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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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Why Does the Media Not Tell the Truth About Hezbollah’s Attacks on Israel?
Firefighters respond to a fire near a rocket attack from Lebanon, amid ongoing cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, near Kiryat Shmona, northern Israel, June 14, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
Last month, the BBC News website published a report by the BBC Jerusalem bureau’s Lucy Williamson under the headline “Fires in northern Israel fuel demands to tackle escalation with Hezbollah.”
The following day, the BBC News website published another report by the same journalist on the same topic titled “Israelis using gardening tools to fight wildfires sparked by Hezbollah rockets.”
A couple of weeks later, that pattern was repeated. On June 19, the BBC News website published a report by Williamson headlined “Israel and Hezbollah play with fire as fears grow of another war,” which was previously discussed here.
Late on June 22, the BBC News website published another report titled “Unable to back down, Israel and Hezbollah move closer to all-out war,” which is credited to “Lucy Williamson, Reporting from the Israel-Lebanon border.”
If one assumed that the reason for the appearance within days of a second report on the same topic by the same journalist was the emergence of new information concerning the situation on Israel’s northern border, one would be wrong.
A considerable proportion of Williamson’s second report (which was also translated into Swahili) consists of interviews with people on both sides of the border: Israelis from Kiryat Shmona and Malkiya, and two residents of southern Lebanese villages.
Failing to clarify that her interviewee lives in a town described as one of the “bastions of strong Hezbollah support” where a strike against a Hezbollah command center took place in March, Williamson tells her readers that:
Fatima Belhas lives a few miles (7km) from the Israeli border, near Jbal el Botm.
In the early days, she would shake with fear when Israel bombed the area, she says, but has since come to terms with the bombardments and no longer thinks of leaving.
“Where would I go?” she asked. “[Others] have relatives elsewhere. But how can I impose on someone like that? We have no money.”
“Maybe it is better to die at home with dignity,” she said. “We have grown up resisting. We won’t be driven out of our land like the Palestinians.”
Readers may recall that just days earlier, another BBC report from southern Lebanon promoted that same “Nakba” comparison.
Similarly failing to note Hezbollah’s presence and infrastructure in Mays al Jbal (also Meiss al Jabal), Williamson continues:
Hussein Aballan recently left his village of Mays al Jbal, around 6 miles (10km) from Kiryat Shmona, on the Lebanese side of the border.
Life there had become impossible, he said, with erratic communications and electricity, and almost no functioning shops.
The few dozen families left there are mainly older people who refuse to leave their homes and farms, he told the BBC.
But he backed the Hezbollah assault on Israel.
“Everyone in the south [of Lebanon] has lived through years of aggression, but has come out stronger,” he said. “Only through resistance are we strong.”
Williamson fails to remind her readers that Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon 24 years ago, and that the only “aggression” has been in response to attacks by Hezbollah and other terrorist groups, such as the cross-border attack that sparked the war in 2006.
As in her previous report, Williamson portrays the events resulting from the Lebanese terror group’s decision to attack Israel on October 8 as “tit-for-tat”:
But as the tit-for-tat conflict grinds on, and more than 60,000 Israelis remain evacuated from their homes in the north, there are signs that both Israel’s leaders and its citizens are prepared to support military options to push Hezbollah back from the border by force.
Also, as in her own previous reports and in most other BBC content, Williamson fails to explain to her readers that according to UN Security Council Resolution 1701, Hezbollah should be nowhere near the border with Israel ,and that the UN’s “peacekeeping force” in Lebanon has failed to enforce that resolution since it was passed in 2006.
Williamson’s framing of the situation in the north of Israel includes the following:
The dangerous stalemate here hinges largely on the war Israel is fighting more than 100 miles (160km) to the south in Gaza.
A ceasefire there would help calm tensions in the north too, but Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is keeping both conflicts going, mortgaged by his promise to far-right government allies to destroy Hamas before ending the Gaza War. [emphasis added]
And:
Demands for political change are likely to increase when Israel’s conflicts end.
Many believe Israel’s prime minister is playing for time: caught between growing demands for a ceasefire in Gaza, and growing support for a war in the north.
In other words, Williamson’s framing ignores the fact that Hamas chose to attack Israel on October 7, and that Hezbolah chose to attack Israel on October 8, and almost every day since then. She erases the fact that Hamas has rejected multiple ceasefire offers in order to promote a narrative whereby it is Israel’s prime minister alone who is “keeping both conflicts going”.
Moreover, she tells BBC audiences that:
The problem for Israel is how to stop the rockets and get its people back to the abandoned northern areas of the country.
The problem for Hezbollah is how to stop the rockets when its ally, Hamas, is being pounded by Israeli forces in Gaza.
Williamson cites a statement made by the UN Secretary General on June 21:
Hezbollah is a well-armed, well-trained army, backed by Iran; Israel, a sophisticated military power with the US as an ally.
Full-scale war is likely to be devastating for both sides.
The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, said it would be a “catastrophe that goes […] beyond imagination”.
Like the UN Secretary General, Williamson has nothing to tell her audiences about the Lebanese state’s decades-long failure to tackle the Islamist terrorist organization that has repeatedly dragged that country into conflict, and has nothing to say about the failure of the United Nations to enforce its own resolutions designed to prevent further conflict.
The BBC’s sidelining of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 and its whitewashing of the failures of the UN forces that are supposed to enforce it, did not begin in October 2023: that editorial policy has been evident for many years.
Now, however, that policy is being used to advance framing of a potential escalation after over eight months of continuous attacks on Israeli communities by Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations, as something that is the responsibility of Israel alone.
Hadar Sela is the co-editor of CAMERA UK – an affiliate of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), where a version of this article first appeared.
The post Why Does the Media Not Tell the Truth About Hezbollah’s Attacks on Israel? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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University of Toronto is granted an injunction to dismantle a pro-Palestinian encampment that has been on campus for two months
The University of Toronto has received an injunction to dismantle the pro-Palestinian encampment on its property. The 98-page decision from Justice Markus Koehnen of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice said that members of the encampment must take down the tents within 24 hours, by 6 p.m. on Wednesday, July 3. Toronto Police will have […]
The post University of Toronto is granted an injunction to dismantle a pro-Palestinian encampment that has been on campus for two months appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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Jewish Cemeteries Vandalized in Cincinnati, Montreal
Vandals in Canada targeted a Jewish cemetery. Photo: Screenshot
Vandals have targeted notable Jewish cemeteries in Cincinnati, Ohio and Montreal, Canada, sparking outcry and concern over mounting threats of antisemitism.
Vandals at Montreal’s Kehal Yisrael Cemetery placed memorial stones in the shape of a Nazi swastika on top of tombstones. Ones with the last names Eichler and Herman were targeted in the antisemitic attack.
Placing memorial stones on graves is an ancient Jewish custom to memorialize the dead. Jewish cemeteries oftentimes have stones nearby tombstones for mourners.
Canadian leaders decried the vandalism.
“It is absolutely abhorrent and revolting to defile the dead with swastikas,” Jeremy Levi, the Jewish mayor of a Jewish-majority suburb of Montreal, commented on X/Twitter. “This desecration at the Kehal Israel cemetery in Montreal is beyond contempt. [Canadian Prime Minister] Justin Trudeau, step aside and get out of the way so we can reclaim our country. May this Kohen’s neshama have an Aliyah on high.” One of the tombstones vandalized belonged to a Kohen.
The leader of the Conservative Party in Canada’s parliament and candidate for prime minister, Pierre Poilievre, lambasted Trudeau and denounced antisemitism. “We cannot close our eyes to the disgusting acts of antisemitism that are happening in our country everyday,” he posted on X/Twitter. “The prime minister must finally act to stop these displays of antisemitism. If he won’t, a common sense Conservative government will.”
Canada, like many countries around the world, has experienced a surge in antisemitic incidents since the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’ massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7.
Meanwhile in Cincinnati, vandals targeted two historic Jewish cemeteries this past week, toppling and shattering ancient tombstones — some dating back to the 1800s.
According to a statement from the Jewish Federation of Cincinnati, 176 gravesites in Cincinnati’s West Side were ruined “in an act of antisemitic vandalism.”
“Due to the extensive damage and the historical nature of many of the gravestones, we have not yet been able to identify all the families affected by this act,” the statement continued. “Our community [is] heartbroken.”
The Cincinnati Police Department and the FBI are investigating the incidents.
The destruction of monuments is the latest in a greater trend of antisemitic vandalism. In an incident over the weekend, vandals in Australia targeted war memorials dedicated to Australian veterans who sacrificed their lives in Korea and Vietnam with pro-Hamas graffiti.
A couple weeks earlier, vandals in Belgium defaced two memorials for Holocaust victims with swastikas and a phrase calling for violence against Israel. In Germany, meanwhile, at least seven stolpersteine, or stumbling blocks in the sidewalk meant to mark Jewish homes seized by the Nazis, were defaced with the message “Jews are perpetrators.”
The US, Canada, Europe, and Australia have all experienced an explosion of antisemitic incidents in the wake of the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, and amid the ensuing war in Gaza. In many countries, anti-Jewish hate crimes have spiked to record levels.
According to the B’nai Brith, antisemitic incidents in Canada more than doubled in 2023 compared to the prior year.
The post Jewish Cemeteries Vandalized in Cincinnati, Montreal first appeared on Algemeiner.com.