Testimony. Contemporary Writers Make the Holocaust Personal

TESTIMONY CONTEMPORARY WRITERS MAKE THE HOLOCAUST PERSONAL To make personal is a form of testimony. In this landmark volume, a group of America's finest novelists, essayists, and poets weave their own stories of the Holocaust's impact on their lives. By looking closely at their lives - and our own - we see where the shadow continues to fall. The book brings together some of the most distinguished writers of our day: Max Apple, E. M. Broner, Jane DeLynn, Leslie Epstein, Leslie Fiedler, Herb Gold, Geoffrey Hartman, Alfred Kazin, David Lehman, Alan Lelchuk, Julius Lester, Gordon Lish, Phillip Lopate, Daphne Merkin, Leonard Michaels, Mark Mirsky, Marge Piercy, Robert Pinsky, Francine Prose, Barbara Rogan, Anne Roiphe, Norma Rosen, David Rosenberg, Susanne Schlotelberg, Grace Schulman, Lore Segal, and David Shapiro. Most of the writers were born during and after the war, in the United States, sheltered from the Holocaust. Although they were distant from the catastrophe, they are now, as writers, called on as witnesses, transmitters for a new generation. Many write of their own childhoods - how they gained knowledge of the Holocaust and how they came to terms with it. One author asks: "Can an event that hardly touched me so have altered me?" The experiences are varied, including a converted Jew who looks back to an unusual past in Georgia and one who recalls Judenrein towns in West Germany. Some embraced Israel, some Hollywood, others academia or politics, some an inner escape. These are tales of family ties and families that are no more, rich religious traditions lost as well as lives where the absence of Jewish culture is now deeply felt.

In this sequel to Congregation: Contemporary Writers Read the Jewish Bible , Rosenberg asks 26 notables when they first learned of the Holocaust, how it shaped their careers and other questions. In a keen essay, Phillip Lopate censures what he sees as the Jewish preoccupation with the Holocaust to the exclusion of other human and even other Jewish disasters. Lore Segal fled Austria and lived with five different English families in eight years; the Holocaust drew black American Julius Lester and German Susanne Schlotelburg to Judaism. Unfortunately, many pieces are labored, fragmented and self-indulgent, banal or romanticized trivializations, with the nadir being Gordon Lish: "Yes, I am being paid for this. Yes, I am glad I am being paid for this. No, I did not say that I did not want to be paid for this. No, I did not say go give instead what you are paying to me to somebody who really paid with his bones for this." First serial to Esquire, Tikkun and Partisan Review; Jewish Book Club selection.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Rosenberg, who edited the recent Congregation: Contemporary Writers Read the Jewish Bible ( LJ 11/15/87), has now edited a new collection of essays by 27 contemporary Jewish writers on how the Holocaust affected their lives--emotionally and intellectually--and how they came to terms with it. Contributors include Herbert Gold, Alfred Kazin, Anne Roiphe, Julius Lester, and Marge Piercy. The writing is consistently of a high level. This unusual anthology will be of value to anyone interested in Holocaust studies and Jewish literary life in America. For most collections.
- Robert A. Silver, Shaker Heights P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.