Ways of Remembering

...There still is, as rocks with holes in them and rusty steel constructions sprout in many lands to express diverse meanings...

...another "countermon-ument," meant to memorialize a pyramid-shaped fountain in a town square contributed by a Jew and destroyed by the Nazis, is a re-creation of the original completely sunk, upside-down, into the ground where it once stood...

...But my own conclusion is that it is not simply the better-organized campaigns of Holocaust fundraisers that lead American Jews to contribute much more money for Holocaust memorials than for Jewish education or culture: The Holocaust speaks to them, and it is what they want to speak of to their fellow citizens...

...Describing the impressive museum at the kibbutz established by people who miraculously survived the Warsaw Ghetto uprising—as well as partisan guerrilla warfare in the Polish forests, and the Polish Home Army's doomed stand in Warsaw—Young writes: "In founding the museum here in 1949, [Yitzhak] Zuck-erman and his comrades literalized the more figurative memorial of the kibbutz itself...

...Yet better that than their jostling over the absurd question of whose suffering was greater than, or almost equal to, whose...

...More than a distinctive response to the Holocaust, their efforts seem to show the difficulty modern art has in unabashedly connecting with recognizable images of suffering or heroism or evil—or, indeed, any images...

...Reviewed by Nathan Glazer Professor of education and sociology, Harvard University Over the past several years James E. Young, associate professor of English and Judaic studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has visited Holocaust memorials and monuments throughout the world...

...As a New York City Arts Commission member asked: "How could we answer special groups who want to be similarly represented on public land...

...He has taken and collected photographs of them...

...French critics and historians have been in the forefront of this development, and have done much to eradicate any simpleminded or straightforward idea of memorialization...

...I must confess to a certain irritation at the excessive intrusion of contemporary critical theory, because its somewhat fashionable language tends to blunt points that could have been made more directly...

...Although there is an appropriateness to such ashamed and embarrassed self-effacement in Germany, I suspect the angry artists who create countermonu-ments would do something similar if they were asked to celebrate unoffending German enlightenment culture, or contemporary German democracy...

...It is hard to make the argument that they should subordinate the feeling to the presentation of more positive aspects of Jewish life...

...The French, of course, with their many republics and empires and restorations, have had substantial occasion to reflect on the way they contest over their history, and on the shifting reactions to their various revolutions and regimes...

...One might think the Holocaust provides less opportunity for conflict and equivocation, but Young demonstrates that memorializing the Holocaust has not been an easy affair...

...It would be unfair, in any case, to let irritations over language obscure the author's achievement...

...Would not the larger scope of an institution like the Jewish Museum in New York City be preferable...

...This is the theme that Israel, without forgetting the six million, accentuates...

...he affords us knowledge of creations variously extraordinary, pathetic and questionable...

...The Warsaw Ghetto uprising, with its incredibly young and brave participants, seems to loom larger with time...

...Young ends by expressing regret—as many Jewish thinkers do, as I do—that because Holocaust projects around the country consume so large a share of the American Jewish community's energy and funds, one gets the impression it is how Jews prefer to present their history and significance to their fellow citizens...

...Poland, under the same kind of regime, found it harder to deny the central-ity of Jewish extermination in Nazi ideology...

...The German concentration camps (not the killing factories, set up in Poland) are maintained as museums but are rarely accompanied by art, and that, in the light of the vanishing columns and inverted fountains, is probably all for the best...

...What about the American Indians, blacks, Armenians, the Japanese incarceration, and so on...

...In Germany, where the question of what to do has been numbing, almost paralyzing, Young's first examples are monuments that disappear into the ground: A lead-plated 39-foot column is designed to sink, a few feet at a time, until it is invisible...

...The disappearing column of lead is supposed to attract graffiti as it sinks, yet how is anyone to know that the graffiti should relate to what the Germans did to the Jews, rather than to what the Allies did to the Germans, or capitalism did to the workers, or to the environment, etc., etc...

...He has studied hundreds of monuments among the thousands that now exist, many in places not easy to reach...

...While many of us wondered whether the Holocaust Museum belonged on the Mall in Washington, history has a way of resolving such doubts: Now that it is open, it has become instantly legitimate...

...and he brings to his discussion of these monuments great sophistication in current understanding of art, of symbols, of significations...

...Of late there has been a good deal of self-consciousness about the writing of history, the commemoration of historically important happenings, the uses of historical memory in defining a national identity, and the like...

...I was deeply moved by the field of jagged broken granite at Treblinka, which Young calls "perhaps the most magnificent of all Holocaust memorials...

...You can just about grasp that, and it adds nothing to the words of the museum's curator that follow: "We wanted to build a Yishuv [settlement] as a monument to what we had seen in the ghettos and the camps...

...Young quotes often from the historian Pierre Nora's Les Lieux de Memoire, elaborating on his and other views of the matter...

...In this large volume of text and photographs he focuses on some of the most prominent among them—on their origins, their forms, their different meanings to different people at different times—and explores at length the problems of memorializing a historical event...

...True, it will have to be joined by memorials telling the stories of a half-dozen other groups...

...In fairness, one must also note that it recalls the Art Deco sculpture of American public buildings of the 1930s and '40s—there was a unity of style that transcended politics...

...Fully abreast of these concerns, Young resonates to all the ambiguities and paradoxes they raise...

...He begins with Germany, goes on to Poland, then to Israel, and finally to the United States...

...Here in the United States remembering the Holocaust would appear to offer no grounds for controversies going to the heart of national identity and meaning, but the appearance is deceiving...

...It is done by concentrating on Jewish heroism, for there was that too...

...It took them a long time to come to this realization...

...It is a remarkable story, and on the whole it is told well...

...In Israel memorialization posed a unique problem: How to incorporate the Holocaust into the epic of the state that it helped bring into being, when the Holocaust itself testifies to Jewish weakness, indignity, humiliation...

...But I suppose one must write in the tropes (another term favored by Young, which I hope I am using correctly) of one's time and discipline...

...In fact, it is a wonder that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was brought to completion without having to involve itself in the equal-time issue...

...And I was moved by the monuments made out of the vast accumulations of broken tombstones from destroyed Jewish cemeteries...

...These monuments, like so many others in eastern Germany, are today undoubtedly being revised...

...But in the words of the Polish Jewish sculptor Nathan Rapoport, who designed the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, "Could I have made a rock with a hole in it and said, 'Voila...

...To be sure, Polish artists were obligated to favor the Socialist proletarian style...

...In the former German Democratic Republic, on the other hand, monuments were erected—but they were "anti-Fascist" monuments that made much more of the Communist victims of Nazi inhumanity than the Jewish (Jews could get their credit as Communists and anti-Fascists...

...But Poland rises above both German shamed self-effacement and proletarian realism in some monuments that I—and I assume most readers—did not previously know existed...

...One must be grateful he did not, even though his work recalls Soviet sculpture...

...Every reader will come away from The Texture of Memory enriched...

...In each country, the issue of what was to be done—using what esthetic means, giving what account, with what emphases—has divided sponsors, officials, designers, Jewish and non-Jewish communities...

...The heroism of the Jewish people...