Gubar: Remembering what one never knew

By Jayne Spencer

David

For the survivors, families, friends and others throughout the world who witnessed the 9/11 attacks on America, memorial artistic expression has and will continue to take many forms. The tragedy is fresh and firsthand. Last night’s Lincoln Center world premiere of John Adams’ On the Transmigration of Souls, a work commissioned by the New York Philharmonic to mark the first anniversary, for example, features orchestra, chorus, children’s chorus and multi-channel sound design to create, as Adams told NPR, not a requiem, but “a memory space, a place where you can go and be alone with your thoughts and emotions.”

Literary critic Susan Gubar’s newest work, Poetry of Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew, addresses a 20th-century horror and a different artistic medium.

The German state-sponsored system of persecution and murder known as the Holocaust robbed Europe of close to two out of every three Jews by 1945. Six million European Jews were dead, along with millions of others the Nazi regime had deemed “life unworthy of life”—Roma, the handicapped, some of the Slavic peoples, Socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals—were among those who perished. The magnitude of the horror itself and the indelible nature of its shadow on succeeding generations is as hard to grasp today as it was a half century ago.

The artists Gubar looks to in this new work are North American and English poets who serve as “proxy-witnesses.” The Holocaust, after all, continues to recede into world history. Eyewitnesses are fewer and fewer, a situation Gubar addresses in a chapter titled “The Holocaust is Dying.”

She also addresses German philosopher Theodor Adorno’s 1949 injunction: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”

Adorno’s injunction has expanded and contracted in meaning over time, Gubar writes: “It was understood to signify any and all forms of representation—poetry as a genre, or aesthetic work about the Shoah—the sentence sometimes was taken to be an admonition (beware of writing poetry), sometimes a directive (poetry ought not be written), sometimes simply a diagnosis (poetry cannot be written).

“Indeed, anyone who participates in the academic field of Holocaust studies inevitably confronts the danger of ‘consuming trauma’ (the phrase is Patricia Yaeger’s), converting grievous suffering into rhetorical pleasure or professional profit in much the manner of those creative writers faulted for finding artistic gratification in imaginative responses to the Shoah.”

Gubar looks at many contemporary writers, among them Anthony Hecht, Gerald Stern, Sylvia Plath, William Heyen, Michael Hamburger, Irena Klepfisz, Adrienne Rich, Jorie Graham, Jacqueline Osherow and Anne Michaels, who have grappled with personal and political, ethical and aesthetic consequences of the Holocaust.

The book is dedicated to Luise Dreyfuss David, Gubar’s mother, who will soon be moving from her apartment overlooking Central Park in New York City to an apartment at Meadowood Retirement Community in Bloomington. The two are tied by family history, an unwavering acceptance and affection for one another and, this season, anticipation of their two separate books coming into print. David’s is a touching, often wrenching, and courageous family history, replete with photographs. It charts her experiences in Furth, Hamburg and later, in New York City following her departure from Nazi Germany with an infant son in tow. David’s book will be published early next year.

Gubar’s project is an outgrowth of a reunion of Furth and Nuremberg refugees and survivors that she attended, along with her mother, in 1996, in the Catskills. Gubar completed the IU Press manuscript last year while a Laurence S. Rockefeller Fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values.

“But how does one remember what one never knew?” she asks.

“For the second generation of refugees—the children of parents exiled from their homelands by Hitler—‘never forget’ and ‘never again’ combine to create a curious divide between those who lived through painful disruptions, dislocations, deaths and those who did not and therefore may not fully comprehend their significance.

” This gulf, ruled by what the critic Lawrence Langer calls ‘the principle of discontinuity,’ constitutes an ‘impassable chasm’ permanently separating even the most loving parents from their offspring. On one side of the widening abyss stand survivors who often censored their own responses to an experience so traumatic as to be inexpressible; on the other, their children who question the imagination’s capacity to understand what has not been personally endured. Given the entreaties ‘never forget’ and ‘never again,’ it is important now as a dwindling number of survivors enter their seventies and eighties to find in art a bridge over the gulf of discontinuity, to entertain the contrary view that not writing (or, for that matter, not reading) poetry after (and about) Auschwitz constitutes an act of barbarism.”

In the end, Gubar argues that poetry is a “survivor,” not only of Auschwitz but of Adorno’s injunction as well. “I would trace its license back to an ancient mandate,” she writes, to the Book of Joel in the Old Testament:

“Has such a thing happened in your days,
Or in the days of your ancestors?
Tell your children of it,
And let your children tell their children, and their children another generation.”