BUT WHY ANOTHER BOOK ON THE HOLOCAUST?

If the murder of millions is something we must become numb to, in

order to persevere, then I disagree.

It is as if memory must be dismissed for present life and living.

Need it be? Granted, I do not think about a serf in twelfth-century

France. Perhaps I should, but I don’t. Our species itself has a short

attention span. Indeed, why do we practice the art and science of psychotherapy,

for example? It is not to put things behind us as much as

to bring them forth, to evoke experience. Real therapy, healing, is a

question asked of the species as revealed in an individual member.

I detect in this question an annoyance, in that Jews are given a certain

latitude and then no more; as if we have heard it all before. The

question bespeaks subliminal impatience, perhaps even anti-Jewish sentiment.

If yet another book on word processing, financial self-help,

travel, or cooking appears on the shelves of your local bookseller, that

is fine. But another book on the Holocaust, whether from Christians or

Jews, evokes a sigh of “enough.” Why is this? I write to make you feel

my impressions of the world; it is my rib on the barbie and I grill it in

my own special way. It is the writer’s job to do that. The Holocaust, as

far as I am concerned, is the single most important human event in

world history. It created a lens through which we can understand ourselves

culturally, anthropologically, and sociologically. We avoid knowing

ourselves, often fleeing more from the light than the dark. All the

great deprogrammers have been assailed, even murdered, Christ for

one.

In his clarion call, Jefferson said it best: “I have sworn upon the

altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the

mind of man.” Thrilling, isn’t it? And enlightened! Freud searched the

unconscious, in his own rational way, to try to set us free. Face it—

great slabs of self are cut off from our awareness. Most of what we do

is done and decided for us, unconsciously. You don’t really believe you

are in control, do you? Our species is that early grunting creature that

moved from out of the sea-slime to land, in gasping epochal leaps, until

it became a creature of terra firma. We are aware only in spasms,

twitches. Our circuitry is that way; we are hot-wired.

Since you are not a survivor, a witness, why do you feel you can add anything

more—or new—to the Holocaust literature?

I don’t have to be a witness to anything in order to exercise my own

humanity, either as a holder of opinions or a writer. In fact, and with all

due deference, why would a survivor necessarily have a grasp on what

happened? We spend our entire lives living, often very poorly, and very

often end without any set of rules, conclusions, or principles, much less

wisdom. I write about the Holocaust for it is an Amazonian cataract of

great force, of thundering essence, when we examine human behavior

at its most basic. I have every right to engage. Indeed, the question

should be: Shouldn’t every human alive, and yet to live, have a br

spectrum of ideas and views about this species-shaking event of the

twentieth century? We are all witnesses to the Holocaust. This is one

of the essential themes of my work. It should be dealt with until the end

of historic mankind on this planet, until its lessons become in some

implacable and evolutionary way part of our germ plasm.

We know this much: human beings can be morally inhibited—and

since we are not genetically wired not to kill our own, the only salvation

is in the word, in memory, to stave off our id impulses. This is why, for

the Jew, memory is essential, probably one of the greater gifts of

Judaism to the world. Jews, to use the vernacular, do not “put things

behind them” and “get on with it.” The Jew metabolizes life, records

and registers it. Memory kept the Jew as one during a two thousand year

diaspora—for indeed something indelible and lithographic had

happened in Sinai that the Jew chose not to forget. This is the great and

remarkable commentary on the history of the Jew. Metaphorically we

are all Jews, if we allow that to be.