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My ‘transgressive’ Holocaust novel is still stirring debate, 20 years later
(JTA) — Recently, I opened my email and found a link to an article in a scholarly publication, The Journal of Jewish Identities, published by Johns Hopkins. Puzzled, I clicked and discovered the following: “‘I was a prisoner. Jew. Whore’: Inherited Sexualized Trauma in Sonia Pilcer’s ‘The Holocaust Kid’ by Alex M. Anderson and Lucas F. W. Wilson.”
I read the headline and gasped. “The Holocaust Kid” is a novel of interconnected stories I published in 2001. In it, I explored the psychological and existential perspective of being the daughter of Holocaust survivors, but not reverentially. (Hence the title.)
Sure, it is semi-autobiographical. And yes, I was scarred by my history. But had I really “inherited sexualized trauma”?
I began writing ”The Holocaust Kid” in the early 1980s. It was written in an edgy style, used in my first novel “Teen Angel,” that a New York Times reviewer described as “tough and sweet, rude, loud and hilariously filthy.” I worked on much of the book in Israel, wanting to live in a country of survivors. But I hadn’t realized how uncomfortable the subject was, almost taboo, until I gave a reading in Jerusalem to a room filled with young writers and journalists. After I finished, there was hostile silence. One listener finally asked, “Why write this? And why are you reading it here?” I answered, “Because I’m a writer.” I had stories I wanted to tell, and believed that my take on the Big H, as my protagonist Zosha calls the Holocaust, needed to be heard. But the question should have alerted me to the difficulties my manuscript would face.
I didn’t know, nor did my agent Carl Brandt, who had sold my two previous novels, that it would take 20 years, over 40 rejections, countless rewrites and several more agents to sell this book. It was treated as nasty and unseemly — and I, an untouchable — by editors, many of whom were Jewish. Perhaps the editors were offended by the language. Or was I making fun of the Holocaust, as some editors suggested?
I suppose I am interested in the transgressive, but I had no intention of being disrespectful. A good joke, I thought, is the best way to deliver a devastating blow. I learned that from the survivors.
In lieu of living family, my parents belonged to a large network of Polish Jews. All were survivors. The women played canasta and men, poker. As they tossed their bright plastic chips and picked up cards, blue numbers flashed on the insides of their arms. Their stories were profoundly and terrifyingly cynical about human nature. Yet often funny, and extremely dark.
“You remember Yola? She was the not bad-looking one with crooked teeth, who went with the German. He gave her crabs.” Laughter. “If Bolek hadn’t shared his piece of bread, I wouldn’t be here. Lucky me, I was dealt three queens!”
I was born in a German DP camp, but I was raised on the streets of Brooklyn and Washington Heights, where I attended tough public schools. I rebelled against my Jewish/Holocaust background and joined a girls street gang. It is a complex matter to write about the Holocaust and its inheritors. I realize the subject was inviolable. And I admit that my take on survivors and their children is troubling, but that’s what I meant to do: to give it a raw, provocative slant, growing out of my experiences.
The book was finally sold by Gareth Esersky to a small, courageous press, Persea Books, and editor Karen Braziller. The pub date was September 2001, right before the tragedy of 9/11. The book was mostly ignored, but I did get an email from the husband of a well known therapist and filmmaker who is a Second Generation descendant of survivors, or “2G.” (In 1987, I believe I introduced the term “2G,” in a short-lived New York magazine called Seven Days.) He wrote that ”The Holocaust Kid” was a travesty, that I insulted the memory of the dead and should seek psychological help.
The almost universal rejection by the Jewish literary community was painful. But I carried on, kept writing and published other books.
Twenty-one years later, I was contacted by Lucas Wilson, who was writing his doctoral dissertation about Second Generation writers. His subjects included Art Spiegelman, Helen Epstein, several others and me. I had watched on Zoom as he defended his thesis. End of story, I thought.
A year or so later, I received the email with a link to an article by him and another graduate student, Alex Anderson. The scholars focused on the most controversial story in the collection, “Shoah Casanova.” This story involves a sexual encounter between Zosha and Uly Oppenheim, a Jewish Holocaust professor, who like Zosha, is 2G.
As they begin their lovemaking, he takes off his tie and begins to snake it around her. “He was the master. Ubermensch. Superman. So powerful,”” she thinks. “It was 1942. I was a prisoner. Jew. Whore. … If I made him love me, he’d take me through the war. I would survive.” As he is about to climax, he says, “I’ve got something for you, my little refugee. This comes all the way from Oswiecim.” Oswiecim is the Polish word for Auschwitz.
The scholars wrote, “The protagonist, Zosha Palovsky, engages in Nazi-Jewess erotic fantasy and role play as a way of addressing, albeit obliquely, her inherited sexualized trauma… [I]t gives voice and, as it were, body to what she imagines her mother to have gone through.” They continue: “Inherited sexualized trauma can thus be defined as the second generation’s adopted psychic and affective wounds that stem from what they imagine to be their parents’ experiences of sexualized violence during the Holocaust.”
Whoa! When I wrote ”Shoah Casanova,” I wasn’t thinking about my mother’s trauma, nor my own. I was trying to describe my character’s attraction/repulsion to Uly, and to their master/slave game. This is one more variation on the theme of how the Holocaust plays out in both of their lives. So it was weird to have the language of trauma applied to my story and, by implication, to me.
While he was writing his dissertation, Wilson and his mentor, Alan Berger, questioned me more than once about the identity of Uly Oppenheim, the kinky Holocaust professor, but I refused to reveal it. Why? Because I made him up, just as I made up his book about female survivors forced to work in brothels, titled “Our Bodies, Not Our Souls.” To me, this is the pleasure of creativity — making things up.
I cannot deny that the book contains episodes from my life. But I take refuge in what Carl Brandt told me when I was starting out: “There’s no way for anyone to know what actually happened and what’s fictionalized.” And I recall Philip Roth’s remark: “I say to my imagination: ‘This is what really happened. Can you top this?’”
After I sent a few friends the Wilson/Anderson article, they asked with concern, “How do you feel about this?”
If I am honest, at first, I felt thrilled to have my work read at all, after so long, and analyzed by scholars. Then I began to wonder: How much truth is in their thesis?
I remember a story my mother once told me. She worked at a munitions factory in a forced labor camp. Once she returned after curfew. A soldier caught her. He forced her to take off her dress and clean the street with it. Then he laughed and walked away. For the rest of her life, my mother remained frightened of men in uniforms. I once saw her grovel before the mailman, but I do not think this was not sexualized trauma.
The desire for domination is hardly limited to the Jewish/Nazi dynamic. Many women and men run fetishistic scenarios in their minds. You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy humiliation, at least in your fantasies. Besides, they’re just playing. And dead serious.
Yet there is something deeply embedded in our culture’s collective unconscious that feeds on the notion of Holocaust “sexualized trauma.” It’s in the ether. Consider the films “The Night Porter,” “The Pawnbroker,” “Sophie’s Choice” and “Schindler’s List.” All of them feature scenes of terrified, naked women.
Twenty years after my book came out, and 80 years after the Holocaust, writers and filmmakers are finding new ways to tell the story. Some are breaking taboos about whose stories should be told, some are using humor and others have focused on the children and grandchildren of survivors and victims. A recent film, “The Zone of Interest,” written and directed by Jonathan Glazer, captures the horror from the point of view of Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss and his family, who live in an idyllic house. It shares a wall with Auschwitz. We see their lush gardens, parties with children jumping in a swimming pool. But in the background, there’s the insistent sounds of gunfire and screaming. And no one notices.
“We’ve become desensitized,” Glazer has said. “It’s impossible to show what happened inside those walls. “And in my opinion, one shouldn’t try.” Instead his interest was in creating “ambient evil.” The effect is powerfully haunting.
Although I did not agree with the scholars’ thesis, they gave me a reason to go back to a novel I began many years ago. My hardest one to write. The most difficult to sell. My most personal book. “The Holocaust Kid” lives on.
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The post My ‘transgressive’ Holocaust novel is still stirring debate, 20 years later appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Police Neglect is a Pogrom’s Essential Ingredient
Israeli football supporters and Dutch youth clash near Amsterdam Central station, in Amsterdam, Netherlands, November 8, 2024, in this still image obtained from a social media video. Photo: X/iAnnet/via REUTERS
JNS.org – In Amsterdam, in the heart of Europe, on Nov. 7, Israeli football fans were hunted, beaten and terrorized by gangs. Was this a pogrom? According to conventional wisdom, it takes two to make a riot and three to make a pogrom. A pogrom requires three parties: instigators, victims and the public instrument of law and order that either neglects or condones the violence.
The instigators, in this case, were the Arab-Dutch gangs who went on a “Jew hunt.” The victims were clearly the Jewish supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv. And the third ingredient?
The Dutch police made 62 arrests before and after the riot but none during the assaults.
The Anti-Defamation League has said, “Given the extent of the rampage and violence, the number of detentions to date is alarming[ly] low.”
A month before this incident, there were alarming media reports that local police officers were refusing to safeguard Jewish and Israeli sites across the country.
We have been here before.
There is a long colonial tradition of the authorities ignoring mob attacks on Jews in Arab countries. The British army stood outside the gates of Baghdad but failed to quell the Farhud massacre of Iraqi Jews on June 1-2, 1941. It was only when the rioters began threatening Muslim quarters that the troops were ordered to intervene. By then, 179 Jews had already been murdered; women had been raped, babies mutilated, and extensive looting and destruction of property had taken place.
In the Libyan riots of 1945, during which more than 130 Jews died, the Jews held the British authorities partially responsible for the riots: they did not intervene directly in the pogrom until the third day of violence. In 1948, troops, including soldiers of the Jewish Brigade, were ordered to their barracks by the British administration in Libya while a second pogrom raged, and 14 Jews were killed. More deaths were prevented only because some Jews had been trained in self-defense.
The French colonialists, too, had an ignominious habit of failing to protect the Jews. When a riot broke out in Constantine, Algeria, in 1934, killing 25 Jews, unarmed police could not prevent the initial incident from spreading. The civil and military authorities in the city hall underestimated the dangers. The mayor, his deputy and the prefect were all on vacation, and none were recalled to deal with the situation. The secretary-general of the Algerian government even forbade the troops under the leadership of the military commander for Constantine to use bullets. The army took three hours to arrive.
In the Amsterdam case, victim-blaming has already begun. The Maccabi fans had “provoked” the riots when they burnt a Palestinian flag and “destroyed” a taxi. Nevertheless, there is strong evidence that the Amsterdam riot was preplanned and premeditated. This, too, is an essential ingredient of the classic pogrom. In 1941, Jewish homes were daubed with a red hamsa on the eve of the Farhud riot. In the run-up to the 1948 pogrom in the Moroccan city of Oujda, inscriptions with skulls and crossbones appeared, declaring “Death to the Jews!” and that the community leader “Obadia will be hanged, and the rest will follow!”
In Mandatory Palestine, on April 4, 1920, at the peak of the Nebi Musa festival, anonymous Arabic-language notices began circulating in Jerusalem that said, “The government is with us, [the British Gen. Edmund] Allenby is with us, kill the Jews; there is no punishment for killing Jews.” Over four days, thousands of Arabs ran through the Jerusalem streets, throwing stones at Jews, destroying Torah scrolls, setting a yeshiva and several houses on fire, breaking into buildings and looting, with little intervention from the British authorities until the very end.
In Aden, the British-trained forces of law and order took an active part in the killing during the 1947 riots in which nearly 90 Jews were murdered. In 1929, knowing that a pogrom was about to happen, the Arab-dominated police force in Hebron made sure that Jews were not able to defend themselves, and 67 Jews were killed.
In the case of the violent riots targeting the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans in Amsterdam, were the police incompetent or did they fail to act by design?
The attitude of those police officers who refused to do their duty because defending Jewish sites and people would present them and their consciences with a moral dilemma is as close as it gets to condoning the violence.
On the night of Nov. 7, the Dutch police neglected to control events. More frightening, the risk of contagion across Europe is high. Jews have not felt more threatened since World War II, and less confident, in the event of trouble, that the forces of law and order will be ready to protect them.
The post Police Neglect is a Pogrom’s Essential Ingredient first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Under US Pressure to Expel Hamas, Qatar Keeps Double-Dealing
Qatar’s Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani makes statements to the media with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in Doha, Qatar, Oct. 13, 2023. Photo: Jacquelyn Martin/Pool via REUTERS
JNS.org – The United States is pressuring Qatar to expel Hamas leaders from its territory due to the terrorist organization’s refusal to consider even a short ceasefire and new suggestions for a hostage release deal with Israel.
According to international media reports, Qatar is under American comply with an ultimatum to expel the senior Palestinian terrorists.
While Qatar has confirmed that it is stalling its mediation efforts in the indirect hostages-for-terrorists exchange talks between Israel and Hamas, it has not confirmed that it is ousting Hamas members.
Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president for research at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said, “This is pressure from Senate Republicans, amplified by Trump’s electoral victory. The Biden team appears to be trying to take credit for something that was spurred by others.
“The regime in Doha is trying to simultaneously confirm and deny the news. This is consistent with Qatar’s double-dealing. The goal right now should be to squeeze the regime to jettison Hamas,” he added.
While it is “unclear how Trump’s arrival will change any of this,” Schanzer assessed, the fear of a shift in American policy “is undeniably pushing Doha to make these moves and announcements.”
Meanwhile, “the Qataris are going to continue to buy up assets in the United States, regardless of who is president. This is their way of gaining leverage over our leaders in politics and business,” said Schanzer. “I believe that the next administration needs to conduct a careful and thorough review of these sovereign investments. The amount of money that Qatar has invested in this country is staggering. But it has not yet been made clear why it has invested so much—especially in sectors like education that do not yield a financial return.”
The Biden administration’s ‘last card’
Brandon Friedman, director of research at Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, told JNS that US pressure on Qatar is the Biden administration’s “last card to play. How effective it will be depends on how Hamas—and Qatar—perceive the Trump administration. My guess is that the Qataris suspect the Trump administration will ask them to expel Hamas, so there is no harm in playing this card now and preemptively dealing with a potential source of tension with the new administration.”
According to Friedman, “The Qataris use their relations with various Islamist and jihadi groups as foreign policy tools to advance and protect their interests. Even if they expel Hamas, they will continue to host factions of the Muslim Brotherhood and let Al Jazeera be used to promote the Brotherhood’s ideology. It is also unclear whether the US asked Qatar to end its role as financial backer and conduit for Hamas’s extensive regional network of businesses and charities, which funded its terror infrastructure.”
(Hamas began as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.)
Qatar, Friedman said, “was traumatized by the Saudi-led June 2017 blockade that lasted until the end of the Trump presidency. The blockade was imposed shortly after Trump’s visit to the Saudi kingdom. The Qataris are likely to make every effort to earn the good favor of the Trump administration.”
Asked to address the American military’s ongoing use of Qatar’s Al Udeid Airbase, which Doha spent a very large some of money to build and develop, Freidman said, “I don’t view the US as dependent on Al Udeid. I see it as a source of leverage for the US in dealing with Qatar. It is a symbol of US protection.
“If the US withdrew from Al Udeid, Qatar would feel unprotected. In fact, one might argue it is not a coincidence that the US quietly renewed its lease of Al Udeid for another 10 years after the Qataris brokered the November [2023] deal for the hostages. It was almost as if it was a reward for good behavior or a service provided.”
Addressing Doha’s global investments, Friedman said that “Qatar can use its immense wealth to purchase US arms, which would likely be viewed favorably by Trump. It can also invest its energy wealth in the US economy, which is one of the ways Saudi Arabia won favor with the first Trump administration. It is worth noting that Qatar has been substantially increasing its activities in both of these areas—US weapons purchases [$1 billion in 2022] and investments in the US economy over the past five to 10 years.”
‘No longer serves its purpose’
On Nov. 9, Reuters reported that Qatar is stalling its Gaza ceasefire mediation. Doha informed Hamas and Israel it will “stall its efforts to mediate a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal until they show ‘willingness and seriousness’ to resume talks,” the news agency stated on Saturday, citing the Qatari Foreign Ministry.
“The Gulf country has been working alongside the United States and Egypt for months on fruitless talks between the warring sides in Gaza,” said the report.
“The Qatari ministry also said press reports on the future of the Hamas political office in Doha were inaccurate without specifying how,” it added. On Friday, Reuters cited a US official as confirming that Washington asked Doha to expel Hamas, and that the Qataris had “passed this message on to Hamas.”
Reuters also cited an unnamed official briefed on the matter as stating on Saturday that “Qatar had concluded that with its mediation efforts paused, Hamas’ political office there ‘no longer serves its purpose.’”
Hamas has denied being told to leave the Gulf state, which has hosted it since 2012.
The post Under US Pressure to Expel Hamas, Qatar Keeps Double-Dealing first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Who Is Testing Us?
“Abraham and Isaac,” oil on canvas, Anthony van Dyck, circa 1617. Photo: National Gallery Prague via Wikimedia Commons.
JNS.org – On Shabbat, we will read the Torah portion Vayera and the poignant drama of the akeidah, the binding of Isaac, which is the 10th, and most difficult, test of faith that our father Abraham had to face in life. Would he be prepared to sacrifice his beloved son Yitzchak, Isaac, on the altar of God, especially since he waited so many years for this son to be born to his wife, our matriarch, Sarah?
Why is this famous act of near-martyrdom so special? What makes Abraham and Isaac so unique? Haven’t there been many millions of Jewish martyrs throughout our long and torturous history? Only one generation ago, 6 million martyrs, including more than 1 million innocent children, were killed. And one year ago, 1,200 of our finest—young and old—were martyred by Hamas.
So why, I ask, is the near martyrdom of Abraham and Isaac so special?
There are many famous answers to this question, but I would like to share with you an unconventional answer that I believe speaks to us today and has a very relevant and personal message to us all.
This section in the Torah begins with these words: “And it came to pass after these things, and God tested Abraham.”
That’s it. I just gave you the answer. Did you get it? No? You missed it? OK, let me repeat it. “And God tested Abraham.” Did you hear the emphasis this time? God himself was testing Abraham.
What is my point? Tragically, we Jews are all too accustomed to martyrdom. We are used to giving up our lives and our children’s lives when we are threatened and attacked by our enemies, by antisemites and by the vicious villains of history. We understand that life is a battle between good and evil. In this epic confrontation, we have all too often given our very lives for our faith, for our principles, and for God so that the forces of light would vanquish the forces of darkness and evil.
So for Abraham to be called upon to give his life, or his son’s life, in a battle against, say, the mighty King Nimrod would be understandable. But here, Abraham was not being tested by Nimrod or Hitler or Hamas. Here, Abraham is facing off against God. God Himself was testing Abraham!
That the antisemite wants to take your child’s life is a reality we are, sadly, all too familiar with. But God? God is threatening my child’s life? This, we cannot come to terms with so easily.
But Abraham said nothing. Not a word. He got up early the next morning and went on this mission with total faith in God. He did not demand any answers to the many questions he could have asked.
The unique test of Abraham was whether he would become disillusioned by the clear contradiction in God’s own words.
“Hey God! One minute, you tell me you are giving me a crown prince and that he will be my heir and the next link in the founding fathers of the Jewish people, and the next minute, you’re telling me to sacrifice him? And he hasn’t yet married or fathered any children. I don’t get it, God.”
Abraham could have said that, but he didn’t. He never wavered. Not for a moment. And that is part of his immortality. That is why his sacrifice remains unique, even after millions and millions of heroic acts of Jewish martyrdom throughout the generations.
God was testing Abraham. Not the antisemite. Not Hamas. God. And Abraham passed the test with flying colors.
Disillusionment is a very big test in life, especially if it comes from an unexpected source—like God.
We are often faced with tests of disillusionment, and not only for the big events, like the Holocaust or Oct. 7.
I can understand why my competitor is hurting my sales. He wants to. But why is God allowing this to happen to my business? I’ve been good. I come to shul. I give tzedakah. Didn’t God promise in the Bible that if we are good to Him, He would be good to us? Why is He killing my whole business?
That is a big test. Will we allow ourselves to wallow in disillusion?
Furthermore, the word “Elokim” doesn’t only mean God, it can also mean the godly. The godly, too, can sometimes cause us to be tested.
Like the rabbi! The rabbi is supposed to be a man of God. “Well, he didn’t say good morning to me or Shabbat Shalom or wish me a chag sameach. He didn’t visit me when I was in hospital or when I had the flu.” If the rabbi did not live up to one’s expectations of a spiritual leader—to the high standards people expect of a man of God—then one can become disillusioned. Many people worldwide have left synagogues because they became disillusioned with their man of God, their rabbi.
That, too, is a test.
And then there is the most common test of all. I must have heard this one at least a thousand times!
“Rabbi, I know a guy who goes to shul 10 times a day. He prays, he shukels (shakes) up a storm, and he makes it like he is the holiest guy in town. And when it comes to business, he is a rip-off artist! A gonif (thief)! If he represents religion, I don’t want to have anything to do with it!”
You know what? Personally, I can understand people having that reaction when they see such blatant cases of shameful hypocrisy. The so-called “godly” people may be testing us again.
But to tell you the truth, I’m tired of all those old stories about religious rip-off artists. Let’s assume you are right, and that fellow is indeed a pious swindler. Good in shul and terrible at work. So what? What does that have to do with you? Just because someone else failed his tests in life, why should you fail yours?
Whether we become disillusioned by the so-called “godly” among us, who behave unethically, may well be a test of our own faith.
Every one of us has a direct relationship with God. Jews don’t need intermediaries. If so and so is a crook, that’s his problem, not mine. And if Mr. X is a hypocrite, is God not God? Is Torah, not Torah? Is Judaism, not Judaism?
Why should someone else’s behavior weaken my relationship with God? Does that release me from my obligations and responsibilities?
A Jew’s connection to God is holy, inviolate and non-negotiable, irrespective of the behavior of others, even the “godly” among us. The seeming inconsistencies in the behavior of a rabbi, chazzan, rebbetzin, gabbai or some crook who happens to dress “religious” are entirely irrelevant.
Let me end with a story. At the end of World War II, after the U.S. Army liberated the Mauthausen concentration camp, Rabbi Eliezer Silver, a well-known leader of the American rabbinate, went to help the survivors. He arranged a prayer service with all the inmates where they said Kaddish for their fallen family members and thanked God for their survival. The rabbi noticed one survivor turned his back on the prayers and wouldn’t participate, so he went over to him and invited him to join them. The man told the rabbi why he wasn’t going to pray.
“In our camp, one Jew had managed to sneak a siddur into the camp. Whenever it was safe, Jews would get in line for a chance to hold the siddur in their hands and offer a prayer. At first, I respected him greatly for that noble act of courage and sacrifice. But then I saw that the fellow with the siddur was charging for it! He would take a quarter of the people’s daily food rations as payment for his siddur. How despicable! It was then that I lost my faith and decided never to pray again. How could a Jew do such a thing?!”
The wise rabbi put his arm around the survivor and said: “So, let me ask you a question. Why do you look only at the one shameful Jew who charged his poor brothers for his siddur? Why do you not look at the dozens of holy Jews who were prepared to give up a quarter of their meager rations and risk their lives just for a moment of prayer with the siddur? Why don’t you look at them and be inspired by them?”
The survivor acknowledged that the rabbi had a point. To his credit, he turned around and joined the rabbi in the prayers. That survivor was none other than the famous Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal.
Whether our fellow Jews, even supposedly “godly” Jews, behave correctly or not, let’s make sure we still do the right thing.
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