Changing Focus: An Introduction

Extraordinary Ordinary, Permission

Perhaps this is obvious. And yet, I sometimes think that this most obvious fact is often forgotten in the whirl of rhetoric and research by political scientists and historians. Too frequently the Holocaust is spoken of in statistics, in analysis of power and powerlessness, too often evoked by photographs of lines of anonymous naked men and women or mass graves. Yet
der khurbn that survivors experienced is not general but very specific. It is reflected in precious sepia photographs pasted into incomplete family albums. It consists of identifiable names, of familiar faces of family members, of named streets, stores, and schools, teammates, friends, libraries, doctors, hospitals, lectures, marches, strikes, political allies and enemies – the people, place, and institutions that make up the fabric of any human being’s ordinary, everyday life. It is these specifics and the loss of that ordinary life that survivors remember and mourn. And not just today, but during all those frequent moments when memory of childhood or ghettos or camps is triggered by something in the present – an angle of someone’s jaw, a special shade of color, a faint smell of a certain food, a dream. During those daily moments when the fabric of our present life tears apart, survivors mourn and mourn again.

                –Irena Klepfisz, “Yom Hashoah, Yom Yerushalayim: A
                Meditation,” Dreams of An Insomniac, Portland, 1990.

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CB: When I am doing art, I am a liar and I am mostly an awful professional artist, disgusting, it is my job . . . it is true that I really wanted to forget my childhood. I have spoken a lot about a childhood, but it was not my childhood. It was a normal childhood. I never spoke about something that was true, and in my art at the beginning it seemed biographical but nothing was true, and I was never speaking about the fact that I was Jewish or that it was impossible for my mother to move because she had polio. I never spoke about that and I never spoke about my weird grand-mother. When I spoke about my childhood, it was this normal childhood and when I decided to make a photo album, I chose the photo album of my friend called Durrant because Durrant is just Smith in England, Durrant is nobody, just a normal French man.

NW: Is this a way to recreate a better childhood?

CB: To erase and forget my own childhood. You know it was so tough, it was so awful, I mean all our parents are awful, but my father was so awful, my mother was so awful.

NW: But it is not just to forget, but to make something better.

CB: Yes, just normal.

                –Paul Bradley, Charles Esche and Nicola
                White, “An Interview with Christian
                Boltanski,” Christian Boltanski: Lost,
                Glasgow, 1994.

In the e-mail discussions that led to the Rennert Women in Judaism Forum at Barnard in January of 2001, Marianne Hirsch, Joanne Leonard, Lorie Novak and I struggled with what it meant for each of us to look at our own our ordinary, primarily American Jewish family photographs in public given that there were so many more important, significant Jewish images that we each felt obliged to privilege. How were we to talk about these ordinary images and common family stories when the Holocaust looms so large, casting shadows on these other stories? Despite the fact that Janet Jakobsen and I had discussed the importance of “changing the focus” of recent discussions of Jews and family photography (the Tower of Faces at the National Holocaust Museum and Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the eleven pillars of Jewish children at heart of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York made up of the photographs of French Jewish children preserved by Serge Klarsfeld and reproduced in his monumental study, French Children of the Holocaust¹ among many other examples.²) to address other less discussed images, as a group, we still struggle to talk about anything but the Holocaust. As our discussion became more focused we talked about the relationship between ordinary and extraordinary images of Jews in the twentieth century. We tried to clarify the interrelationship between these images and what it might mean for us to look at our own family albums. In these discussions it became clear to me that these were issues we shared with other contemporary American Jews, and I used the introduction to my presentation at that time to specifically address this problem and my own trepidation. What I talked about was how it is possible to claim common memories from under the shadow of the Holocaust. How can we make these other legacies matter when such enormous communal trauma is still so raw?

In order to begin to make it possible to address some of these less traumatic legacies, in my presentation I turned to the words of a child survivor and child of survivors, poet and activist Irena Klepfisz, and an interview with the French artist Christian Boltanski, a child of survivors. I use their words, the texts that open this section, because both Boltanski and Klepfisz express, albeit in different ways, their longing for the ordinary, for common things. In Boltanski’s case, he asks simply for a normal childhood and without such a past feels compelled to make one up. Klepfisz, on the other hand, argues that the thing survivors mourn most is the loss of the quotidian, the ordinary stuff of everyday life, “familiar faces, named streets, stores, and schools, teammates, friends, libraries, doctors, hospitals, lectures, marches, strikes, political allies and enemies – the people, places and institutions that make up the fabric of any human being’s ordinary everyday life.” These are the things, she argues, that survivors remember and mourn again and again.

What follows is a version of what I said at Barnard. I repeat these words here because they were about what it might take for American Jews to risk changing our focus. It was about permission and echoes the conversations that made possible the discussion that did transpire at Barnard.

For most American Jews, like most of those included in this collection, touching the past, especially our own families’ pasts, is entangled with the Holocaust. Although no one in my own family was directly affected by the Holocaust – there are no survivors in my family, no family members who died in hiding or in camps – I, like so many American Jews, cannot get to these other stories without remembering the Holocaust. Even as the Holocaust serves as a barrier keeping us from these other stories, it is also a way in. As my parents and their families, like so many other American Jewish families, lived out their lives in the relative safety and comfort of the United States of the 1930s and 1940s, the lives of European Jews were devastated. European Jewish life was destroyed in broad and brutal strokes. The simultaneity of these narratives is only a part of the story.

What interests me is how tangled these legacies have become in the 50 years since the war, how difficult it has become even to broach some of the more ordinary tales of American Jews, immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe who came to the United States at the turn of the last century, and those who came even earlier, Jews originally from Spain and the Netherlands and those who came in the mid-nineteenth century from Central Europe. Because I want to look at these other, perhaps more ordinary tales, I have asked myself again and again why it is so difficult to tell these stories? What holds us back? Instead of turning away from this dilemma, I want to use it here as my way into this collection of other visions and other stories about American Jews.

And so I begin with the words of children of survivors, children who long for ordinary lives, children who recognize the preciousness of everyday things precisely because their lives have been shaped by extraordinary loss. I am interested in the seemingly necessary interrelationship between ordinary and extraordinary legacies. It is difficult to invoke one legacy without a phantom or haunting presence of the other, at least at this particular historical moment, the beginning of the twenty- first century.

I have lived with Irena Klepfisz’s words for a very long time and in many ways, they have enabled my own.³ In some sense, it is her status as a child survivor and child of a survivor writing about the Holocaust that has emboldened me to begin to take seriously the ordinary legacy that is my own, the common tales of my own family’s history in this country, an immigrant legacy that is the only family history that I have.⁴ And I can tell only this tale.

The names of the places my family came from, much less their various family names, the names they had before coming to this country have already been lost.

Although I have touched the graves of at least some of my great grandparents buried in this country, I do not know where they came from. They are as far back as my family goes. The oldest of these relatives include my paternal great grandmother who helped raise my father and, according to her gravestone, she was born in 1869. It is here where my family history begins, and here my story is a common one. It is the kind of narrative that is necessarily seen in contrast to the traumatic legacy of survivors.⁵

I begin with this tension and my own discomfort even in the context of this special issue knowing a bit about the family stories of some of the others who are also presenting their work here, Muriel Hasbun, Marianne Hirsch and Joanne Leonard, whose families were more directly affected by the Holocaust. I want to foreground my discomfort because it is a discomfort shared by many other American Jews who have found it difficult to claim our own ordinary family stories and somehow value and mourn them under the shadow of the Holocaust. Are they important enough? Do they merit careful attention given how they pale in comparison to the devastation wrought by the Holocaust? I believe they do.

It was with trepidation,⁶ at the panel where this special issue began, that I finally turned to my own family photographs and the gendering of other family pictures in the home that I grew up in. Making these fears explicit enabled me to ask others to share their own stories and pictures in this collection. Here the Holocaust is not central. Instead, by changing focus, this special issue primarily addresses these other legacies. Traces of the Holocaust are here, most powerfully
in Muriel Hasbun’s “Protegida: Auvergne-Ave Maria” but also in Joanne Leonard’s discussion of her piece “Reel Family” and in Marianne Hirsch’s account of a postwar family photograph of her own now a part of Lorie Novak’s Internet installation “Collected Visions.”

1. Serge Klarsfeld, French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial, (New York, New York University Press, 1996). [↩]
2. See for example, Yaffa Eliach, There Once Was A World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok, (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1998) and Ann Weiss, The Last Album: Eyes from the Ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau, (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001). [↩]
3. I am so grateful to Irena Klepfisz not only for her powerful words but also for her friendship. It was both a pleasure and an honor to have her in the audience as I passed out her words as part of the handout for my presentation at Barnard. Her work continues to be an inspiration in all that I write. [↩]
4. In a somewhat different way, I am reminded of Susan Suleiman’s efforts to go back and trace her own parents’ past but even with the names of places and dates, she discovers that there is no going back, the records of Jews are lost. See Susan Suleiman, Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). [↩]
5. See for example, Jonathan Rosen, The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000). Rosen’s book is literally his attempt to confront the legacies of his two grandmothers, the one who died in the Holocaust and the one he knew, the woman like my grandparents, an Eastern European immigrant who lived to a ripe out age in this country. [↩]
6. I should also note that Janet Jakobsen and I discussed this before the panel discussion where this essay began. We pushed to make the panel and even this issue not about the Holocaust but in our conversation its presence loomed larger. Again I felt important to put the tension out there, to make it visible, tangible, for it is the frame around the more common images I want to consider. [↩]