By Words Alone:
Mintz, Alan
A map to the infernal kingdom BY WOBDS ALONE THE HOLOCAUST IN LITERATURE Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi University of Chicago, $15, 262 pp. Alan Mints THE ABUNDANCE of novels, poems, and plays...
...LESLIE MARIA JOHNSON (daughter of Lester Johnson) The author replies Yes, art exists in context...
...To the Editors: I am shocked that your magazine should publish an article as clearly vicious and untrue as Ms...
...They rely on devoted and generous contributors to make up the inevitable yearly deficit...
...He produces two dozen paintings a year"-how does she know...
...The Editorss...
...That was the whole point of my article...
...JOHN AHERN teaches Italian literature at Stanford University...
...It exists in a peculiarly reflective relationship to the sensibility and personal history of its creator...
...It works least well in the case of engaged Jews, whose writings are intelligible, by Ezrahi's own admission, only in terms of longstanding literary quarrels with God...
...By their gifts the Associates have expressed in a very concrete and practical way what all of us feel-that Commonweal is not merely another publication among many, but one that offers a distinctive perspective on the world, one that has created for many a kind of sustaining intellectual and moral community...
...It apparently falls outside the scope of the book, but puzzlingly, this is never made clear...
...I suggest that the editor and Ms...
...Does this kind of defamatory speculation belong in your magazine...
...Mullarkey barely discusses Johnson's work itself...
...One hardly need add, at the beginning of 1981, that this perspective is something of a besieged one-partly because many of other viewpoints have been willing to back their views with financial support...
...Here the particular horrors of the Holocaust as a historical event are absorbed into essential symbols of violence and death...
...Where did she get her "facts...
...teaches in the theology department of St...
...The facts are these: Magazines like Commonweal lose money...
...Mullarkey do their research next time before they insult and misrepresent an artist...
...He has persevered with art...
...Wells (Oxford), is working on a study of the fiction of Graham Greene...
...How can this person be considered an "opportunist" or a "careerist...
...The Jewish writer who writes as a Jew is lodged in a tradition of lamentation literature for which the subject of national catastrophe is hardly new...
...Mullarkey do their research next time before they insult and misrepresent an artist...
...Alan Mints THE ABUNDANCE of novels, poems, and plays concerning the Holocaust that have appeared since the early 1960s has begun in the past few years to generate its own body of literary criticism...
...Although the main business of the book is classification, her occasional analyses of specific texts are always insightful and well handled...
...The Holocaust depicted as a Jewish tragedy is located at a stage on the continuum where personal identity is not isolated but linked to a collective vision...
...How has his "long-shot" paid off...
...Finally, the loyalty of the Commonweal Associates, whose aid has made the vital difference when the books have to be balanced...
...Against this background, the appearance of Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi's book, By Words Alone, an attempt to see Holocaust literature whole, is a welcome event...
...The model rests on the assumption that the literature of the Holocaust forms a unified "concentrationary idiom" which is marked by internal coherence and an interchangea-bility of languages...
...I suggest that the editor and Ms...
...Tadeusz Borowski, the Polish author of a brilliant short-story collection, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, is the exemplar of a genre which represents the shattering submission of the self to the world of the camps and which forbids the least trace of transcendence through metaphor or rhetoric...
...Where did she get her "facts...
...Mul-larkey's "Icons of Vulgarity" in the August 1 issue...
...I am referring to the art world...
...Yet the long-range health and effectiveness of Commonweal depends on our finding new readers, on our attracting and retaining staff members and writers with a rather unusual combination of broad intellectual interests, editorial talents, and religious concerns...
...Similar journals run deficits ten and even twenty times that sum...
...Leaning heavily on several authors in one or two languages and at the same time compelled by their own search for identity, critics have often been led to make extravagant theological pronouncements based on a paucity of texts...
...Commonweal's deficit has been no greater because we have kept our operating expenses to a barebones minimum...
...Others, Commonweal among them, are independent...
...Ezrahi's map is formulated in terms of a six-stage continuum that reaches from realism to myth...
...The loyalty, first of all, of you, our readers, who among, other things have given this magazine an extraordinarily high renewal rate...
...I am at a loss to understand Ms...
...At the same time, Commonweal confronts the sharply rising costs that everyone knows too well-and that have been particularly painful in the areas of printing and postage...
...It is a pathetic analysis, or mis-analysis of the subject matter...
...Mullarkey barely discusses Johnson's work itself...
...We ask you to fill out the coupon on the back cover...
...Is that his pay...
...In Commonweal's case, that yearly deficit is relatively low-specifically, it ranges from $15,000 to $30,000...
...As the editors prepared for the Christmas holiday, we learned that printing costs will jump by $ 11,000 next year...
...The second stage is "concentrationary realism," writing that in excluding both memory and hope, is entirely immersed in the realities of the Holocaust world...
...Johnson has suffered the flourishing and financial success'of Pop Art, Op Art and Conceptualism, to mention a few...
...In the next stage, the literature of survival, it is precisely the memories of ordinary scenes of prewar love and family that supply the strength to resist submission to the norms of the concentrationary universe...
...It exists-is made and marketed-in relation to a consuming audience and to the taste of its time...
...She filled her article with strangely contradictory statements, at one point commenting on Johnson's "sense of movement," later calling the same figures an "invitation to voyeurism," the "knees on their way to the spectator's groin...
...their works chronicle the struggle to maintain the integrity of the self in the camps and the survival and restoration of personal identity afterwards...
...On several personal matters I must comment: ' 'Johnson paints with none of Leger's proletarian sympathies"-how does she know...
...By being excluded from all the major museums...
...But whatever the size, either the deficit is covered or the journal ceases to exist...
...It is a pathetic analysis, or mis-analysis of the subject matter...
...How has his "long-shot" paid off...
...Loyalty, also, of writers who pass up more remunerative opportunities because they want to reach these readers...
...These reservations take little away from the value of this admirable book...
...Johnson is the bourgeoisie"-how does she know...
...His work is in the permanent background, home, life-style and cost of his paintings...
...Without the addition of new names to that list, there will be no Commonweal in the future...
...It is particularly disturbing that Ms...
...Where, exactly, is his commercialism...
...REVIEWERS FRANK McCONNOX, author of The Science Fiction of H.G...
...To these Commonweal Associates, the editors-and no doubt the readers and writers-of Commonweal would like to express our heartfelt thanks...
...He has persevered with art...
...Johnson's claim that Johnson suffers neglect...
...Johnson has suffered the flourishing and financial success'of Pop Art, Op Art and Conceptualism, to mention a few...
...In fact, we have had little choice in these matters...
...Is that his pay...
...Correspondence (Continued from.page 2) Misrepresentation Greenwich, Conn...
...The works of Weisel, Andre Schwarz-Bart, and Paul Celan, among others, take their meaning in a larger covenantal schema of the Jews and their relations with God...
...The work of Lester Johnson seems to me to be particularly illustrative of that actuality...
...The inconsistency of the long closing chapter, an excellent and searching piece of literary history that documents the failure of American writers to mount a substantive response to the Holocaust, also undercuts the validity of the model by demonstrating that the American scene demands to be understood on its own terms...
...Ezrahi has worked hard in making - basic distinctions and groupings in regard to subject and genre, and the result is a map of Holocaust literature which, though in need of testing and refinement, will help us to find our way in this most infernal of kingdoms...
...We hope that many others among our readers will join their ranks-and in that way assure not only Commonweal's continued existence but its growth and constant improvement as well...
...ALAN MINTZ teaches Hebrew Literature at Columbia University...
...The model works best in the case of authors whose involvement in a national cultural milieu was marginal before the War...
...How can this person be considered an "opportunist" or a "careerist...
...He wants "lilacs/or young ass"-how does she know...
...It exists-is made and marketed-in relation to a consuming audience and to the taste of its time...
...Does this kind of defamatory speculation belong in your magazine...
...And the loyalty of a staff that excels despite conditions that would have warmed the heart of the unreformed Scrooge...
...By years of hard work and very little public recognition...
...Johnson is the bourgeoisie"-how does she know...
...Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi writes with authority and sensitivity about material that is too commonly treated with theatricality...
...While this is a useful way of discussing some works, it simply doesn't work for many other works, which cannot be fully understood unless they are also considered within the context of their specific national literatures...
...Where, exactly, is his commercialism...
...LESLIE MARIA JOHNSON (daughter of Lester Johnson) The author replies Yes, art exists in context...
...I am at a loss to understand Ms...
...The fiction of Jerzy Kosinski and Jakob Lind is marked by grotesque, apocalyptic images of evil and perversion, which Ezrahi calls "the pornography of death.'' The final stage involves the impact, slight though it is, of the Holocaust on American literature, in which the Holocaust, when it is addressed, must be gotten at through several removes of imagining...
...Perhaps too much so...
...DAVID J. O'BRIEN teaches history at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester...
...By Words Alone embodies one way of reading Holocaust literature which will enrich and be enriched by other angles of vision...
...It is particularly disturbing that Ms...
...He has persevered with art...
...We have underspent on promotional efforts, on salaries, on the size of our staff...
...FATHER ROBERT E. KENNEDY, S.J...
...The fifth stage is the Holocaust reduced to myth...
...That was the whole point of my article...
...Peter's College, Jersey City...
...The first stage is the documentary art of the Holocaust, such works as Steiner's Treblihka and Hoch-huth's The Deputy, which, though they may be novels or plays, achieve their effect by claiming to be defictionalized truths, mere reports with no invention...
...He is the author of George Eliot and the Novel of Vocation...
...Mullarkey to comment on Lester Johnson's personal life, politics, background, home, life-style and cost of his paintings...
...Yet critical writing on this literature has been both narrow and overgeneralized...
...The work of Lester Johnson seems to me to be particularly illustrative of that actuality...
...He has persevered with art...
...By years of hard work and very little public recognition...
...By being excluded from all the major museums...
...This is all the more true in the case of the voluminous and important imaginative literature on the Holocaust written specifically in Hebrew and Yiddish, with which this book does not deal...
...The authors are mostly women (Ilona Karmel, Anna Langfus, Zdena Berger...
...She filled her article with strangely contradictory statements, at one point commenting on Johnson's "sense of movement," later calling the same figures an "invitation to voyeurism," the "knees on their way to the spectator's groin...
...What problems there are in By Words Alone stem from the model itself, which like all models, is limited in its explanatory power...
...The Editorsu to fill out the coupon on the back cover...
...He wants "lilacs/or young ass"-how does she know...
...I would like to know what authorizes Ms...
...The imaginative literature of the Holocaust is extraordinarily varied, written in many languages, motivated by different mentalities and ideologies, achieved through a wide range of formal strategies...
...Loyalty has always been the key to Common-wears survival...
...We are indebted to Ezrahi for putting forward the claims of Borowski, Karmel, Langfus, Sperber, Celan, and others, and also for framing reservations concerning the achievements of Weisel, Schwarz-Bart, and Kosinski...
...On several personal matters I must comment: ' 'Johnson paints with none of Leger's proletarian sympathies"-how does she know...
...Johnson's claim that Johnson suffers neglect...
...It exists in a peculiarly reflective relationship to the sensibility and personal history of its creator...
...Schwarz-Bart's The Last of the Just, for example, certainly owes as much to the passions and conventions of the French mind as to other Holocaust works considered as a separate genre...
...He produces two dozen paintings a year"-how does she know...
...His work is in the permanent A worried thank you Dear Readers, Without the people whose names follow this letter, there would be no Commonweal today...
...In addition to grossly distorting the works of a great artist, she goes out of her way to defame and discredit his character...
...Some are supported by institutions...
...Her essays in literary evaluation are also worthwhile...
...Her chapters are full of well-reasoned discriminations on such issues as the difference between the Soviet penal system and the Holocaust, the definition of the survivor as hero or as victim, the ideological implications of various terms for the Holocaust...
...She, and your magazine, are obviously ignorant of the context...
Vol. 108 • January 1981 • No. 1
