Koltun-Fromm, Ken

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Haverford College: Haverford Scholarship

Haverford College Haverford Scholarship Faculty Publications Religion 2003 Shaping Losses: Cultural Memory and the Holocaust [book review] Ken Koltun-Fromm Haverford College, kkoltunf@haverford.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.haverford.edu/religion_facpubs Repository Citation Koltun-Fromm, Ken. "Shaping Losses: Cultural Memory and the Holocaust [book review]." Biography 26 (2003): 151-53. This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Religion at Haverford Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Haverford Scholarship. For more information, please contact nmedeiro@haverford.edu. Shaping Losses: Cultural Memory and the Holocaust (review)Koltun-Fromm, Ken.Biography, Volume 26, Number 1, Winter 2003, pp. 151-153 (Article)Published by University of Hawai'i PressDOI: 10.1353/bio.2003.0027For additional information about this article                                                       Access provided by Haverford College (22 Mar 2013 16:31 GMT)http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/bio/summary/v026/26.1koltun-fromm.htmlAfter Holroyd’s years of determinedly solid research all over the world,after a bulldog English determination not to give in, is Works on Paper worthreading? Yes, because it is an antidote to the learned astronomers of criticismderided by the greatest Londoner, Samuel Johnson, in favor of the more fun-damental human qualities of emotion, imagination and, by implication, will.George SimsonJulia Epstein and Lori Hope Lefkovitz, eds. Shaping Losses: Cultural Mem-ory and the Holocaust. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001. 239 pp. ISBN0-2520-2438-9, $49.95 cloth; ISBN 0-2520-6949-8, $21.95 paper.The Holocaust is weighty, both as a cultural power and as an inexhaustiblesource for loss and guilt. It appears so momentous, so blindly other, that wecan either lose ourselves in its overpowering vastness, or carefully reconstructour identities without thinking too much about “dead Jews.” I, for one, havefollowed the latter course, but Epstein and Lefkovitz’s edited volume on cul-tural memory and the Holocaust have made such a willful act far more dif-ficult. Indeed, the various essays in the volume argue that conflicting mem-ories and narratives inform Holocaust remembrance. To evade or embraceare no longer, and really never have been, our cultural options for encoun-tering human tragedy. Instead, moments of absence and presence, loyaltyand betrayal, guilt and freedom shape and inspire cultural memories of loss.The title of this book, Shaping Losses, evokes these conflicting pressures, andspeaks to the deep human need to shape and control the very things thatremain beyond our grasp. The Holocaust is just that kind of thing that wecontinually reconfigure, even as we know that it evades all borders, and defiesall shapes.Epstein and Lefkovitz have configured their text on cultural memory intofour parts: 1) Journeys: Recollection and Return, 2) Images: Photograph,Film, Sculpture, 3) Voices: Memoirs and Stories, and 4) Legacies: Paradoxand Ambivalence. The most powerful and quietly elegant piece in the volumeis Irene Raab Epstein’s recollection of her experience just after surviving theconcentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. Raab Epstein (the editor’s mother)recalls her friendship with Edith, another camp survivor, and their short butintense, if not fragile relationship. The writing is compact, clear, and disclos-es only what we need to know: “In my hospital room in Karlstad, the highpoint of my day was the arrival of the mail.” After recounting one such letterfrom Edith, in which all hope for a “normal life” had been “crushed andeverything seems dark again,” Raab Epstein concludes her essay: “That wasthe last time I ever heard from Edith Domber.” For the reader—or at leastReviews 15109-reviews  3/12/03  9:25 AM  Page 151for this one—Edith lives beyond Raab Epstein’s account to provoke dream-like images of friendship, death, broken promises, and a whole range of per-sonal reflections triggered by a writing style that invites reader response.I emphasize this sense of playful and private openness because the edi-tors labor to close it down. In the introduction to the volume, Epstein andLefkovitz tell us exactly what Raab Epstein is up to: the story reminds us that“any effort to shape loss cannot give voice to the silence of the dead or beginto imagine what meanings the millions of the murdered might have con-tributed to the world.” This may be true, but I would not have read it outof the story if Epstein and Lefkovitz had not already read it in. One sensesthat the editors—both children of Holocaust survivors—are protecting theirparents. I would have preferred a more exploratory introduction, one thatbroadened the powerful thesis of the collection:Giving some form to emptiness is, however flawed, a necessary betrayal, and wetherefore find ourselves obliged to engage in the process as though to fulfill asacred duty. It is a duty to participate in the making of cultural memory and notleave it to others. (8–9) The betrayal, in this case, is participating too much, and thereby limiting thecultural memory of other readers.There are many fine essays in this volume, including Froma Zeitlin’sreading of Henri Raczymow’s Un Cri sans voix and Jaroslaw Rymkiewicz’sUmschlagplatz (Part 3: Voices), and Lefkovitz’s moving and profoundly hon-est account of inherited memory as a “repetition compulsion” (Part 4: Lega-cies). Excellent as well is Carol Zemel’s essay on Roman Vishniac’s photo-graphs of East European Jewry (Part 2: Images), in which “cultural identityis standardized, drenched in melodrama and pathos, and driven into stereo-type.” Vishniac’s photos present the familiar trope of the Jew “as exotic otherand eternal sufferer” (85). Julia Epstein’s “Remember to Forget: The Prob-lem of Traumatic Cultural Memory” (Part 3: Voices) broadens the volumeby exploring common tensions in exilic identity, and seeks “connections tothose who have lived through other genocides” (196). Whatever their differ-ences, human tragedies evoke traumatic cultural memories that exploreabsence, loss, and the discontinuities in identity formation. Epstein turns toToni Morrison’s account of “disremembering” in her Beloved to explain thekind of remembering that best “activate[s] the consciousness with respect toincontrovertible, unredemptive loss” (188). Disremembering “commemora-tively reinforces the meanings of the past through a collective remembering”(192), and hints at a cathartic retrieval of the past while not sliding into152 Biography 26.1 (Winter 2003)09-reviews  3/12/03  9:25 AM  Page 152salvific redemption. The scars remain, as they do on Sethe’s own body inBeloved, but they also make healing possible.The insightful essays are balanced, unfortunately, by more difficult read-ing. These works surely contain profound thoughts and important insights,but I admit that I do not know what they are. Sara Horowitz, for example,uncovers a fascinating allusion to wounded tongues in post-Holocaust Jew-ish memory, but the conclusions she draws from the disturbing and gen-dered image move beyond anything I can discover in the images themselves.Then there is Claire Kahane’s “Geographies of Loss,” and Marianne Hirschand Susan Rubin Suleiman’s “Material Memory: Holocaust Testimony inPost-Holocaust Art.” As I read both essays, I continually return to a questionJulia Epstein poses in her essay: “Are these elegant turns of phrase merelysemantic muddles, or do they designate something fundamental about theways in which we are shaped by memory and the ways memory functions asthe core of identity?” Both essays, I am convinced, discover important ten-sions in cultural memory, but their linguistic style tends to obscure the pro-ductive richness of their ideas. The contrast between these essays and theopening one by Irene Raab Epstein is dramatic, and reveals a good dealabout the variety of language games employed to discuss the absence andpresence of tragic loss.Epstein and Lefkovitz have collected an admirable mix of essays onHolocaust memory that are critically honest, intensely personal, and coura-geously reflective about the scope and meaning of unbearable tragedy. Thisbook tests its readers in multiple ways, and moved this reader to relive form-ative memories that still agitate and disturb. These are challenging essays toread, in no small part because they speak beyond the Holocaust tragedy toexplore the deep human need to shape loss and to memorialize absence.Ken Koltun-FrommJacqueline Vansant. Reclaiming Heimat: Trauma and Mourning in Memoirsby Jewish Austrian Reémigrés. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2001. 204 pp.ISBN 0-8143-2951-9, $34.95.In the acknowledgements which preface her book on Austrian reémigrés,Jacqueline Vansant informs us that “in addition to learning the dialogicnature of writing a book, I have also come to realize the importance of nottaking myself too seriously when working on a very serious project.” Indeed,what is striking about this contribution to exile and memoir studies is themodesty of its approach, always seeking to allow the émigrés to speak forthemselves, while nevertheless providing a lucid structural and analyticalReviews 15309-reviews  3/12/03  9:25 AM  Page 153

Shaping Losses: Cultural Memory and the Holocaust [book review]

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Shaping Losses: Cultural Memory and the Holocaust [book review]

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