fifty frenchmen can't be wrong (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
some_stars) wrote2011-04-19 12:22 pm
some_stars) wrote2011-04-19 12:22 pm
JEW RAGE
What is WITH this semester, this is the second time I've managed to find a peer-reviewed article that fills me with blinding fury at how full of offensive shit it is. This one is not quite so bad as the last, since most of its insights and arguments are good, but--well, it's called "Three Holocaust Writers: Speaking the Unspeakable," by Patricia A. Gartland. It starts with a section on how impossible the concept was to cope with, how European Jews had no precedent in their history of antisemitic persecution to process the Holocaust, the impossible task of remembering and expressing it. Then it introduces those three writers, concentration camp survivors writing about their experiences. All were political prisoners, none are Jewish.
The article doesn't seem to notice this as something perhaps worth addressing. In fact it freely uses these authors' various memories of witnessed/viewed Jewish victims (and their bodies) as examples of the trauma they experienced and how they remember/process it or don't. What really pushed me over the edge, though, was being unable to find anything in the 28 years since--searching for works citing this article--that addresses it either. Like, MAYBE the author's argument and conclusions about the process of remembering the Holocaust aren't generally applicable to every single survivor author? Maybe?
I'm not saying that these writers, the political prisoner survivors, and their experiences aren't well worth studying(and of course I'm not saying, as I should hope is obvious, that their trauma was somehow less bad or "counts" less), but not if you go in with the stated intention to study all Holocaust survivors and use this one group to pronounce about everybody. If anyone had just noticed...it's a good article aside from this gaping maw of WTF looming beneath it, it says thoughtful intelligent things about trauma and memory and writing, it just says them while cheerfully erasing Jews--and anyone else targeted for identity rather than action/speech--from the Holocaust as anything but someone else's horrible memory. Which at least one of the three books looked at does as well--that was the topic of my last paper--and I am sadly unsurprised to see that erasure/appropriation replicated entirely uncritically here.
ANYWAY I am actually going to attempt a longer entry on this later--yes, this is the SHORT version--with quotes (oh so many quotes) and after I've spent a little more time searching for people citing it(though I've searched JSTOR/MLA/Muse plus Google Scholar already), I just had to drain a tiny bit of my rage so I can get through the rest of the day. I will probably not get the longer entry done tonight, since we're having a seder, after which I'm doing my yearly reading of Elie Wiesel's haggadah. While doing so I will be sure to remember that, as Gartland says, "in the end, the Holocaust must remain the province of those who lived through it."
The article doesn't seem to notice this as something perhaps worth addressing. In fact it freely uses these authors' various memories of witnessed/viewed Jewish victims (and their bodies) as examples of the trauma they experienced and how they remember/process it or don't. What really pushed me over the edge, though, was being unable to find anything in the 28 years since--searching for works citing this article--that addresses it either. Like, MAYBE the author's argument and conclusions about the process of remembering the Holocaust aren't generally applicable to every single survivor author? Maybe?
I'm not saying that these writers, the political prisoner survivors, and their experiences aren't well worth studying(and of course I'm not saying, as I should hope is obvious, that their trauma was somehow less bad or "counts" less), but not if you go in with the stated intention to study all Holocaust survivors and use this one group to pronounce about everybody. If anyone had just noticed...it's a good article aside from this gaping maw of WTF looming beneath it, it says thoughtful intelligent things about trauma and memory and writing, it just says them while cheerfully erasing Jews--and anyone else targeted for identity rather than action/speech--from the Holocaust as anything but someone else's horrible memory. Which at least one of the three books looked at does as well--that was the topic of my last paper--and I am sadly unsurprised to see that erasure/appropriation replicated entirely uncritically here.
ANYWAY I am actually going to attempt a longer entry on this later--yes, this is the SHORT version--with quotes (oh so many quotes) and after I've spent a little more time searching for people citing it(though I've searched JSTOR/MLA/Muse plus Google Scholar already), I just had to drain a tiny bit of my rage so I can get through the rest of the day. I will probably not get the longer entry done tonight, since we're having a seder, after which I'm doing my yearly reading of Elie Wiesel's haggadah. While doing so I will be sure to remember that, as Gartland says, "in the end, the Holocaust must remain the province of those who lived through it."
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... Yeah, I'd consider that MAYBE WORTH ADDRESSING.
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