Healing and the Holocaust

...Perhaps, then, the place for A Season for Healing can be found among other personal statements of writers who have seized the opportunity to confront their own obsessions (in Roiphe's case, Jewish victimhood, moral superiority, and vengeance, among others) in the hope that readers will learn something from her confrontation...

...Thus, if Roiphe accepts "the moral superiority of the Jewish people," does her plea for healing imply both failure and condescension...

...But only, as Roiphe concludes, "Maybe...

...The Holocaust has cast a shadow over all of these relationships, creating a condition of anxiety and hostility typified by envy, guilt, mistrust, recrimination, and violence...

...But finding a meaningful place for A Season for Healing among other commentaries on the Holocaust will be difficult, in part because its reflections offer so little and come so late, in part because it offers up as much confusion as it lays to rest...

...Robert Skloot (Robert Skloot is professor of theater and drama at the University of Wisconsin-Madison...

...Roiphe's analysis frequently tears itself apart in its inability to decide who is meant by "we," "our," "they," or even "Jews...

...Angry in tone and apocalyptic in vision, Roiphe's reflections are contained in ten short chapters, most of which focus on the relationships between Jews and others: Christians, African-Americans, Poles, Catholics, Russians, and God...

...Roiphe's writing, often exploiting Holocaust imagery, is frequently vivid, occasionally awkward, sometimes both ("The cloak of humanism has a hole in its pocket and through it the Jews are dropped...

...For example, her frequent allusions to Jews occupying the "moral high ground" and the "Jewish claim to moral superiority" are undercut by her own acknowledgment of Jewish bigotry and oppression of others, so that lumping all Jews together is a convenient but murky strategy...

...And she offers some suggestions about how to resolve interpersonal and intercultural tensions which, exacerbated and inflamed by the Holocaust experience, have brought the world closer to even greater annihilation...

...Perhaps, Roiphe answers, but only by committing ourselves to behavior that involves an understanding of "the human demon in all of us," an "acknowledgment of anger and the helplessness it engenders," a resolve "to let the dead go," and an appeal to our self-interest: If we don't change, we will be victims of a fate even worse than the one suffered by the Jews a generation ago...

...But because she admits that anti-Semitism is ineradicable and the human need for violence and revenge inevitable, her suggestions are more prayerful than pragmatic, more desperate than hopeful...

...As a result, many chapters of A Season for Healing succeed as a kind of emotional divestiture, with Roiphe exposing all her own ambivalence and hostility on her way to getting on to the business of pondering the future...

...As such, they are the fitting conclusion to her gloss of bloody Jewish history, her anecdotal and occasionally sentimental review which provides the background for the author's own unresolved psychological and theological conflicts...

...But from the standpoint of her argument, most problematical are the pronouns...

...Read by itself, the final chapter ("Time: The Great Healer...

...She approaches the subject with passion and a commitment to bringing clarity to the confusions and paradoxes that trouble so many Jews in the post-Holocaust world...

...Near the end of the final chapter, Roiphe becomes her own best critic if not her own best judge: "Anger cannot be kept out of this book although the book is about healing...

...It should be clear that A Season for Healing is a personal book...

...In A Season for Healing, Anne Roiphe, known primarily as a fiction writer, has produced a book of essays on the issue that has obsessed many Jewish writers of the present generation, the Holocaust...

...represents an enormous effort on Roiphe's part to imagine a better world for all peoples...

...It is perplexing, however, to witness the amount of outraged energy Roiphe expends on subjects that have been dealt with for so many years in greater depth and sophistication by so many distinguished essayists and academic scholars—unless, of course, the expenditure of outrage is seen as a primary purpose for writing these essays...

...Can this condition ever be altered for the better...

...On her own terms, also troubling is the omission of two chapters on relationships that would seem to belong within the boundaries of her speculations: the Jews and Germany, and the Jews and the Arabs, although the latter group does receive some attention in the chapter on the Jews and Israel...

...Large issues (the Holocaust's uniqueness, Christian guilt over Jewish death, Israel's fortress mentality) as well as small ones (William Styron's Polish heroine, Cardinal O'Connor's patronizing ignorance) have all been written about with greater skill and insight, and make A Season for Healings, book not to be consulted for new political, theological, or historical insights...