Letters
LETTERS Holocaust To the Editor: A few extended observations on NBC's "Holocaust" ... After more than three decades, the murder of six million Jews continues to stagger belief, and the magnitude...
...Aren't you suggesting a course of action to the Soviets and in essence doing exactly what you accuse Mr...
...Rose Kolchinsky Brooklyn Heights, New York Stuffed Deep Water Fish To the Editor: So the ubiquitous Eastern European Shabbat and holiday dish— gefilte fish—finally made it to the pages of moment...
...Those who found the well-publicized character of Green's enterprise appalling and therefore refused to submit to the complicity of watching it do not prefer ignorance...
...And a few documentary films which do go within those gates might have also been energetically advertised and publicized...
...The next day, at work, in the streets, and in the trains, I heard reactions so different from my own that I was shocked...
...Alternatives exist...
...There are no exceptions...
...Dulzin at some future date using his statements to justify closing the doors on Russia's Jews...
...Rabbi Isidore Aizenberg Jamaica Estates, New York...
...Without the insult of commercial interruption, without the shabby cliches of soap opera, without gazing directly into the abyss of the Holocaust kingdom, those six million dollars could have been spent more wisely...
...After more than three decades, the murder of six million Jews continues to stagger belief, and the magnitude and incomprehensibility of the crime have generally resisted efforts at description...
...That is why the enthusiasm Jewish representatives lavished on the show is rather puzzling...
...Perhaps that admission amounts to a disqualification to comment on the show...
...Perhaps such efforts might not have been rewarded with such mammoth audiences...
...Some explanation is required for the view that those who try to depict the annihilation camps give proof that they cannot understand what happened there...
...Yet nowhere in that scholarly note on Jewish gastronomies is it mentioned what it is that is stuffed in the "stuffed deep-water fish en glace" (italics mine...
...The adventure type exploits of the Warsaw ghetto and East European partisans...
...The point of the criticism is really what has been disseminated, what might be its effects, and what were the alternatives...
...The aroma of the steaming fish pot and the taste of the fish itself still lingers on...
...Kaitz do any research...
...Perhaps an unsavory prejudice has been revealed against Gerald Green, who assumed that within his range was a subject too artistically and morally demanding for Malraux, Camus, Grass, Nabokov, Agnon or Bellow...
...We have probably been so visually brainwashed by Manische-witz's jars of so-called "gefilte-fish" that we forgot what was to be "filled...
...If the production indeed presented a crude distortion of this historical calamity, then those who accept the validity of NBC's version show disdain for the public...
...Howard Kaplan Los Angeles, California Bingo To the Editor: I am absolutely appalled that a magazine of the caliber of moment would accept an article like "The Game in the Synagogue Basement," by Merrill Kaitz (April, 1978...
...the cleanliness and summer-camp hardships of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and There-sienstadt...
...With Jews like Mr...
...Time Magazine's report on this episode neglects to mention whether footage of the most gruesome deaths fetched the higher prices, but this financial transaction indicates something of the respect NBC had for the memory of the victims...
...To my knowledge none of those endorsing the show have commented on this sign of the mentality of the producers, who were such good customers of men who should have been dangling from the gallows...
...Whatever the quality of the "research" that went into the program, very few of its admirers afterwards claimed that the expenditure of $6 million resulted in some genuine illumination of the mystery of the Holocaust...
...To imagine such settings, the producers of the show bought from former S.S...
...Stephen Whitfield Assistant Professor, Brandeis University Waltham, Massachusetts To the Editor: It has been some days since the last episode of NBC's "Holocaust...
...First, my own reaction...
...NBC might have been asked how this reality could be depicted when camp survivors have claimed that their worst nightmares were better than what faced them each day...
...Defenders of the network are assuming that a more uncompromising program could not have painfully entangled viewers in the fate of European Jewry...
...The fish's skin would be patiently and carefully separated from the flesh and then cut in circular strips...
...Perhaps only eighty million or maybe sixty million Americans would have tuned in...
...The various reactions are interesting and should be noted...
...The ground fish mixed with all the other ingredients was then stuffed into the skin molds, and only then became gefilte fish...
...But, and this is a big but, I take issue with moment raising the point that the Soviets can and may quote from Mr...
...My parents both came from Warsaw and I lost my grandparents and many cousins, uncles and aunts to this great tragedy of the 20th century...
...It will often smack of profanation to attempt to make the Holocaust manageable, to include such monstrous criminality and such immeasurable suffering within our normal world...
...But that may be the line that separates those who are serious about enlarging our sensitivity to the Holocaust from those who want to compete with "Roots...
...all combined to leave the viewer with something less than the realization of true horror and the determination that it will never happen again...
...As someone who travelled to the Soviet Union in 1971 and '72, who met with dozens of dissidents and taught Hebrew to the clandestine Hebrew teachers during a period when virtually all Jewish emigres went to Israel, I am shocked, frightened, and furious at the statements and lies Aryeh Dulzin has made...
...How does Mr...
...Far from advancing understanding of the Holocaust, NBC may well have distorted it and thus impeded the efforts to clarify the moral problems the Holocaust poses...
...Kaitz, who needs enemies...
...Rather than have given the "Big Event" series the boost of such well-orchestrated publicity, Jewish spokesmen should have pointed out how much taste, poise, wisdom, fear and trembling and imagination such a subject demands, how nearly impossible it is to render into artistic or documentary images the reality of starvation in the ghettos and degradation in the camps...
...Did Mr...
...It is unilluminating to treat history as though it were elastic enough to yield fictional characters who coin-cidentally turn up everywhere, and about whom the viewer is supposed to care...
...Today we need all the friends we can get and I do believe the Jewish people have many good points and accomplishments that deserve praise instead of derision...
...These living proofs led me to study a great number of books concerning these events—trying to understand the impossible...
...Dulzin of doing—supplying the Russians with ammunition to use against us...
...Such common-sense realizations short-circuit the feelings of revulsion and anguish...
...NBC nevertheless failed even to approximate some definition of propriety...
...I came away from the first episode approving of what I saw...
...As I watched the next episodes I became disturbed by something I couldn't quite put my finger on...
...One of the insoluble paradoxes that the Holocaust poses for the living is how to strike the proper balance between the distant and the immediate...
...officers their "home movies" of Nazi atrocities...
...People were shot, hanged and gassed on the screen surrounded by an environment reflecting bright colored antiseptic Middle American sensibilities...
...Now people will see and learn what my people went through...
...More frightening, however, was hearing non-Jews comment on the melodramatic aspects of the drama...
...Surely by now the obtuseness of commerical television should have been apparent, and its earlier handling of complex historical and moral issues might have suggested a different sense of responsibility...
...These saw it as a soap opera/ adventure/thriller, and came away feeling it was exaggerated and could never have happened that way...
...Finally, I saw by the reactions of those around me what was wrong...
...The Czechs' "Shop on Main Street," the Italians' "Garden of the Finzi-Continis," the Americans' "Diary of Anne Frank" are all memorable and terrifying because they stop short of the gates of Hell...
...It is always going to be treacherous to weigh the awareness that such an experience is radically alien against the impulse to make it intelligible...
...The only significant defense of the show is related to its ratings—that perhaps 120 million Americans watched it and may well have learned something from it...
...I grew up aware of the Holocaust from a very young age...
...It was the old "keep a low profile" approach which I had thought died with the Warsaw ghetto...
...a wedding in the midst of death...
...Does he know how many synagogues do not permit bingo...
...Gefilte Fish, on the other hand, was what my Bubbe Shprintza used to make every Friday...
...It is obscene to hawk the sponsors' wares amidst scenes of torment and massacre and to pretend that the ethical acuteness of the viewer is not thereby diminished and betrayed...
...He is using the same old 'line' usually attributed to our non-Jewish 'friends,' that if one is bad we are all bad...
...The extinction of European Jewry is so horrifying to contemplate that an obsession with it can endanger our sanity, and yet the quest for meaning and the need to mourn require us to incorporate the Holocaust in our lives...
...That is why, however inescapable the publicity and the interest in NBC's "Holocaust," I resisted all temptations to watch this segment of the network's "Big Event" series...
...As I sit down to write these words I am affected by numerous conversations with family and friends over the meaning of the "event" itself and the events it depicted...
...The case that Elie Wiesel presented in the New York Times, which need not be repeated here, was never seriously answered by Green, nor by anyone else who has defended such a program on the basis of its wide dissemination...
...Even Leo Rosten in his The Joys of Yiddish identifies gefilte fish as "fish cakes or fish loaf made of various fishes which are chopped or ground____" If so, both Joan Nathan's and Rosten's fish dish should be called "gehakte fish"—ground fish...
...Allan Roit Brooklyn, New York Lies To the Editor: I read your editorial "Lies Our Leader Tells Us" (April, 1978) with unmitigated horror...
...Many American Jews saw the TV movie as bringing up things that should be left dormant...
...the bright happy shining Hollywood faces...
...I am a first generation American...
...Such dogged commercialism is indeed an example of the evil of banality...
...I have never quite understood how the popularity of a work is an argument for its merit, although those who are employed in the mass media have the power to dismiss or ignore artistic and intellectual criticism of their activities...
...I have seen cousins and friends of the family with numbers tattooed on their arms and horror revealed in their eyes...
...I tried to explain to them how it could, without really totally knowing how myself...
...Kaitz have the temerity to say, "I had to wish my people would get out of this particular shell-game____I was beginning to despise myself, my fellow man, and my religion...
...I saw soon that the twenty or thirty percent fiction had turned the whole show into a melodrama only slightly related to historical fact in their eyes...
...It must have been unsettling to "accept" the killing of nameless and faceless human beings by realizing that they were only extras toppling over into a ditch...
...Such suffering has been so incommunicable that no major post-war novelist—European or American, Jew or non-Jew—has dared to tackle directly this awesome subject...
...I am sorry to have come to these conclusions because, done right, such a "TV event" could have helped Americans understand why we react so strongly to a little band of fanatics in Skokie, and why we are so attached to one small state in the Middle East...
...The true horror of what happened never came across to the viewers...
...It has always been a source of irritation and sadness to me that authors of the Jewish faith, or better still, who happen to be born into the faith, always debase their race and religion as if to purge themselves...
...But this was just a Jewish bingo game, a meanMoment/7 ingless dirty shakedown...
...In 1976 I visited the Sudbahnhof station, Jewish Agency, and HIAS installations in Vienna as an independent observer, representing no position or organization, and found the conditions and treatment exactly as described in your editorial...
...Network television might have shown films that try to get the subject into focus by accommodating it to human scale, by directing our attention toward a few persons or families in their vulnerability before the descent into darkness...
...Therefore, I viewed "Holocaust" with the eyes of one knowing its truths and feeling, as much as one who wasn't there can, its pains...
...italics mine...
...I take exception to what he has said and I sincerely believe he owes us an apology...
Vol. 3 • June 1978 • No. 7
