Essay: Ethics of Survivor Treatment in Post-Holocaust American Literature

In the latter half of the twentieth century, several Jewish American writers have taken on the task of representing the Holocaust and its victims in their art. Even though Isaac Bashevis Singer, Art Spiegelman and Cynthia Ozick are did not experience the Holocaust themselves, several of their works center on this sensitive issue. Through their short story, graphic novel and novella they explore the difficulty of writing about a topic that is for them as American Jews both near and distant, and raise issues regarding American society's treatment of Holocaust victims.

Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus embodies the artist's struggle with depiction of the Holocaust on several levels. First, such a struggle is inherent the narrative's very form. For the depiction of a Holocaust story, Spiegelman chose the graphic novel, a medium he associates himself in the novel with the lighthearted fun of Walt Disney's cartoons (in a conversation with Vladek). Even though the subject matter of Maus is very grave, the manner in which the story and the novel itself are presented is visually appealing, to the point even of being fun and delightful: the horror story of Nazis and Jews turns into a game of cat and mouse, quite literally, as Nazis become cats and Jews mice. The presentation of the story has been very polemical, with readers taking offense with the huge swastika on the front cover and the inherent playfulness of the graphic novel genre. The question arises: is such a medium a legitimate choice for the presentation of such a sober story?

Even though the novel alone cannot, of course, provide a comprehensive answer to this question, Maus as a work does contain several defenses of this form. This choice of graphic depiction is very self-aware. The novel opens with an epigraph by Hitler: "The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human". Spiegelman literalizes this metaphor, and depicts Jews (as well as Nazis and Poles) as non-human. The book's full title, too, is an indication of Spiegelman's deliberate choices, as it contains a pun: A Survivor's Tale can be read as A survivor's tail. In addition, although the novel presents itself as primarily relating Vladek's story as a Holocaust survivor – as indicated by the full title Maus: A Survivor's Tale – a parallel plot tracks the process of Spiegelman's documentation Vladek's tale. The readers are shown Spiegelman's many deliberations behind the process of writing the story. For instance, Vladek tells Art the story of his old girlfriend, whom he did not treat in a perfectly gentlemanlike manner. Vladek urges Art not to include this in his book: "I can tell you other stories, but such private things, I don't want you should mention". Art agrees – "okay, okay – I promise." Of course, he reneges on his promise and relates all of this to his readers.

In thus doing, Spiegelman explores what it means to be a Holocaust survivor's child, and, furthermore, what it means and how it feels to document the Holocaust as someone who has not experienced it first-hand. By choosing to ignore his father's wishes and using his own judgment in the inclusion of certain scenes in his book, Spiegelman asserts his artistic and personal vision. By exploring his own story, and not just his father's, Spiegelman stresses the importance of the experience not just of the Holocaust survivor but of those who surround the survivor. Both Art and Mala, Vladek's new wife, suffer because of Vladek's stinginess and tendency to harsh criticism, which seems to be a symptom of his experiences in the holocaust.

In addition, as we find out from the novel, even before the publication of Maus, Spiegelman was a cartoonist – he published the mid-novel insert "Prisoner on the Hell Planet". Spiegelman explores the subject of the Holocaust in a very sensitive manner, and, he seems to say, any one medium should not be barred from exploring any one subject just because of conventions and taboos. Indeed, Spiegelman manages to explore the topic of the Holocaust – not to mention other grave topics such as his mother's suicide and his father's unhappy marriage – in a very sensitive manner, despite the medium of the novel.

While Spiegelman's relationship with the Holocaust is relatively close due to his father's experiences in Nazi Germany, Ozick's and Singer's affiliation with the Holocaust is more obscure. The two American authors consequently explore the massive tragic event from a less personal, more societal point of view. In both the novella The Shawl and the short story The Cafeteria, Ozick and Singer criticize the hypocritical attitude of their contemporary American society toward Holocaust survivors.

In the novella, Rosa is a Holocaust survivor now living in Miami, Florida. She suffers emotionally and psychologically from hallucinations of her child Magda who was dashed against an electric fence by a Nazi in a concentration camp. She lives in overwhelming decrepitude. Just like in The Cafeteria, here too a central character appeals to an American Jew for help and understanding and sympathy and here too, it is denied her.

Rosa searches Miami streets at night for underwear that she thinks Persky stole from her. As she does so, she encounters Mr. Finkelstein, owner of the extremely luxurious hotel Marie Louise. The hotel's beach is surrounded by barbed wire which, of course, brings back extremely difficult memories for Rosa. She goes to complain to the hotel's owner. "Barbed wire… you [are of the] S.S!" and he very unsympathetically throws her out. The juxtaposition between Rosa's own miserable squalid hotel room and the luxury of the Marie Louise serves as a further criticism of American Jewry: American Jews are clearly aware of the suffering that holocaust survivors undergo and do nothing to help.

Another criticism inherent in The Shawl is against American psychological treatment of holocaust survivors. In his correspondence with Rosa, Dr. Tree invites her again and again to participate in a study about Holocaust survivors. He sends her an article which he says Rosa might find particularly useful about the psychology of baboons. Rosa finds this extremely offensive, as well as his treatment of survivors as such and not as proper human beings. Stella, Rosa's niece, aggravates this hostility that Rosa harbors toward psychologists by treating her attachment to Magda's scarf as a "fetish" or a "fixation", terms she learned at night school psychology classes.

These themes of societal hypocrisy crop up in The Cafeteria, as well. The protagonist of Isaac Bashevis Singer's short story is a successful Jewish American author, Aaron. Aaron's relationship with Esther embodies the hypocrisy inherent in American society toward Holocaust survivors (or in his story, "refugees").

When he first meets Esther, she is pretty and appealing, despite having experienced the Holocaust: "They [the patrons of the cafeteria] listened to her talk and jokes. She had returned from the devastation still gay… I imagined I was in love with her". Esther, whose name is a reference to the great biblical savior of the Jewish people, is appealing – as long as she presents a strong façade. He courts her, inviting her to supper and visiting her father's house. However, as Aaron gradually gets to know Esther and her experiences of the war, she loses her attractiveness. "On the bunks near me one time, a mother lay with one man and her daughter with another. People were like beasts – worse than beasts".

Several years later, they meet again. She complains to Aaron about her health, her dead father and her problems getting reparation money from the German government. Some time later, she visits Aaron in his apartment and relates her vision of having seen Hitler in the cafeteria the night it burned down. No longer is Esther the pretty, appealing woman who joked despite her hard past. Instead, the ghosts of her past begin to emerge and overtake her reality, which is, after all, to be expected from a survivor of such a trauma. This, however, does not elicit sympathy from Aaron, but instead alienates him. "I was afraid that Esther would continue to call me. I even planned to change my telephone number". Esther doesn't contact him again, but his guilt over his maltreatment of her begins to show: Aaron starts hallucinating himself, imagining that his apartment is on fire, and finally imagining that he sees Esther with her husband on the subway when they are both probably dead.

This tension between knowing that he should be nice to Esther and not wanting to because being nice to such a person is simply unpleasant is reflected, Singer implies, in American society. "Suddenly a little lawyer showed up… you know they're now giving reparation money… the lawyer says my only chance is to convince them I'm ruined psychically [says Esther]." Even though American society and Germany ostensibly has good intentions toward Holocaust survivors, their intentions do not translate into actions, and socially and officially Holocaust survivors end up lonely, suffering and without aid for their hardships.

Photo by Matt Collamer