Witnessing the Disaster: Essays on Representation and the Holocaust. By Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer eds. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Pp. vi + 317, ISBN 0-299-18364-5).

This volume contains thirteen essays authored by a distinguished group of scholars from the humanities. Drawing from a range of cultural theorists, with frequent reference to Felman and Blanchot, the authors invoke multiple dilemmas involved in the translatability and transmission of the Holocaust as event, experience, and memory. These dilemmas are philosophical and generic: what constitutes testimony versus witness, history versus memory, non-fiction versus fiction? The generational passing of those survivors who directly experienced the Holocaust, and the consequences for memory and representation, is an important leitmotiv. While many of the authors critique the principle of “Holocaust fiction,” they engage in close-grained analyses of written texts composed over the past thirty years in which the Holocaust figures directly or indirectly. The texts include Eliach, Frank, Kosinski, Bellow, Wilkomirski, and England. Following an introduction which addresses the broader issues of witnessing and representation of the Holocaust in a range of cultural forms, the volume is divided into three parts: “The Epistemology of Witness,” “Memory, Authenticity, and the ‘Jewish Question,’” and “The Ethical Imperative.” While the chapters work well together and echo one another in terms of themes and theoretical perspectives, they also transcend these organizational categories. This review highlights issues of concern to scholars of cultural studies and folklore. James Young’s opening essay traces movements in author Art Spiegelman’s hearing his father’s story and his process of telling it over a period of thirteen years, from 1978 to 1991. A significant aspect of the father’s narrative is suppression, for Vladek destroyed his first wife Anya’s Polish-language diaries after her suicide, and thus eliminated a family text which his son longs to access. Young raises the question of genre boundaries within Holocaust fiction, a theme taken up at several points in the volume. He cites the representational struggles that emerged after the initial classification of Maus as fiction by the New York Times, and its subsequent reclassification as non-fiction, in part a response to Spiegelman’s concerns with reception of his work, including among American revisionists. Richard Glejzer’s essay on Maus considers the ontology of testimony and witnessing. Power struggles within family memory occur: Vladek claims that he never read Anya’s diaries before destroying them. In destroying the diaries, he ignored his wife’s wish that their son know their contents later as an adult. However, he kept her family photographs, which provide a visual link to her family’s pre-Holocaust past; Vladek has no family photographs of his own. Whose voice(s) prevail in remembering and forgetting a family/cultural memory? The question of voice and language is key to Alan Rosen’s essay. Rosen decenters the narrative authority of (American) English as the vehicle for transmission of survivors’ interviews, narrated originally in Hebrew, Yiddish and German. If, for some, contemporary English represents “the language of dollars,” it can also provide a more neutral linguistic option through which to narrate traumatic experience. The drama of passing from one language to another, across cultural spaces, and the ensuing loss of a cultural world through English-language assimilation, is ever present. Four essays in the volume articulate the meshing of theory and practice in teaching about the Holocaust. In Part One, Janet Alsup’s essay draws from Felman’s concept of secondary witnessing in examining the reception of Holocaust texts in an undergraduate English class. Alsup raises ethical questions and offers pedagogical strategies when confronted with a revisionist paper proposal submitted by a young white male student. The study of contemporary genocides can provide a means to counter younger generations’ perceived “overexposure” to the Holocaust, especially among those young adults who are not direct descendents of survivors. In Part Two, Susan David …