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For Amos Funkenstein, 1937-1995
There are no witnesses of the concentration camp phenomenon in all its totality. There are only witnesses to daily, partial facts.
Pierre-Serge Choumoff, in Les échos de la mémoire 1
I
In Zakhor, his poignant study of "Jewish History and Jewish Memory," Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi calculates that "the Holocaust has already engendered more historical research than any single event in Jewish history." 2 And yet, Yerushalmi goes on to insist that there is "no doubt whatever that its [the Holocaust's] image is being shaped, not at the historian's anvil, but in the novelist's crucible" (98). But if it is true that the modes of sense-making and formal emplotment of the two genres can never simply be collapsed together, the distinction between the ways in which the historian and the novelist structure their narratives is neither as absolute nor as easy to demarcate as Yerushalmi's antithesis requires. 3 The gravity of the catastrophe, as well as its radical implications for our understanding of modernity, have made the ethics of representation itself an unavoidable question, directly inflecting, and often even circumscribing, both the interpretive and the rhetorical choices within which any discourse, whether fictional or historical, can be cast and still seem ethically responsible to its subject matter. 4 More strictly than with most other themes, there is a strong and articulat critical consensus that serious works about the Shoah need to acknowledge and explicitly register the problematic nature of their undertaking. A certain self-restraint of the interpretive imagination must be seen to accompany the scrupulousness with which factual evidence is assembled, analyzed, and deployed, and this obligation arises irrespective of the genre or the particular medium of representation.
Yet for all its apparent rigor, as soon as one begins to probe the actual terms of that ethical demand, it is curious how narrowly conceived its range really is: all of its strictures and prohibitions apply exclusively to the depiction of the victims directly caught up in the genocide. There is no parallel attentiveness to the ethical burden of representation when the subject is the lives of those same people in the years before they became victims of the Nazi terror. The requirements of historical carefulness, allied to imaginative austerity, that are regarded...