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Jewish cultural subjects and changed his Americanized name “Sam Morgan” back to his original Yiddish name “Shlomo Markovitz” (13). Before his European trip, Sam almost completely suppressed his Jewish identity, but after having visited Poland and Germany he has immersed himself in Jewish history, language and tradition and in so doing appropriated the cultural remnants of European Jewry as a way to connect with the soul of his murdered ancestors. This might further be illustrated by Alain Finkielkraut who argues in his The Imaginary Jew that “memory of the Holocaust must extend to memory of the Jewish community and culture based on the common language of Yiddish that the Holocaust destroyed” (Apel 182). Steinfeld seems to indicate that Holocaust remembrance is intrinsically linked to both a mourning and celebration of the pre-war East-European Jewish culture that was virtually eradicated during World War II.18 Through the tragic absurdity of Sam’s failed bodily memory of his mother’s tattoo, Steinfeld therefore draws attention to the profound ambivalences and difficulties of second-generation memory and raises controversial questions about Holocaust remembrance, which are of great contemporary socio-cultural significance.19 Steinfeld further suggests that a total fixation on the icons of atrocity seems to constitute a form of remembrance reminiscent of what LaCapra terms “acting-out”. However, a knowledge of the Holocaust mediated through the cultural remnants of

the Jewish community might better facilitate a process of “working-through” that allows one to engage with historical trauma while also maintaining cognizance of the life-affirming aspects of Jewish history and tradition, which thus emerge as a more fruitful soil to ground a viable and spiritually resilient post-Holocaust Jewish identity. Several of these themes related to the

18

This emphasis on the value of the Jewish heritage is also present in Steinfeld’s story/play “A Room of Pure Remembrance” about second-generation group therapy sessions. It is significant that the Old Doctor likes to end his sessions by reading from some Jewish cultural texts: “It is the Old Doctor’s graceful way of raising a Jewish banner high and attempting to disperse the stench of the crematoria from the room” (Would You Hide Me? 132).

19

Recently, a significant number of young Israeli Jews have acquired Holocaust tattoos to memorialize their

grandparents:

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dynamics of identification and remembrance also resurface in Steinfeld’s more recent short story “The Never-Again Man”. This story features an ex-government archivist obsessed with pursuing Nazi war criminals, who after having been interrogated by Canadian police officers for his participation in vehement demonstrations against anti-Semitism, is tempted to obtain a concentration camp tattoo. However, in contrast to Sam Morgan in “The Apostate’s Tattoo,” this protagonist does not acquire a tattoo from a tattoo parlor, but creates a self-inflicted Holocaust inscription before he passes out in a downtown bar.

By ironically juxtaposing the exceedingly dispassionate and restrained Canadian RMCP officer with the vehemently militant Jewish protagonist, Steinfeld raises poignant social-cultural questions about Jewish-Canadian relations in connection with Holocaust remembrance. When the Jewish protagonist exclaims during his interrogation that “The War lives in my blood,” the Canadian Mountie “didn’t understand nor want to understand” and simply admonished him to “just forget World War II, for your mental health” (156).20

When the Mountie merely smiles and scratches his chin upon hearing the protagonist argue that forgetting is the greatest crime for a Jew, he informs him of the motto “Never Again” at the heart of the State of Israel saying: “Without believing that lesson of history, I might have grown up to be exactly like you” (156).

This interrogation scene therefore constitutes what Alan L. Berger, speaking about Steinfeld’s early work, aptly describes as “a searing indictment of the dissonance that exists between the Holocaust and the indifference of Canadian culture” (76). Steinfeld thus provides a trenchant critique of Canadian historical complacency with regard to the Holocaust as seen through the, albeit distorted, lens of a fervently fanatic Jewish-Canadian activist.

20

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Steinfeld’s ironic social critique particularly consists in the glaringly absurd disporportionality between the relative complacency of the Canadian city policemen and the protagonist’s maniacal quest for historical justice. Whereas the protagonist simply wants to talk about “the need for justice if there was ever to be even a semblance of sanity in the world,” the policemen are “only interested in my penchant for causing disruption. They wouldn’t even forgive me my three-days’ growth of beard, I believed” (157). Ironically, the city policemen also initially treat the protagonist, in contrast to his self-image as a bona fide Jewish avenger, merely as a drunken public agitor without paying any attention to his ethnic identity. The policemen were “most critical of my long history of social activism, as though being a Jew were irrelevant to the case. The policemen seemed to regard my behavior as no different from the behavior of the war criminals I pursued with increasing preoccupation” (157). Steinfeld thus provides an ironic social critique of both Canadian attitudes towards and perceptions of Jews in relation to the Holocaust as well as the ultimately unproductive nature of extreme Jewish militancy. These ironic remarks thus emphasize the need for historical sensitivity and greater awareness of ethnicity in attempting to gain psychological insight into the motivations behind seemingly extreme social activism.21 In contrasting “Levicitus’ Antiquarian Book Shoppe” with “a darkened tattoo parlour,” Steinfeld seems to employ the centrality of bookishness in Jewish culture, with its mandate to ‘remember,’ to problematize the tattoo parlour as a surrogate space of cultural remembrance. The spatial juxtaposition of the two locations is further reinforced by the significance of the name of the bookstore, which is evocative of the Torahic prohibition against tattooing: “Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves” (Levicitus 19:28). Although the deathly mystique of the “darkened tattoo parlour” suddenly has an overwhelmingly alluring attraction to

21_{The protagonist says in this regard: “I felt that these two policemen were judging not only my entire life, but the}

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the protagonist, he subsequently turns from the tattoo parlour while flailing at his chest “attempting a physical, punishing retribution” and seeking refuge in the familiar bookstore (166). Both the bookstore and the tattoo parlour are further described as essentially sacred locations by the respective descriptions of “sanctuary” and “holy place”. However, only Leviticus’ with its “old smells and endless shelves of books” provides the protagonist “comfort and serenity”. Since the old owner of the bookstore “never displayed a book published after 1940,” it is particularly interesting that the protagonist experiences the book textures as “soothing medicaments” (167).22 The cumulative force of these striking contrasts between the bookstore and the tattoo parlour seem to suggest that these two locations function as two contending spaces of remembrance. Steinfeld seems to suggest that the bookstore is a more stable and constructive medium to connect to the irretrievably lost pre-Holocaust world than the Holocaust tattoo, which is portrayed as a largely death-fixated mimetic repetition of the traumatic past that irrevocably leads to a violently self-wounding form of remembrance.23 When the protagonist passes the tattoo parlour, he enthusiastically tells himself:

The idea of a tattoo made so much sense, was the act that would atone for all my mistakes and blunders. God, I yearned for a symbol, a simple handle on history and the innumerable deaths… The work of history, the vital inscription, the lifeline back through the years, disinterring graves, resurrecting the executed innocents. (165-166)

Although the protagonist thus envisions the tattoo parlour as an easy available means of personal atonement as well as a way to symbolically repair the injuries of the traumatic past and vindicate

22

In this regard, it is significant that “the Jewish-books section used to be part of the History section,” but that the protagonist convinced the old man “to put in a special subsection for books related to Judaism” (166).

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Holocaust victims, he tragically replicates the very suffering that his tattoo was meant to redress. Entrapped in corrosive melancholia, the protagonist’s consolidated rage and anguish eventually erupt in the form of self-inflicted wounds, which contain a tragic-absurd dimension in that his flesh wounds constitute a traumatic reenactment of the past that directly contradicts the

semantic content of the etched words “NEVER AGAIN”. This phrase clearly refers to the

injunction to remember the Holocaust in order to prevent it in the future, but the protagonist transposes himself into the past of the Holocaust and constantly relives its belated psychic effects. The protagonist’s tortured form of self-wounding remembrance can aptly be illustrated by what Marianne Hirsch describes as “the desire and the hesitation, the necessity and the impossibility of receiving the parents’ bodily experience of trauma manifested in the visual mark or tattoo” (Generation of Postmemory, 81). The protagonist’s total transposition into the empty, deadening world of historical trauma thus tends to lead to mimetic reenactment and self-wounding rather than working-through and envisioning future possibilities out of the captivity of the past.

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solidaristic social context…Social processes of mourning losses and dead loved ones may be the only effective ways of partially overcoming melancholia and depression or at least of preventing them from becoming all-consuming and incapacitating” (History and Memory 184). Since there is hardly any such “solidaristic social context,” the protagonist becomes increasingly entwined in melancholia. The self-inflicted wounds of the protagonist is thus representative of many of Steinfeld’s characters, who, as Rachel N. Baum has perceptibly noted, are “alone in [their] obsession, alone in [their] desire to create an ethical relationship to the past” (105). In demonstrating the futility of his characters’ propensity to vicariously appropriate their parents’ suffering, Steinfeld seems to implicitly suggest that his characters’ re-appraisal and reclamation of their Jewish heritage is a more constructive countervailing strategy to confront the soul murder and outrageous spiritual devastation of the Holocaust than the vicarious appropriation of icons of Holocaust atrocity anchored in the world of historical trauma. Steinfeld’s protagonist’s violent self-wounding can thus be seen as a morbid memorandum, driven by a guilt-ridden fight against forgetfulness, so consuming in its pain and overwhelming in its futility to try to relive the past. This fight against forgetfulness will be further explored in the next chapter through an analysis of how Steinfeld’s characters attempt to solidify their

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Chapter III “Bruising Memory Dances”:

Traumatic Re-enactment as Remembrance and Revenge

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Many of Steinfeld’s characters fantasize about burning, shooting or otherwise destroying Nazis, German sympathizers, Holocaust deniers, and locations that serve as gathering spots for antisemites” (76). This chapter will examine Steinfeld’s short stories “Ida Solomon’s Play” and “Dancing at the Club Holocaust,” because these both involve memory acts representative of Steinfeld’s work that can be seen as postmemorial efforts at making sense of the past. My approach to analyze these efforts is LaCapra’s work on the trauma-theoretic concepts of “acting-out” and “working-through,” because these concepts help to elucidate the performative acts of the protagonists. These acts mediate what Hirsch calls “the psychology of postmemory” as a response to fragmentation and irretrievable loss (Generation of Postmemory 5).

In Steinfeld’s short story “Ida Solomon’s Play,” a daughter of a Holocaust survivor repeatedly performs a one-woman play about the life of her mother Ida Solomon. The daughter reenacts several scenes from her mother’s pre-war adolescence in Radom Poland to her solitary suicide in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1997.

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stages of her life demonstrates that the daughter, like the protagonists of chapter two, have not managed to mourn her mother in a way that enables her to recontextualize the loss of her mother into her own life narrative. Her mimetic reenactment of her mother’s life shows that her own narrative has been totally eclipsed by that of her mother. This eclipse of her own narrative is illustrative of her failure at “working-through” the traumatic loss of her mother, because as LaCapra suggests, “Working through trauma involves gaining critical distance on those experiences and recontextualising them in ways that permit a reengagement with ongoing concerns and future possibilities” (History in Transit 45). While the daughter suggests that she “wrote the play to keep from jumping off my balcony,” which seems like a form of “working-through” her traumatic loss of her mother, the play and her performance of her mother’s memory do not ultimately allow her to gain “critical distance” from the past, and she fails to recontextualize her mother’s experiences, but rather mimetically repeats them. Steinfeld thus suggests that forms of “working-through” that do not enable gaining enough critical distance from the past collapse back into forms of what LaCapra terms “acting-out,” the tendency of “compulsively reliving past experience” (67) (Writing History 24).24

Through portraying the daughter as feeling increasingly compelled to continue her dramatic performance beyond the ‘proper’ confines of the theatrical stage, Steinfeld problematizes the processes of “acting-out” or “working-through” as having radically blurred suggesting that while performative expressions might be a helpful response to trauma, they might also lead one to assume the burden of memory to the point of collapse, as also seen in “The Never-Again Man”. Since the protagonist feels to

24

Given that “Ida Solomon’s Play” was first published in Steinfeld’s short story collection Forms of Captivity and

Escape from 1988, this reference to “jumping off my balcony” might possibly evoke Primo Levi’s death on April

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need to prepare before her theatre performance, and calm down afterwards, this helps to gradually break down the distinction between theatrical stage performance and current Canadian reality grows increasingly vague for her, even to the point that her memory performance is, in LaCapra’s words, “the reliving or reincarnation of a past that is experienced as fully present”

(History and Memory 104).

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which one remains dedicated or at least bound” (Writing History 22). The daughters’ captivity in her mother’s past is partly shattered by her confrontation with the authentic blue numbers on the forearm of the Holocaust survivor in the dreary bar. Her play is now shown to be a “madly punishing and creative way to make sense of the past, to counteract my guilt and justify remaining alive” (70). Steinfeld thus portrays her postmemorial effort to reincarnate the past to the point of vicariously appropriating and literally ‘acting-out’ other’s traumatic experiences, similar to the characters from chapter two who feel in need of counteracting their guilt and anguish, as both an affront on the other as well as the self.

This affront on the self, this time in the form of a traumatic revenge fantasy, is particularly vividly depicted in “Dancing at the Club Holocaust” which involves Reuben Sklar, a son of Holocaust survivors, and a Canadian Jewish psychiatrist who displays incredulity toward his patient’s claim to frequently attend a neo-Nazi nightclub called “Club Holocaust” in New York. By juxtaposing the psychiatrist’s scrupulously ordered and hyperhygienic office with Sklar’s tortured Holocaust-infused psyche together with its imagined neo-Nazi basement club, Steinfeld forcefully depicts the absurdity of a detached, objective analysis in understanding the enormity of the Holocaust and its terrible psychological aftereffects.25 Particularly the glass imagery, such as the double-sized desk protected by a sheet of polished glass and the long window that “opened an unconscious eye over the city (31),” conveys a sense of purported intelligibility, rational transparency as well as security and immunity, which the anguished patient considers as a retreat from the ravages of history and remembrance. Sklar therefore calls his shrink as well as his ex-wife, who are both Jews that have successfully assimilated themselves in contemporary

25

This theme also reappears in Steinfeld’s poem “History and Its Words” whose last line is the following: “orderliness and ritual and conjuring / no match for history and its words (Where War Finds You, p. 7). The

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Canadian society, “a comfortable Jew” and “a forgetter” thereby forging his own second-generation identity in opposition to his fellow Jews less tortured than himself (39).

Sklar’s adoption of this tortured type of postmemorial identity, particularly by repeatedly and belatedly subjecting himself to, what Marianne Hirsch calls “the cutting and wounding force of traumatic repetition,” by watching the neo-Nazi’s debauched entertainment, leads him to increasingly terrible forms of self-wounding (215). Having revealed to the psychiatrist that his mother killed herself after the war because she couldn’t dance anymore due to her crippled legs as a result of having been tortured by the Nazis, she tells him: “My mother could barely walk… It’s taken me all my life to comprehend that my mother had been a dancer before the War” (32). Elaborating on her concept of “postmemory,” Hirsch indicates that the second generation “remembers” their parents’ experiences, “as the narratives and images with which they grew up, but that are so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right” (“Surviving Images” 9). Since Sklar’s only narrative or image is that of his crippled mother being unable to dance, he develops a traumatic revenge fantasy that is precisely the mirror image of his memory of his mother. However, before he acts out this fantasy he attempts to further understand his mother’s memory and solidifies his second-generation identity by repeatedly

visiting the neo-Nazi club by watching “with grieving eyes” various notorious anti-Semitic propaganda films, such as Jud Süss (1940) and Der ewige Jude (1940) as well as the sexual degradation and humiliation of a club member impersonating a Jew (35).26 His memory of his mother is thus in a typical postmemorial manner mediated through a mix of childhood recollections and cultural representations that allow him to revisit a traumatic past that occurred largely before his birth.

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The images of the neo-Nazi club also increasingly cause Sklar to appropriate his mother’s past as his own. This can be seen in the fact that Reuben Sklar thinks he saw his mother’s concentration camp number on his own “renegade hand” with which he broke the mirror of the psychiatrist after having viewed the denigrating scenes at the neo-Nazi basement. Michael Greenstein has further perceptibly noted that the glass imagery in the psychiatrist’s office, in particular the broken mirror, is evocative of Kristallnacht (1222).27 The fact that Sklar deliberately cuts himself with the shards of glass seems to be a symbolic gesture that both shows his identification with his mother’s past and by which he performs his second-generation identity in opposition to the “comfortable” Jewish psychiatrist in his “plush office” with its protective glass (38). Significantly, the Holocaust tattoo thus reappears in this story are an image that directly leads to Sklar’s wounding, which reinforces the themes of mimetic repetition of the past and self-wounding forms of remembrance discussed in chapter two. In addition to the theme of remembrance, I will now focus more particularly on traumatic reenactment as a form of revenge. Sklar ironically uses a dance performance from a Nazi propaganda film to shape his revenge act, as a postmemorial effort to imaginatively repair the past, a symbolic rather than simply financial “Wiedergutmachung” for his mother’s crippled legs that so desired to dance (32). When two-third of the way through Jud Süss various members of Club Holocaust begin to dance in couples, Reuben is reminded of the incredible Totentanz performed in Paracelsus (1943), in which Death, in the person of a juggler, enters a town in the midst of a plague and invites the citizens to join him in a celebratory dance.28 However, in imaginatively returning to the past, he

27

It might be interesting to compare Steinfeld's narrative to Arthur Miller’s play Broken Glass (1994) about a couple in New York City in 1938 in which the character Sylvia becomes partially paralyzed from the waist down after reading about the events of Kristallnacht in the newspaper. Not wholly unlike the psychiatrist in Steinfeld’s story, in Miller’s play, Dr. Hyman thinks that Sylvia's paralysis is psychosomatic.

28

Harald Kreutzberg’s “Dance of Death” dance scene in G. W. Pabst’s film Paracelsus (1943):

Heartbeats of Madness Overheard