SOURCE: Milowitz, Steven. “Holocaust Writing.” In Philip Roth Considered: The Concentrationary Universe of the American Writer, pp. 147-65. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000.

[In the following essay, Milowitz examines Roth's treatment of the Holocaust in such works as The Professor of Desire, The Prague Orgy, Deception, Operation Shylock, and others.]

Why come to the battered heart of Europe if not to examine just this? Why come into the world at all? ‘Students of literature, you must conquer your squeamishness once and for all! You must face the unseemly thing itself! You must come off your high horse! There, there is your final exam.’

—Philip Roth, The Professor of Desire

“Black milk” enters our consciousness as one of the most remarked upon and treasured metaphors of the Holocaust, encapsulating of the reversal of normalcy and the metamorphosis of what once nourished into that which sickens. Milk, the breast's incorruptible source of life, is transformed into the poison the prisoners drink as they dig their own graves in Paul Celan's “Fugue of Death.” A poem about retaining autonomy while under the command of an avaricious destroyer and about the disintegration of values and of civilizing concepts that once sustained the speakers, it is also a poem about poetry and music, about the rhymes and verses that are sustained even after catastrophe.

Its music, its beauty, the cadence of its striking repetition, make problematic our relationship to it. As we read we are enveloped not so much by its sadness as by the pleasure it gives to us. The poem acts as a catharsis for our sorrow, evidence, as Lawrence Langer suggests, that “what dims the light of creation need not extinguish the lamps of language” (H&L [The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination] 15). It is, then, transformed from a poem of destruction to a poem of promise and revitalization. Pleasure and hope sing from the ashes and we recognize why Theodore Adorno and George Steiner warned so vehemently against, as Steiner put it, “an art of atrocity,” explaining that “The world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason” (123).

The immediate, clear, danger of speech is the danger of making horror palatable, making a fetish of extermination. The reader, as well as the writer, is not immune to this danger, for as he reads Levi and Kosinski he experiences an aesthetic joy in language and story. One is reading about horror, confronting disaster, and yet one is protected and distanced, a part of and apart from at once. “You're of the little pocket of Jews,” Philip is told, in Deception, “born in this century who miraculously escaped the horror, who somehow have lived unharmed in an amazing moment of affluence and security. So those who didn't escape, Jewish or not, have this fascination for you” (D [Deception] 140). Fascination connotes not merely curiosity or morbid wonder but excitement, the thrill of investigating an event beyond the realm of understanding, an inexhaustible and unique subject. It is the fascination that both moves Roth and his protagonists and which cements a sense of shame, a twentieth-century original sin.

Philip's lover asks him, “Are you that in love with suffering” (D 139). Suffering becomes eroticized, a love object to be explored and exploited. It becomes something to search out, not only for beneficence but for self-ennobling. “Enter Zuckerman, a serious person” (TPO [The Prague Orgy] 462), writes Nathan in his diary, as he makes his way through, what Roth calls, “the shrine of suffering, Kafka's occupied Prague,” questing after Sisovsky's father's Holocaust tales (CWPR [Conversations with Philip Roth] 251). Zuckerman looks to Anne Frank and to war-ravaged Prague, to “ten little stories about Nazis and Jews,” stories “about the worst life has to offer” (TPO 435), to feed “his insatiable desire to be a serious man taken seriously by all the other serious men like his father and his brother and Milton Appel” (CWPR 251). But the price of that seriousness is the guilt of knowing that it must be built upon a ghastly reality, that if it can be attained it is only because of a prior devastation, the suffering of others, like the music of Celan's “Fugue.”

To speak, then, to address the horror in any shape or form, is to be susceptible to this accusation, is, in fact, to invite it. And Roth does invite the arrows of calumny upon himself and his surrogate selves. His is an art not of self-love but of self-challenge, self-rebuttal, and self-questioning. What is often characterized as solipsism is less a fascination with his own image than a fascination with his own culpability, a culpability that begins with a fascination with the Holocaust. Holocaust writing entails a self-immolation. “I portray myself as implicated,” says Philip, “because it is not enough just to be present” (D 184). Roth's characters are not like Narcissus, in love with their own perfect image, but rather they are disappointed, remorseful, almost sickened at their uncreased features, features they envision alongside the mirror-image of the others, the victims. The pettiness, the “thinness” of their own dilemmas confronts them in the face of the omnipresent survivor (GW [The Ghost Writer] 151). “In the aftermath of that testimony,” “Philip Roth” remarks of the words of the camp-prisoner, Rosenberg, “in the aftermath of Demjanjuk's laughter and Rosenberg's rage, how could the asinine clowning of that nonsensical Pipik continue to make a claim on my life?” (OS [Operation Shylock] 303).

How much is one to disregard of one's own troubles? How much must one sacrifice? These questions attack the writer as he picks up his pen. How can he speak at all, about anything? When the questions begin, the writer becomes hedged in by doubt, restricted by his own superciliousness, the knowledge that his own pain “pales” before the truth of the destruction (OS 77). And if he does deign to take up the Holocaust, the questions become even more difficult. Beyond beautifying it, making it into a story of uplift, there is the knowledge that in the search for seriousness, in the brave attempt to escape triviality and look squarely at the faces of slaughter one will inevitably fail, one will offend, one will besmirch memory in some way, because one is seen by others and imagined by oneself as unauthentic, and so not entitled entry to that history.

The “real” Jews, many feel, are the survivors, those who have tasted the black milk: In Roth they are Tzuref, his eighteen children, and the greenie in the black hat (“Eli, the Fanatic”), Solly, the diner owner (Letting Go), Barbatnik (The Professor of Desire), the imagined Amy Bellette (The Ghost Writer), Dr. Kotler (The Anatomy Lesson), Sisovsky (The Prague Orgy), Aharon Appelfeld (Deception & Operation Shylock), the imagined Kafka (“Looking at Kafka”), Werner (“The Contest for Aaron Gold”), Primo Levi (Patrimony), Cousin Apter, Rosenberg, and Smilesburger (Operation Shylock).

Solly's “concentration camp number on his forearm” gives him stature beyond his position; “the Herzes respected him fiercely” (LG [Letting Go] 112). When Mr. Kepesh introduces his friend Barbatnik to David and Claire he says “Dramatically, and yes with pride—‘He's a victim of the Nazis’” (POD [The Professor of Desire] 236). As “Philip Roth” watches the trial of John Demjanjuk, the man accused of being Ivan the Terrible, he glances at several elderly spectators whom he first dismisses as “retired” men and women “who had the time to attend the sessions regularly” (OS 67). “Then,” he remarks, “I realized that they must be camp survivors” (OS 67). They change before his eyes, rise upward. He now wonders, “what was it like for them to find standing only a few feet away … Demjanjuk's twenty-two-year-old son?” (OS 67). Their thoughts, their feelings are no longer dismissed; their very bearing speaks to him with new energy and depth. They are made eminent by their history, a history that concurrently degrades the pain Roth's post-war characters suffer.

The “authentic” pain of the survivors belittles the “unauthentic” pain of the spared (OS 125). “My father survived Auschwitz,” the Israeli lieutenant, Gal Metzler, tells “Philip Roth,” “when he was ten years younger than I am now. I am humiliated that I can't survive this” (OS 169). Compared to the Barbatniks and the Apters, the Zuckermans and the Roths feel themselves as false, their lives a “nothing” (AL [The Anatomy Lesson] 67). “Philip Roth” describes the “antithetical twentieth-century Jewish biographies” (OS 201) of Aharon Appelfeld and himself, and it is the unforgotten distance between the shetl-born and the Newark born” that haunts his narrative (OS 312).

Appelfeld and the others are imprisoned and starved, murdered and incinerated, orphaned from family and exiled from home, while “Roth” is “disgracefully being held prisoner by no one but myself,” as he must acknowledge (OS 315). Tarnopol is incapacitated by Maureen, Kepesh is crippled by desire, Klugman made childlike by silly Brenda, Epstein made ill by lust, Novotny is hobbled by back pain, Zuckerman is disabled by fame, and Portnoy, impotent in Israel, wonders, “How can I be floundering like this over something so simple, so silly, as pussy!” (248). Their weakness speaks louder because it is paired with the strength of the remembered others.¹

Eli makes the distance between the survivor and the American Jew clear when he sits in Tzuref's chair and finds himself unaccustomed to the “sharp bones of his seat” (E [Epstein] 249). The comfort Eli takes for granted is an impossibility for the school-master. It is felt by Eli and by the protagonists who follow in his path as an elemental distance that must be respected and remembered. “I was not a Jewish survivor of a Nazi death camp in search of a safe and welcoming refuge,” Zuckerman explains (CL [The Counterlife] 58). The “American-born grandson of simple Galacian tradesmen” cannot know what the survivor knows, cannot feel the scars he feels (CL 59). The American Jew and the camp Jew must know each other, as Nathan explains brothers know each other, “as a kind of deformation of themselves” (CL 89). They are counterparts, living counterlives, separated by time and luck.

“What have the Holocaust survivors done and in what ways were they ineluctably changed?” Roth asks Aharon Appelfeld (OS 214). The question exposes Roth's longing to conjoin with his counter-self, to know the other as oneself, to cleave to their “distinctly radical twoness” (OS 200). To become another, see as the other sees, depart oneself and enter one's compliment, one's double, is an idea that repeats throughout Roth's works, beginning with Eli and the greenie. Henry, having become Hanoch, wants to say, his brother argues, “I am not just a Jew, I'm not also a Jew—I am a Jew as deep as those Jews,” as deep as the victims (68). To see through their eyes, to think with their memories, he feels, will give him a wholeness his own life will not provide. Roth's question asks for the same knowledge that Hanoch searches for at Agor. How are they different from me? his words ask. How can I understand them? Inscribed in that question is an espousal of guilt, the guilt that anyone who approaches the Holocaust must be prepared to admit; the guilt of being less than their counter-selves, the guilt of gaining a subterranean intellectual pleasure in probing the survivor, in asking the question, the guilt, finally, of having escaped the pit.

In Operation Shylock “Roth” imagines John Demjanjuk's thoughts about his own guilt: “Well, they might as well charge him with owing ＄128 million on the water bill. Even if they had his signature on the water bill, even if they had his photograph on the water bill, how could it possibly be his water bill? How could anyone use that much water. … There has been a mistake. … and I should not be on trial for this gigantic bill” (261-2). The Demjanjuk of “Roth's” imagination complains of disproportionate guilt, the same complaint Portnoy voices, and if for Demjanjuk it is not a valid question, for Portnoy and “Roth” it is a recurring and insistent query which explains much about their traumas and their resentments. For it is not Demjanjuk, after all, who speaks those words; it is “Roth.” And it is “Roth” who admits, “I had dreamed that I owed ＄128 million on my water bill” (260). Here the metaphor is applied directly to “Roth,” the writer and not Demjanjuk, the supposed Nazi.

Guilt devours “Roth” as it devours Portnoy and Zuckerman, guilt for trying to touch the concentrationary world and for failing. “All these voices,” Zuckerman states, “this insistent chorus, reminding me, as though I could forget, how unreasonable I am, how idle and helpless and overprivileged, how fortunate even in my misfortune” (AL 155). All the problems Roth's characters face, problems with parents, with their bodies, with their fears and desires are as nothing when placed next to the “true” victims, the victims whose absence has precipitated and enlarged those problems.

Anger follows guilt, the anger of not being allowed one's own misery, not being allowed one's own pain, of always having that other standing above calling one's tragedy comedy. Zuckerman's attack on Freytag, the “Forbidder,” is also an attack on the Jewish dead who deny him his suffering, deny him legitimate complaint (AL 263).

Characters want to reestablish their selves, to become autonomous beings, at the same time as they want to remember the others and enter their consciousness. The self-fascination of Roth's characters is a narrative attempt to make themselves as real as the too-real victims, to overcome the guilt of their shadowed lives, a project which can only lead them deeper into the waters of self. Portnoy complains of being “locked up in me” (248). Zuckerman speaks of his “dwarf drama” (AL 145). And “Roth” hears the accusation, “You! You! Nothing in your world but you!” (OS 100).

Roth's solipsism is a means of exploring the way an individual, so cognizant of the Holocaust, moves back and forth on the seesaw of guilt, how he tries to both remember and to retain selfhood, and how those two activities undermine each other. Roth is not like Sylvia Plath, for whom the Holocaust becomes a metaphor for her own personal plight. Roth could never write the line, from “Marry's Song,” “This holocaust I walk in,” to explain his own misery (45). For Roth it is the impossibility of attaching the Holocaust to self that so anguishes him, the futility of the comparison. Roth's characters look inside because of their awareness of what came before, what they missed.

Crying with his sister, Portnoy thinks, “how monstrous I feel, for she sheds her tears for six million, or so I think, while I shed mine only for myself. Or so I think” (78). Portnoy's complaint is bound up with the six million; it is not a complaint born only of a particular childhood in a particular home but born of a particular history. His tears are never for himself, alone, his guilt not only for his own solitary actions. His sister's words are the words Portnoy silently and continually speaks to himself: “Do you know … where you would be now if you had been born in Europe instead of America. … Dead. Gassed, or shot, or incinerated, or butchered, or buried alive” (77).

Roth's solipsism, like Portnoy's, begins outside himself. His characters are fascinated with their selves because they are tormented by the Holocaust. Zuckerman, a notoriously self-obsessed man, explains, “Though people were weeping in every corner of the earth from torture and ruin and cruelty and loss, that didn't mean that he could make their stories his, no matter how passionate and powerful they seemed beside his trivialities” (AL 138). It is this impossibility which gnaws at Zuckerman, which antagonizes him, and which spawns his writing. Roth's knowledge of the Holocaust tells him that to ignore the self is to let the victimizer win, to depersonalize all Jews. And still the worries of self cannot compete with the importance of the Holocaust. What Roth has done is to join the self and history, to watch one work in, with, and against the other, to focus on the individual while placing that individual in the historical continuum.

Neither Roth, Zuckerman, Tarnopol, Kepesh, nor Portnoy can make a claim on the Holocaust. Roth's Holocaust fiction is at variance with so much other Holocaust writing because he must always acknowledge its distance from its source, its insufficiency, the potential unseemliness of its conception. Naomi calls Portnoy a “self-hating” Jew, and he responds, “Ah, but Naomi, maybe that's the best kind” (265). Self-hating means self-indicting, a key term for Roth's fiction. If he is to look at the Holocaust from his secure perch he must admit his own dual-motivations, the pure motivation to grapple with the seminal event of the century and the impure motivation to make himself hallowed by making art of atrocity. Is that not a more interesting definition of “Portnoy's Complaint” than the battle between need and purpose, body and mind? Portnoy's Complaint defines Roth's art; the pull between a moral super-ego fearlessly investigating the unspeakable and the immoral id making use of the Holocaust, creating a career in its wake. It is that war which the “I” must be the battleground for, the place of combat where the sparks fly.²

“How were you to live from now on?” Appelfeld asks of the survivor (X). His question is at the root of Roth's creations, his reclamation of the “I” and his indictment of the “I.” For Steiner trying to answer that question is itself an error; trying to look inside the survivor's heart is an assault upon the survivor. Steiner recognizes the same dilemmas Roth sews into his fictions but asks not for Roth's garrulousness, his games and puzzles, his doubts and accusations, his expressions of terror and impotence, but for wordlessness. Perhaps it would be more appropriate, Steiner argues, to leave the Holocaust in silence, to respect its uniqueness by not invoking it, like the name of God. Steiner argues that “history collaborates with invention to produce—silence,” (123). For Steiner, then, Roth's meticulous intermixing is still inadequate, is still a blemish, a miscue, a noble attempt better left undone. As Adorno states, in agreement with Steiner, “How should art—how can art?—represent the inexpressibly inhuman suffering of the victims, without doing an injustice to that suffering?” (H&L 1).

Entering the Holocaust world, creating characters who wear numbers and who recount suffering, inventing fictions of survivors or possible survivors, somehow anesthetizes the actual Holocaust world, the real survivors and victims, stripping them of their true, unartistic stories. “There is no response great enough,” argues Isaac Rosenfeld, “to equal the facts that provoke it” (BWA [By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature] 197). That, certainly, no one, Roth included, could refute. But does that statement's power, then, command all to cessation? Does the doubt of writing about the Holocaust, or even after the Holocaust, grow so great that it imprisons the writer, blockades him from his interests, his moral obsessions? Should Roth stop in his tracks, let the cold wash over him?

Countering Steiner and Adorno are such philosophers and poets as A. Alvarez, Sartre, Camus, and Anna Akhmatova, who reject silence as a response to catastrophe, who know that only description of misery, as Akhmatova's “Instead of a Preface” makes clear, can salvage humanity from that misery. Alvarez sees art as having a restorative function which would “make further totalitarian atrocities impossible,” Sidra Ezrahi explains (BWA 7). Sartre proselytized for a new literature of “extreme situations” (BWA 7). And Camus stated succinctly, “To talk of despair is to conquer it” (BWA 7).

For Roth neither position is fully acceptable. Silence is the initial impulse for the writer. The hurdles which stand in the way of an imaginative treatment of the Holocaust—especially by one physically untouched by it—grow larger and larger as pen is set to paper. Even for a writer, like Roth, who lets his doubt, wariness, and guilt show with every word, silence seems the more respectful and unselfish stance.

But, then, the poet must view silence as less a reaction than a surrender, less a remedy than an avoidance. To be silent is to announce loudly that not only have the victims been made mute, but even the poet has been beaten down, his voice burned out in the ovens.³ Speech is essential, an answer to death, a pronouncement of the Nazi's failure to subdue everything. To hold back speech is to respond sheepishly to a persecution of memory. “All the tolerance,” Roth argues, “of persecution that has seeped into the Jewish character … must be squeezed out, until the only response to any restriction of liberties is ‘No, I refuse’” (RMAO [Reading Myself and Others] 220). This is what the Holocaust, “the death of all those Jews,” has taught Roth; not “to be discreet,” not “to remain a victim,” but to risk indiscretion, to wade into the dangerous sea of history (RMAO 221). To fail to write, to fail to raise his voice, is “to act as though it already is 1933—or as though it always is,” writes Roth (RMAO 221). The difficulties the Holocaust present are only an impetus for more words. For the writer the impenetrable problem calls for study, the locked door calls for an unfathomable key.

Still, there are self-imposed boundaries that the writer puts in place. There is an accommodation to silence but it is a willed accommodation, a sign not of defeat but of forbearance, of intellectual restraint, which expresses both self-control and an acknowledgement of the Holocaust's sanctity. Adorno makes an addendum, saying that no artist can allow the “artistic representation of the naked bodily pain of those who have been knocked down by rifle butts” (BWA 11). For Roth this becomes a personal guideline.

Roth does not recreate the camps, he does not write texts with a survivor as the narrator. His works have no Sammler or Herman Broder, like Bellow and Singer, authors who, though they were spared the camps, are less reticent about creating a central voice who was not spared. Only in the early unpublished play, A Coffin in Egypt, and in the early short stories, “The Contest for Aaron Gold” (in which his camp experiences in Germany are barely mentioned), and “Eli, the Fanatic” (a story more about Eli than about the survivors he connects with) does Roth deviate, suggesting that his ideas about the Holocaust had been in their infancy in those years, still developing, and so in those works the Holocaust is more obviously present, his fascination less shaded from view. After 1959 there is always a distinct intermediary, a voice which either hears or creates the other voice of the camps. “It was a world,” Howe intones, “for which, finally, we have no words” (SW [Selected Writings: 1950-1990] 432). Howe's position is actually akin to Roth's, and his statement takes us to the heart of the multiple definitions of the concentrationary universe.

The concentrationary universe is both the universe of the camps and the universe in which the next generation is imprisoned. Roth shelters the camp universe with the words of the post-war universe; it is the play of the two that draws the tensions of his fiction. The camp world is barely visible, barely understood, barely mentioned, and its shrouded distance, its intermittent effusions, give it more potency in Roth's work than in much obviously mimetic dramas of the anus-mundi. The galvanic presence of the Holocaust is only enlarged by Roth's type of silence. Appelfeld relates a “proverb from the Mishna, ‘Silence is a fence for wisdom,’” which he applies to his own sparse use of adjectives and which can also apply to Roth's careful excisions, the absence suggested by hints and allusions (72). Roth needs a readership ready to follow silence, to supply history, to look beneath the water to the Hemingway-like iceberg that supports the seen tip. In a world of trivial and lackadaisical reading or a world of amnesia, Roth's work will seem to contain a lack—and so readers and critics will turn to questions of autobiography, to superficial talk about obscenity and sex, to theories that explain all. Readings reveal, often, more about what the reader doesn't know than about what the writer hasn't provided.

It is not Roth's job to educate. Kitsch, like the television movie, Holocaust, is designed to tell a story as though the audience has no information. That is its danger. Alfred Kazin points out that “an amazing number of Germans confessed that the film [Holocaust] had awakened them to the full extent of Hitler's destruction of European Jewry” (ix). What can be expected, then, for those ignorant viewers (and their brethren everywhere) to make of Roth's diffuse discussion of the Holocaust? How reasonable is Roth's silent speech in a world where the Holocaust disappears from memory, or a world where only direct and harrowing images and descriptions are able to grasp readers? If kitschifying television movies and cinematic-extravaganzas are needed to tell the forgotten story, to jar shamelessly at emotions, then Roth's novels are counterparts to them, fixatives to their stark banalities, their dangerous simplifications. Roth's novels use knowledge and expand definitions to contradict the melodramatic pictures brought by readers to them.

Roth's silences must be turned to speech by the critic's hand. Silence is not absence. Howe reminds us that “In ancient mythologies and religion there are things and beings that are not to be named. … Perseus would turn to stone if he were to look directly at the serpent-headed Medusa, though he would be safe if he looked at her only through a reflection in a mirror or a shield” (SW 429). Roth pursues a Medusa-method in his writing about the Holocaust. The giant beast is always there in reflection, in gaps and associations. “I think,” says Roth, “for a Jewish American writer there's not the same impetus, or, oddly, even the necessity, that there is for a Christian American, like Styron, to take the Holocaust up so nakedly as a subject, to unleash upon it so much moral and philosophical speculation, so much harrowing, furious invention” (RMAO 136). For the Jewish writer the Holocaust's grizzly reality need not be invented anew. “For most reflective American Jews,” Roth continues, “I would think, it is simply there, hidden, submerged, emerging, disappearing, unforgotten. You don't make use of it—it makes use of you” (RMAO 130). In that last sentence Roth's philosophy is stated emphatically: The writer lets the Holocaust seep into his words, between his paragraphs.

In The Anatomy Lesson there is a fine example of how the Holocaust juts its way into narrative. Mr. Freytag and Zuckerman are driving to Mrs. Freytag's grave and Nathan sees “miles and miles of treeless cemetery, ending at the far horizon in a large boxlike structure that was probably nothing but a factory, but that smoking foully away through the gray of the storm looked like something far worse” (257-258). Nathan's mind is surfeit with Holocaustal imaginings; they bulge at his senses so that a factory is immediately transformed into a crematorium. In one moment we are traveling through Chicago, in the next we are watching the ashes of Jews drift over the sky. One sentence takes the reader into one concentrationary universe and then leaves him back in the other. Now Nathan's rage at the Jewish dead in the cemetery becomes clear. His is the anger of the man who cannot forget, whose every ache is balanced against the howling pain of millions. A short metaphor and then we are returned to America. Silence and speech come together. There is no Camus-like descent into the intricacies of the massacre nor is there an Adorno-like turning away from the image.⁴

“I no longer believe in the magic of the spoken word,” writes Elie Wiesel, in seeming agreement with those who call for a muting of speech (Berger 9). But Wiesel, clearly, has not heeded the advice of silence. Wiesel's use of the word “magic” differentiates him from the more restrictive philosophers of Holocaust writing. Wiesel is here disparaging the Platonic wholeness of words, their ability to grant transcendence. He mistrusts words but that mistrust only makes his need to write more vehement. When Steiner claims that the Holocaust is “outside reason” he is stating this same idea. If speech cannot be dispensed with it must be chastened. If the Holocaust is not beyond speech, if silence is defeat, then it is, at least, beyond explanation, beyond meaning. Anyone writing about the Holocaust must refrain from the suggestion that their stories “could ‘make up for’ or ‘transcend’ the horror,” as Howe notes (SW 431).

There is a tradition, in both American and European philosophy and literature, of viewing periods of terrible victimization and trauma through the language of heroism and transcendentalism, to view horrific suffering as ultimately liberating, to see in catastrophe evidence of man's unquenchable will to live, man's unbreakable determination, man's ability to rise from terror and humiliation stronger and more intact than ever before. “Suffering,” argues Terrence Des Pres, “has come to be equated with moral stature, with spiritual depth, with refinement of perception and sensibility” (45). In devastation one discovers meaning. Tragedy is released from its original perspective and metamorphosed into promise, into truth. In this manner we regain control over that which is beyond our control.

It is a natural human response to employ interpretation as a means of healing, of holding onto some solid ground. And it is a response not alien to Holocaust-memoirists and poets. Langer calls the language of this response “the grammar of heroism and martyrdom” (HT [Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory] 1). He recounts a “newspaper editorial” which calls a “film about opposition to the Nazis in the Vilna ghetto ‘a tribute to the redeeming power of resistance’” (HT 1). Later, Langer turns to Martin Gilbert's book, The Holocaust, a text written, Langer explains, “with a ruthless and unsettling resolve not to masquerade the worst” (HT 163). And yet even Gilbert's brutal forthrightness ends claiming survival as “a victory of the human spirit” (HT 163). Gilbert's last paragraph, Langer argues, is an effort “to rescue some shred of meaning from a hopeless situation” (HT 165). To force meaning where meaning is distinctly not present is to partake in a hopeful misreading, a misreading filled with “accolades” which “do not honor the painful complexities of the victims' narratives,” as Langer argues (HT 2).

Roth's characters attempt a similar interpretive effort to gain control, over their own convoluted lives, an effort which mimics the efforts of those writers who seem to need to pin their texts on meaning in order to withstand the crush of unexplainable facts. Portnoy calls for “Dignified suffering! Meaningful suffering!” (251). Zuckerman, who sees “virtue in suffering,” wants only to find the virtue, the explanation, of his own physical and psychological torment (TPO 456). “You don't want to represent her Warsaw,” Zuckerman tells himself, “it's what her Warsaw represents that you want: suffering that isn't semi-comical, the world of massive historical pain instead of this pain in the neck” (AL 144). If, the logic goes, his suffering were more like that of Poland's victims it would be more bearable, more worthy; it would harbor a possibility of depth, of eventual growth.

“What did it mean?” asks Zuckerman (ZU [Zuckerman Unbound] 4). To find meaning for Nathan, or for Tarnopol, or Novotny, or Kepesh is to subdue anguish, to categorize and therefore ameliorate pain. They seek a convergence of anguish and meaning, a convergence which degrades the memory of real suffering, suffering without epiphany, without interpretation. By sheltering themselves behind cliches of survival they avoid any honest evaluation of sorrow and catastrophe. Everything is wrapped neatly in a package of hopefulness and all that is lost are the victims' voices and the difficult unvarnished truth.

There is an “impulse to seek a moral” which confronts anyone who looks towards the Holocaust, Appelfeld explains (13). But that impulse must be forsaken for it is the impulse of one “with an ideological bent,” one who must “offer explanations” even when none are available (Appelfeld 14). To turn to ideology when the disaster one is studying is a legacy of ideology is to begin one's exploration in ignorance, to effectively cut oneself off from understanding. Still, argues Appelfeld, “We quickly fled towards the historical lesson, to seek the lowest common denominator of that horror” (14).

Paul Johnson elucidates the historical explanation for the Holocaust: “The creation of Israel was the consequence of Jewish sufferings” (519). The Holocaust was, Johnson claims, the last “necessary piece” of the “jigsaw puzzle” which “helped to make the Zionist state” (519-520). History validates Auschwitz, in this view, makes six million deaths “necessary,” indeed it “helped” the Jews, finally. In The Counterlife Nathan recounts his father's vision of Israel in similar terms: “Militant, triumphant Israel was to his aging circle of Jewish friends their avenger for the centuries and centuries of humiliating oppression; the state created by Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust had become for them the belated answer to the Holocaust” (62). The father's Lonoffian belief system allows the Holocaust to be redeemed in history. The victims are necessary losses towards a greater strength. History is molded to grant form to that which has no form; endless murders are encased into a vocabulary of purpose. Each death is a bridge towards Zion and the individual death is washed away. The continuum is never put at risk. “There at least,” the rationalization goes, according to Appelfeld, “is apparently a cause and, seemingly, an effect” (14).

“A theological moral was immediately added to the historical one,” Appelfeld continues (14). “Wise men arose and labored to erect a new theology” (14). The theological explanations are uniformly linked with the idea of sacrifice and punishment, to the ancient belief that every bereavement suffered has a purpose towards some predetermined goal, and that all victims are either needed for the sacrifice or serving a just sentence for some sin. The Prophet Amos's statement, “You only have I known of all the families of the earth, therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities,” is called on to assert the religious meaning for the Holocaust (Berger 1). “The sufferings of Auschwitz,” Johnson explains, “were not mere happenings. They were moral enactments. They were part of a plan. They confirmed the glory to come” (519). The Nazis become God's messengers, God's soldiers. The ovens are machines not of barbarity but of cleansing, of purification. The theological paradigm is designed to maintain the covenant, to heal the felt rift expressed by the caller to “Philip Roth,” in Operation Shylock, “Philip Roth, where was God between 1939 and 1945. … That was a dereliction of duty for which even He, especially He, cannot ever be forgiven” (206). That question is eliminated by absolute faith, as are all questions. “And was it for their sins,” “Appelfeld” asks Smilesburger, “that God sent Hitler?” (OS 110). To answer yes to that question is to condemn the six million again, to turn them from victims into sacrificial lambs and sinners.

In addition to Appelfeld's two examples of moral-creation, a third must be added, that of personal ideology, the private ideology that men gather to their breasts to ease the burden of memory, to keep anomie at bay. The survivor devices his own schema, his own explanation for his good fortune. Like Bruno Bettelheim, who asserted that his own intellectual and moral strength were the major factors in his living through Auschwitz, these survivors look for a distinct formula within which to place their experience. Bettelheim takes an element of chance and luck away and in so doing uplifts himself and his fellow survivors and provides a blueprint for resistance. In his essays there is expressed the notion that survival can be learned, that what happened to him can never happen again if only each potential victim becomes like himself. Those who died become failures, not strong enough, not prepared and autonomous enough to resist. Bettelheim's mythology is a, perhaps, well-intentioned effort at protecting the self's power, but like any all-encompassing myth of the Holocaust it does more damage than good; it evades the essence of the unique destruction.

What the Holocaust teaches Appelfeld is quite different: “you are not your own person, will is an illusion” (15). The Holocaust is “conceived. … as an episode, as madness, as an eclipse that does not belong to the normal flow of time, a volcanic eruption of which one must be aware, but which indicates nothing about the rest of life” (37). There is no “spiritual vision” to attach to the Holocaust (Appelfeld 55). “It can be explained,” argues Wiesel, “neither with God nor without him” (Berger 3). Survival was luck, victimization was chance. The Holocaust belongs to the “incomprehensible, the mysterious, the insane, and the meaningless,” argues Appelfeld (39). All categories fail. By denying this we make our own concentrationary universe easier to bear but we falsify the past. “Murder that was committed with evil intention,” Appelfeld insists, “must not be interpreted in mystical terms” (39). To do so is to assume that the Holocaust changed nothing. It becomes mitigated by reason.

“There is no meaning here at all,” “Philip Roth” realizes in Operation Shylock (202). No meaning, just facts. An explanation for Roth's insistence on the simple truth of his confessional novel shows through this statement. Roth is restoring facts as facts to their rightful place in this odd novel. Events can be ambiguous, farcical, unbelievable, and still be true. “But Hitler did exist,” the author notes, “those twelve years cannot be expunged from history any more than they can be obliterated from memory, however mercifully forgetful one might prefer to be” (43). Nothing can be doubted only because of strangeness or illogic in Roth's story, certainly not the Holocaust: And it does not have to contain a succinct meaning on which we can hold ourselves afloat. “The meaning of the destruction,” “Roth” continues, “of European Jewry cannot be measured or interpreted by the brevity with which it was attained” (43). Nor can it be measured or interpreted based on any criteria. It denies our conception-hungry minds. The Holocaust, as Steiner held, is beyond reason; it simply is.

In The Breast Roth delineates the path of one man through a trauma which defies interpretation and which denies the healing lexicon that Kepesh initially tries to impose upon it. In that short novel Roth explores and criticizes the urge toward meaning, toward redemptive language which incapacitates so many of those who explore the concentrationary universe and who live in its shadow. In his final rejection of that noble vocabulary of reason Kepesh finds an honest voice, a self torn and battered but a self who lives in truth.

In a conversation with Alan Lelchuk, about The Breast, Roth says, “I've frequently written about what Bruno Bettelheim calls ‘behavior in extreme situations’” (RMAO 55). Bettelheim's extreme situation is, of course, the camps. The Breast then, can be seen as an oblique concentration-camp commentary, the words of a man experiencing a very real, unanticipated, and unreal change, and trying to understand that experience. Kepesh follows the patterns of Holocaust writers, shifting through meanings until, at last, the whole idea of meaning becomes anathema. In The Breast, Roth argues, there is “No crapola about Deep Meaning” (CWPR 57). To give into meaning, for Kepesh as it is for Roth, is to deny experience, to cowardly retreat into ideology (CWPR 57).

The voice which narrates The Breast is a voice recollecting itself after a change has already occurred. The questioning, insightful voice is not an accurate picture of Kepesh prior to his transformation but rather reflects the new Kepesh born of his descent into the real world. The language of meaning is the language Kepesh, as a Professor, has long been initiated into. It is therefore not surprising that when he finds “the flesh at the base of my penis had turned a shade of pale red” he interprets it “at once” as a sign of “cancer” (5). Though it is a painful interpretation it is, nonetheless, something he can understand and latch onto. Kepesh's first theory, upon finding himself blind and immobile, is that he has become “a quadruple amputee” (19). He turns to a recognizable category to find a classification to situate his ordeal, albeit a tortuous category. To find explanatory words is to remain tethered to the world. He looks for “something … anything … some clue, some lead” (71). If logic leads to a discernible cause then a cure can perhaps be found.

“It's a dream,” he explains to himself (54). When this scenario fails to convince him Kepesh decides, “I at last realized that I had gone mad. I was not dreaming. I was crazy” (55). Madness, at least, fits into a pattern, suggests curative possibilities. Madness suggests, to David, a reversal of reality, a turning around of perspective and language. “My illness,” he explains, “was such that I was taking his [Klinger's] words, simple and clear as they were when he spoke them, and giving them precisely their opposite meaning” (57). It is not reality that has come undone but David's eyes and ears. “I got it from fiction. The books I've been teaching—they put the idea in my head” (60). He converts himself from a breast into a text, a form he can work with so much more easily, a form more amenable to excavating meaning.

With each interpretation Kepesh expects release, epiphany, insight leading to a miraculous return of sanity. As each interpretation fails to bring forth the needed escape he turns to another. “That is what I couldn't take,” he tells Klinger, “a happy life” (71). He has gone mad to depose his own contentedness, to pull the rug out from under his own feet. But that, too, offers him no answer. He turns, reluctantly, to an acknowledgement of his condition, of the facts: “I AM A BREAST” (18). It is with that simple declaration that Kepesh loosens himself from an endless and ultimately unsatisfactory search intended to impose meaning on meaninglessness. “Things have been worse and will be again,” Kepesh tells his audience (75). It is not a paean to nihilism but a concrete statement of fact. Accepting uninterpretability is not defeat. Kepesh exists in a world of linguistic boldness; his honesty brings him an autonomy that no constructed myth could confer.

Rilke's poem, which Kepesh recites as an epilogue to his tale, offers no redemption, just reality, no moral, just facts, no deep and transforming message, just truth in all its uncertainty, like the story it follows. Rilke's “You must change your life” is not, as Kepesh explains, “an elevated statement,” clear and impervious (88). Merely it states the obvious. Life must change, change is inherent, and change does not always promise meaning or growth. To extract meaning from that line is to impose meaning upon it.

Kepesh discards a falsely optimistic dogma in favor of a more forthright stance. Change is possible, hope is possible, but they must exist within the world of facts and actions. To find comfort in the language of redemption, the Apollonian dialect, is to deny horror, and to fall into the slough of silence, defeated nihilism, the Dionysian dialect, is to deny reality. Neither is a sufficient response. In The Breast Kepesh explores, in his microcosm of the world, the various ways thinkers have tried to understand the horror in their past; and he finds, after many false starts, what Elie Wiesel might call a “fresh vocabulary,” not an antidote but an inversion of Hitler's distorted language (Berger 3). Kepesh grows into Roth's tongue.

In 1960 Roth had already suggested the insufficiency of the language of redemption. What many critics, Bernard Rodgers prominently, take as an essay calling for the writer to find, in his writing, an “ideal balance” between society and the individual, “Writing American Fiction” is, in fact, a more bold tract (Rodgers 18). Roth notes the “nervous muscular prose,” the practitioners of which are mostly Jewish, and wonders if this prose does not suit the age “because it rejects it” (RMAO 186-187). The strong prose, the “bounciness” which suggests “pleasure,” seems a substitute for what the writer cannot face, the destructiveness, the powerlessness of life (RMAO 187). “Why is it,” Roth asks, “that so many of them wind up affirming life?” (RMAO 188). The affirmation feels forced, false, a balm that obscures but does not heal. “The moral is bouncy,” Roth notes (RMAO 188). The intent of the celebratory prose seems much the same as Kepesh's intent on words of reclamation, and its effect as impotent. Roth looks to Ellison's Invisible Man and away from Styron's Kinsloving, Bellow's Henderson, Herbert Gold, and Curtis Harnuck and their joyful exclamations, their neat conclusions of solace. Ellison's hero explores the world and investigates the cloistered self and his ending, like Kepesh's, “does not seem to him a cause for celebration either” (RMAO 191).

“Writing American Fiction” recognizes in post-Holocaust writers what Langer calls, “The mind in search of sedatives and antidotes,” a normal response to “mediate atrocity” (HT 9). “The air is thick these days with affirmation,” states Roth, but it is affirmation in the midst of nothingness, in the midst of fictional vistas, like Henderson's Arctic (RMAO 188). Defeated by the concentrationary universe the writer looks to language and away from his world to grasp desperately at hope. But, as Des Pres writes, “the world is not what it was;” it no longer makes “sense to speak of death's dignity or of its communal blessing;” there is no sense in attaching words of heroism onto the Holocaust landscape (4).

The oft quoted excerpt from “Writing American Fiction”—“The American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination”—strikes the observant reader of Roth as similar to remarks made by various Holocaust-writers about the impossibility of capturing the Shoah on paper, of describing what is indescribable, of the imagination's weakness against such an uninventable reality (RMAO 176). Saul Friedlander comments, “reality itself became so extreme as to outstrip language's capacity to represent it altogether” (Young 16). The Holocaust world is like Roth's America, an “impossible real,” to borrow Maurice Blanchet's phrase (HT 39). Roth's essay describes the danger of attaching erroneous meaning on a post-Holocaust world, as it describes the writer's angst in coming after an event that defies the writer's capacity to understand or to create. Roth uses America as a more amenable arena to work out what will later in his work express itself as a concentrationary problem and not a local dilemma.

Claude Lanzmann writes, “The destruction of Europe's Jews cannot be logically deduced from any … system of presuppositions. … there is a break in continuity, a hiatus, an abyss” (HT 427). It is that abyss that Roth must be referring to when he writes of the difficulties of the writer in the “middle of the twentieth century,” sickened and stupefied, “horror-struck” and “awe-struck (RMAO 178), withdrawn “from some of the grander social and political phenomena of our times” (RMAO 180). “Our subject resists the usual capacities of mind,” writes Howe, in “Writing and the Holocaust,” and a distinct echo of Roth's essay is heard (SW 424). The Grimes girls act as the ostensible trigger for Roth's essay, but behind them stands a more recalcitrant reality which the young writer seems unwilling to look at forthrightly. Roth's eyes, too, are cowed by the Holocaust. His belatedness to that event strikes the reader as more insistent and informative than the aggrandizement of the murder of twin teenagers from Chicago.

Michiko Kakutani points out that “Philip Roth made these observations back in 1961—before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, before the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., before the social upheavals of the late 60's, before Vietnam and Watergate and Iran-contra” (C 13). Roth's essay relies on an event that stealths itself in silence. “The chief obstacle to correct diagnosis in painful conditions,” reads the epigraph to The Anatomy Lesson, “is the fact that the symptom is often felt at a distance from its source.”

The painful condition of the American reality discussed in “Writing American Fiction” has its source in a more distant past than Roth's remembered Chicago. In Zuckerman Unbound it is that American reality which appears to be harassing the newly famous writer, tailing him like a spy, causing paranoia to grow like a tumor inside him. “Vietnam was a slaughterhouse,” Zuckerman thinks, “and off the battlefield as well as on, many Americans had gone berserk” (7). The world has gone mad, thinks Zuckerman, everyone is a version of Oswald or Ruby. But is it Vietnam or assassinations, or even fame that locks Zuckerman inside his shell of self? Rather they are evidence of the disequilibrium of the concentrationary universe, evidence that the world has been knocked off-track and is drifting ever further into “anomie” (ZU 6). It is not Oswald's ghost or Ruby's ghost that returns and returns in the Zuckerman books but Anne Frank's, placing her world alongside the contemporary world that Zuckerman complains against. If Zuckerman represses that world, her face, it returns, over and over again, to remind him that his angst springs not from a history he observes day to day wandering manic Manhattan but from a history that overwhelms and is prologue to that chimerical city.

Zuckerman worries about a world where “only annihilation gave satisfaction that lasted,” an allusion which peeks further backward than the 1960's (ZU 8). For Nathan, as for his father, the “two points of reference in all the vastness” are always “the family and Hitler,” and from those mutually entangled webs Nathan's consciousness is born (ZU 199). The father's history is his history, the narrative of his life. Oswald and Ruby are covers for what truly frightens the Jewish son. As Nathan reflects upon his old neighborhood he is struck that “the Jews had all vanished” (ZU 223). Vanishing Jews walk beside the New York Jew, so ostentatiously present, fawned over, and stalked, a reminder of what he owes to time, to chance, and of how quickly even the most present of people can be made to disappear.

When Zuckerman's mother, in The Anatomy Lesson, is given a piece of paper to write her name upon, after developing a brain tumor, “she took the pen from his hand and instead of ‘Selma’ wrote ‘Holocaust,’ perfectly spelled” (41). Like her son, her deepest fear is encompassed in that word. “This was in Miami Beach in 1970, inscribed by a woman whose writings otherwise consisted of recipes on index cards, several thousand thank-you notes, and a voluminous file of knitting instructions. Zuckerman was pretty sure that before that morning she'd never even spoken the word aloud” (41). Other words shield that one word, bury it, as much for the mother as for the son. “It must have been there all the time without their even knowing,” thinks Nathan, now seeing clearly what has resided in the mother, furtively, for so long. (42). The word defines the perspective, the way she sees the America of the 1970's and the way her son understands his own imprisoned life. It is passed from one to the other and though Zuckerman carries it around, “in his wallet,” with him he need not, for it is deeply etched in him, and for Roth no less than for Zuckerman (RMAO 136).

When Roth is asked, of Zuckerman, “Why can't he throw it away?” he answers, “Who can? Who has? Zuckerman isn't the only one who can't throw this word away and is carrying it with him all the time, whether he knows it or not” (RMAO 136). Roth's America, in “Writing American Fiction,” and in his own fictions, is understood as an echo, a remainder, a result, and a reminder of the Holocaust. Roth's individuals are stuck in history and that history conceives the current world. The world feels so estranged from them because of the wake that lay behind them, the world buried deep in their minds, carried along wherever they go. “Without this word,” Roth continues, “there would be no Nathan Zuckerman, not in Zuckerman's fix. No chiropodist father and his deathbed curse, no dentist brother with his ferocious chastisement. There'd of course be no Amy Bellette, the young woman in The Ghost Writer who he likes to think could have been Anne Frank. There'd be no Milton Appel with his moral ordinances and literary imperatives. And Zuckerman wouldn't be in his cage” (RMAO 136).

Consciousness of the Holocaust redefines Roth's landscapes. To be Jewish, for Roth's characters, is to live in history. Roth returns again and again to Jewish demons, Jewish questions, because he must. Like Leslie Fielder, he must acknowledge that “in some ultimate sense” he is “a Jew; Hitler had decided that once and for all” (XVII). But by returning he need not be telling the same story again and again, and he does not. The critic sees Jews and assumes one story, one idea. He categorizes the Jewish tale in a way Roth seeks to disparage. That the stories are similar need not mean they are the same. Roth rewrites Appelfeld's insistence on referring to Jews as “we” to his own insistence on making each Jew an “I” (11). He moves into the same territory only to express the variety within that territory. A cursory reading leads one to see him as a writer retreading the same ground, when in fact each novel tries to find a new crevice in the road, a new direction, a new perspective. The one constant is the Holocaust, the obsession that must, albeit quietly and without sureness, return and return: Roth's characters, Jews and non-Jews alike, live in the concentrationary universe; from this there can be no divergence from text to text.

Notes

1. “Jews are either authentic or unauthentic,” argues Alan L. Berger, though he expands the definition of authenticity to those who show “A willingness to confront the Holocaust, to renew, in however modified a form, the covenantal framework of Judaism” (9). Though his reworking of the terms allows authenticity to the post-Holocaust generation it still maintains a strict differentiation, now not between survivor and progeny but between secular Jews and those who turn towards covenantal Judaism. “Secular doesn't know what they are living for,” says a worshipful Jew to Zuckerman at the Wailing Wall, asserting Berger's logic, using it to classify and disparage the unbeliever (CL 100). The marking of authenticity is a means not of celebrating or cherishing but of dividing, dispersing Jew from Jew with the same intellectual construct which separated Jew from Gentile in Europe: One has status, the other none, one has worth while the other is but a false projection, a Jew but not a Jew.

2. But whose I is it, critics wonder, Roth's or his protagonists'? That question is, for the most part, a banal and uninteresting question, a question more to do with, as Roth says, “gossip” than with literature, yet it does open up an avenue for exploring Roth's autobiographical style, a style which has more to do with a Holocaust-consciousness than most would admit (CWPR 122). Roth picks up the autobiographical style because it is the style which implores itself because of his subject matter. “The Holocaust,” Howe writes, “was structured to destroy the very idea of private being” (433). Roth reasserts the private being, the self wrestling with its demons. “The interior,” Appelfeld says, of the Holocaust-victim, “was locked away” (X). Roth unlocks the interior and exposes it compulsively. Of course, this could be accomplished in a purely fictional narrative. Had there been no correspondence between Roth's world and his characters' the subjective I is still the focal point of these fictions. This is true, too, of Roth's effort to impugn the I within the narrative; his effort to expose what maligns and makes guilty these protagonists. And yet a pure fiction does not account for the writer's malignity, or his own guilt. Roth's impure writing subjects not only the narrators to accusations of “loshon hora,” of “evil speech,” but Roth himself (OS 333). The wall that Roth opens between himself and his surrogates opens the floodgates of criticism upon himself; he invites the misreading.

3. Here I invoke the “ovens,” to do what? To make a simple point? To convey the depths of the error of silence? To point concretely to an image that will drive home the hazard of Holocaust-writing? To add zest to an academic study? To make the sentence dramatic? To give my work an aura of seriousness? To set myself up for criticism for using a metaphor I have no right to? These questions are demanded from within each time an image like the ovens is used. It is just these questions which keep the writer away, which warn him, harass him, judge him. How much is honest exposition and how much exploitation? How much is called for and how much is simply too much?

4. Roth does not disparage Steiner or Adorno but reinterprets them. Their idea of silence is suspect from the start. For if no words are to be written how do they account for their own words. Howe suggests, of Adorno, “Perhaps his remarks are to be taken as a hopeless admonition, a plea for improvisation of limit that he knew would not and indeed could not be heeded, but which was necessary to make” (SE 430). For Howe, Adorno and Steiner make their manifestos not to discourage all speech but to instill a certain consciousness in those who would speak, to make them leery and thoughtful, to make the Holocaust a separate entity, a separate disaster from other subjects. “Through a dramatic outburst,” Howe argues, “he [Adorno] meant to focus upon the sheer difficulty—the literary risk, the moral peril—of dealing with the Holocaust in literature” (428). Roth, it appears, reads Adorno in much the same way. Adorno's argument is used to warn against a Camus-like faith in speech's redemptive power.