Vicarious Suffering
SINGER, DAVID
Vicarious Suffering Children of the Holocaust By Helen Epstein Putnam. 348 pp. $10.95. Reviewed by David Singer Associate editor, "American Jewish Yearbook" Elie Wiesel has told us the...
...Nor is she interested in establishing the limited—and fairly obvious—point that the second generation has experienced some fallout from the Holocaust...
...I wanted to ask them questions, so that I could reach the most elusive part of myself...
...She tells us: "I needed tricks to get near it, strategies to cut through the belt of numbness that formed each time I made a move toward it...
...Or again: "I wanted to feel connected to the experience my parents had undergone...
...At least for the present, this seems unlikely...
...That the title, Children of the Holocaust, is misleading is indicative of Epstein's approach...
...And this, of course, is as it should be: The Holocaust must be remembered...
...She takes up with a deranged young man who lives in a garbage-strewn apartment because she "was drawn to the idea of sinking to the bottom of society...
...it is also the subject of symposia, of pilgrimages, even of a phenomenally successful NBC television special now being shown around the world...
...Yet such thoughts are particularly strange in the light of her parents' efforts to shield her from what they went through...
...The last is a crucial remark...
...This point is stressed by several of the interviewees...
...It is impossible to answer these questions with any degree of certainty...
...Why does she so desperately desire to be accorded the status of a "survivor...
...Although they did not avoid all mention of the Holocaust, she...
...I object to seeing the memory of my family sensationalized...
...The book is not at all concerned with those who as youngsters experienced at first hand the horror of the Nazi era...
...Epstein's ostensible aim is to pry open the iron box, to come to grips with " slippery combustible things more secret than sex and more dangerous than any shadow or ghost...
...daydreaming in school, she thinks about "piles of skeletons . . . blackened barbed wire . . . hills of suitcases, mountains of children's shoes...
...In fact, she is nothing of the kind...
...As I talked to more and more of my contemporaries," she informs us, "I began to feel that they were all carrying around a version of my iron box [repressed memories and feelings], the contents of which they had left unexamined and untouched for fear it might explode...
...to the opera, to concerts, to the theater...
...Why, then, is Epstein obsessed with the Holocaust...
...Helen Epstein has recorded these statements without taking them seriously...
...What she yearns for is "a sense of being able to survive any kind of catastrophe...
...Nevertheless, this book does offer some strong hints...
...The other young people in Children of the Holocaust exhibit no evidence either of serious emotional difficulties caused specifically by their having parents who were in concentration camps...
...In Epstein's view this group constitutes an "invisible, silent family," its members "possessed by a history they . . . never lived...
...An Israeli concert musician: "I never thought of my parents as survivors...
...I needed company to look inside it, other voices to confirm that those things I carried inside me were real...
...As the author recounts her life story to age 30, she makes clear that she wants to suffer: " I dreamed of finding ways to suffer, to confront, feel and vanquish pain...
...I resent being talked about and categorized by anyone...
...She finds Israel attractive because there the "experience of death and displacement [is] the rule rather than the exception...
...Not only is the Holocaust almost constantly being written about...
...There had to be other people like me...
...For her, the measure of adulthood is "knowing clanger, or poverty, or discrimination...
...An American beauty queen:" I never felt abnormal in any way...
...She had a heavy emotional investment in fulfilling her fantasy, and had she taken such statements seriously, she would never have been able to write Children of Holocaust...
...she was taken "skating, skiing, bicycle riding...
...acknowledges several times that they were careful "not to frighten [her] with their recollections...
...I have an emotional reaction when people try to make it sensational, when they say that survivors or their children are disturbed...
...Given her powerful masochistic urges, it is understandable that Epstein might come to identify with what her mother and father endured during the Holocaust...
...Reviewed by David Singer Associate editor, "American Jewish Yearbook" Elie Wiesel has told us the greatest fear of Holocaust survivors is that their whole inhumane experience will be forgotten, that the memory of Auschwitz will disappear...
...What she is after is not so much money or fame, but rather psychic gratification—gratification derived from convincing the world that she, too, is a "survivor...
...For Epstein's argument that all children of Holocaust survivors are emotionally scarred rests primarily on evidence drawn from her own inner life, not from her "conversations" with others...
...This is not a wholly ignoble objective...
...It was part of their life and not necessarily the most significant part as far as my conception of it...
...I don't think I'm disturbed at all...
...This hardly speaks of a situation that would inevitably give rise to nightmarish visions of the Holocaust...
...At the same time, one cannot help noting the eagerness of some to turn the current interest to their own needs...
...Helen Epstein, whose book has received wide and quite favorable media coverage, is an example...
...A product of Manhattan's Upper West Side, Epstein likens herself to her parents, who lived through Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen...
...Epstein stresses that since earliest childhood she has been haunted by "glimpses of destruction": Riding a subway, she feels herself to be on a "train of cattle cars on its way to Poland...
...In the few instances where Epstein is able to come up with a horror story [a case of incest, for example], she fails to demonstrate a causal link between the events described and the Holocaust...
...If her mother has a concentration camp number tatooed on her arm, Helen can point to her iron box—a "bomb," a "tomb," a "vault" —holding thoughts and emotions "so potent that words crumble before they [can] describe...
...She cannot really be in Auschwitz, but she can fantasize about it and thereby become a "survivor...
...For the most part, she portrays men and women who are perfectly well-adjusted—hardly surprising, considering the loving concern lavished upon them by parents who took care to keep their horrors largely to themselves...
...Moreover, while she succeeds in persuading us that she has problems, she never convinces us that they are in any way the result of her parents' suffering in the camps...
...Instead, it focuses on young people like herself—born after World War II to actual survivors...
...sitting in Carnegie Hall, she fears that "men in black boots and shiny jackets" are going to "storm through the doors" and take her away...
...She seeks, in other words, to expose the scars that all children of Holocaust survivors carry...
...The author, however, is in no way motivated by scholarly considerations...
...There is a place for a scholarly attempt to assess the emotional well-being of children whose parents were in concentration camps...
...I was living a very typical, normal, average life...
...Indeed, she states directly: "I studied my parents: I took on their values and . . . wanted to imitate their experience...
...In addition, they plied her with "food, books, art, music and dancing lessons...
...No, she will settle only for our accepting her and all of her peers as full-fledged "survivors...
Vol. 62 • June 1979 • No. 13
