Jerusalem

The Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem is brimming with pictures, personal effects of survivors and the dead, video testimonials and installations of bunk beds and railroad tracks that are meant to generate an understanding of what happened on both the personal and human level. It is effective. As I walked through the museum I saw clusters of people holding each other, wrapped up in each other’s arms and their personal pain as waves of museum-goers swirled past them. After listening to the testimonial of a survivor who described how the guards at Auschwitz picked up babies and children and smashed them into the walls of the camp, I too crawled into a friend’s arms. I needed to be touched and to remember that I was alive. The final room of the museum is spare and iconoclastic. A series of quotes about the importance of remembering scroll slowly across the walls. The act of remembering in this instance is proscribed by the theme of the quotes: the word as an act of healing. The images and built displays in the museum cannot possibly tell the complete story of 6 million organized deaths and millions of small acts of atrocity. Equally, we museum-goers do not have the visual or emotional capacity to supply the missing images and missing emotions. The message of the final room is that the act of writing can help to bridge that gap.

In Jerusalem, there is a tall, gray wall that scrolls its way through the cityscape. While walking along its hilly paths under flowering rosemary and golden stones, we came to an opening and saw that the vista of the city sprawled out on all sides of us. Yet across Jerusalem’s sun-soaked beauty, a wound is being cut. Neighborhoods and families are separated in order to bring a cold, uneasy peace to two national psyches, each traumatized by thousands of years of persecution and colonialism. The wall, a hotly debated issue in Jerusalem, generates words upon words. On a hidden corner in the Old City, Arabic slurs cut a Jewish star in half. Elsewhere, words, phrases and symbols are written on the signs of protestors, in academic journals and in people’s prayers. Thus, the physical wall is transformed into words, and then back out, becoming a metaphor. The wall is the reflection of a political conversation that has broken down. The wall is a stand in for the depths of fear that have created it, and the conflicts within Jerusalem, within internally divided Israeli and Palestinian communities, between those two peoples, and their region and the world. We see the wall and know that there is pain and trauma that we cannot see or imagine. Our tour guide tells us the story of a friend who as a small child used to run through an opening in a different wall when his mother was angry with him. He figured that by the time he was picked up by the guards and held for her to collect, a process that could take a day or two, she would have forgotten her original reason for being angry with him. We cannot know these small stories in their entirety. We just say, There is the wall and trust that our company will understand.

As a writer, my job is find the perfect word to either create an emotion, draw a picture in my reader’s mind, or call up a concept, among other things. My fingers are silent when I try to find words about the things that we humans do to each other. Rainer Maria Rilke, the 19th century German poet, said that words replace the imageless act. I once thought that he meant that the heavy presence of a word is important for its ability to generate images in our minds. I wonder now if he meant that words protect us from acts that are too horrific for us to want to imagine. We can hide behind words. Words like genocide, destruction, murder, horror, and holocaust are big enough and empty enough that they can hold all the tiny personal acts of violence that render us helpless both when experiencing and recalling them. These words are built on common narratives: the word ‘holocaust’ is generally categorized as the experience of the Jews in the Nazi death camps and neglects to describe events in France, the Netherlands and elsewhere during World War II. Concurrently we argue about Armenia, Rwanda and Cambodia and question if their pain is large enough graduate from the word “genocide” and to lay claim to the word “holocaust”. Of course, we have other words too, words like peace and tolerance and love. They seem to be easier to define and imagine, but difficult to act on. A traditional Native American myth describes a boy with two pet wolves. One wolf was full of hate and destruction. The other wolf was full of love and tolerance. He asked his grandfather how to manage the wolves and was told, The wolf that you feed is the wolf that will survive.

When I think of how words might replace the ‘imageless act’, I question familiar idioms like the pen is mightier than the sword and words have power. When I see the wall and images of starving piles of bodies in mass graves I know that words don’t have power. Humans have power. We can build walls and bombs and death camps call them evil if we like. We can build a golden stoned city and fill it with flowering rosemary and olive trees. We can call that city holy if it suits us. Neither designation helps us avoid acts of personal and mass violence. What then, replaces our words? And how will we choose what will survive us?

Jerusalem, July 2007