About 2 weeks ago I was in Chicago for a large writing conference. Associated writers and writing programs or something like that. We, my friend Natalie and I, went to a conference on representations of the Holocaust in literature. Well, not exactly, it was something like, the black forrest revisited. Natalie and I are, to be modest, the world's biggest fans (outside of Poland) of Polish Poetry. There is a rich history of Polish poetry, two of the most famous being Jewish poets, and probably many of the others, although I'm not sure of it. Anyway, this might seem tangential at best but the point is that we were excited to hear poetry about a subject that interests both of us and in a poetic voice that we both find very enticing (sorry couldn't think of a better word). The presentation was horrible. Essentially the presentation did what so many presentations on the Holocaust do, it created a sort of pornography (although a very strange pornography) out of destruction.
To put it lightly, I am tired of this type of presentation. The type of presentation that wants to never stop looking at the death of the Holocaust without actually talking about the Holocaust. The woman read her poems and cried along with her husband. She talked about how her daughter didn't care to pay attention on the trip until a cute boy showed up. At one point she even found a way to implicate the Palestinians (don't ask me how).
But our community at times is no better. The other day we had a community member, a guest at our home, get upset by the word Holocaust. Just the word. In the community of almost all Young Jewish men and women, he was unwilling to hear the word. As if to hear the word spoken was an affront to him. But how do we heal without creating new images? How do we move forward out of the Holocaust as a community if we are unwilling to discuss it even within our own community.
In answer to the presentation but also to the guest at our home, I wrote a poem called so what, which was an effort to address the questions I have recently had of "so what". I do not mean it flippently, just scientifically. What is the purpose of the way we handle the greatest atrocity of recent time to our people? The poem needed critical distance and conceptual work, but what happened when I showed it to school was very interesting. No one knew how to talk about it. It turns out that no one wants to be the first to open their mouth and talk openly even about a piece of art that addresses the Holocaust. So where do we go from here? I don't have the answer to this question, but it seems to me that we as a generation of Jews needs to find one, and find one fast.
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