English

The History of Love, the Contemporary Reader, and the Transmission of Holocaust Memory

Jessica Lang Baruch College, City University of New York

Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love (2005) represents, without the privilege of direct memory, a Holocaust past and a postmodern present. Indeed, the representation of the Holocaust in this novel serves as witness to the end of a generation of Holocaust memoirs and to a future of Holocaust literature where imagination and history are interpolated. This article reviews the range and periodicity of American Holocaust fiction, examines the presence of the Holocaust in The History of Love, and considers strategies unique to Krauss’s voice as a third generation Holocaust writer. Such an examination explores the novel’s ambivalent position, one that is built on a fraught triumvirate: history, a wary critical community, and a contemporary audience longing for an imaginative connection between themselves and the historical event.

Keywords: Jewish American literature / Holocaust fiction / Nicole Krauss

Establishing the parameters of American Holocaust fiction is a nearly impos-sible challenge. While it is superficially easy to apply the criterion — texts involving the Holocaust that are produced by American writers — this broad brushstroke has a history of anxiety attached to it, both to authorial rights and the implicit claims involved with assessment of the content. Lawrence Langer, in reflecting on a visit to Auschwitz in 1964, writes that the “existence of Dachau and Auschwitz as historical phenomena has altered not only our conception of reality, but its very nature . . . The challenge to the literary imagination is to find a way of making this fundamental truth accessible . . .” (xii). In a similar vein, Alvin Rosenfeld argues that “Holocaust literature is an attempt to express a new order of consciousness, a recognizable shift in being. The human imagination after Auschwitz is simply not the same as it was before” (13).1 Both Langer and Rosenfeld take up the challenge of identifying, classifying and analyzing two decades of Holocaust literature that involve a wide range of genres, nationalities, and interpretations of the relationship between “historical fact and imaginative truth” (Langer 8). They also raise the question of the relation between ethics

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and Holocaust representation and, while acknowledging the risks associated with making art out of mass suffering and death, they also view the alternative, a deafening silence, as “tantamount to granting Hitler one more posthumous victory” (Rosenfeld 14).

In important ways, the issues raised by Langer and Rosenfeld produce new challenges as more time elapses between the events themselves and their repre- sentation in both writing and reading. Holocaust literature that does not have its immediate origins in the author’s memory must rely on other devices for rep- resenting the event. Stories centered on memorializing the Holocaust through non-Jews (Emily Prager’s Eve’s Tatoo, 1998), fetishizing the Holocaust (Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, 1979), and laughing at the Holocaust (Roberto Benigni’s “Life Is Beautiful,” 1997) have produced a range of controversies and critiques. In some sense, a paradox is at work here: the more time that separates the Holocaust from the present such that the less available it is in terms of eyewitness testimony, the more accessible it becomes to readers and writers of fiction and the more it becomes historically normalized. In other words, as with other historical events for which few or no eyewitnesses remain, the Holocaust is increasingly a subject matter for the imagination.2

Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love is a novel that both imagines the Holocaust and represents its historical presence in one Jewish family’s American identity. I argue here that the novel, published in 2005, represents, without the privilege of direct memory, both a Holocaust past and a postmodern present. In so doing, The History of Love suggests how the Holocaust can become a historical event in the writer’s imagination, even if it is not part of her personal history. Indeed, the representation of the Holocaust in this novel may be read as an early witness to the end of a generation of Holocaust memoirs and to a future of Holocaust literature where imagination and history — both Holocaust and non-Holocaust history — are interpolated. The History of Love distinguishes itself from older Holocaust fictions in its narrative control, its characterizations, and its style. This article is divided into three sections: First, I review briefly the range and periodicity of American Holocaust fiction. I then examine the presence of the Holocaust in Krauss’s novel, considering how it is situated in a context devoted largely to post-Holocaust, postmodern American identity. Lastly, I review strate- gies unique to Krauss’s voice as a third-generation Holocaust writer (I will define this terminology shortly). A close reading of the novel along these lines conveys the sense that it augurs a larger shift in contemporary American Holocaust fiction, one that allows for, even demands, a formalist critique as a means of exploring the novel’s ambivalent position built on a fraught triumvirate: history, a wary critical community, and a contemporary audience longing for an imaginative connection between themselves and the historical event.

In the 1960s and 1970s, American Holocaust fiction grew in multiple direc- tions: more authors chose to incorporate the Holocaust into their stories; the Holocaust played an increasingly prominent role in these stories; the audience for which these stories were intended increased dramatically. As the Holocaust

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became part of American consciousness, references to it became a central narrative trope in a wide range of texts including novels, stories, memoirs, autobiographies and biographies.3 Holocaust narratives written during this time are, for the most part, readily recognized: as in Jerzy Kosinsky’s The Painted Bird (1965), Cynthia Ozick’s “The Shawl” (1980), and Leon Uris’s Mila 18 (1983), they make explicit reference to a Holocaust setting: for Kosinsky the villages and towns of central and eastern Europe, for Ozick a concentration camp, for Uris the Warsaw ghetto. The representation yields a direct picture of the European events identifiable as “the Holocaust”. Alternatively, Holocaust fiction set not in Europe but in the United States, like Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1969), William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice (1979), Edward Lewis Wallant’s The Pawnbroker (1961), center around a survivor protagonist indelibly marked, physically and emotionally, by events that are, on the one hand, personal and as such, isolating, and on the other hand, part of a cultural history and identity.4 Insofar as these shape the identity of the main protagonist, the portrait of the protagonist becomes itself then a representation of the Holocaust.

Fiction in which the author engages in such direct representation of the Holocaust may be contrasted with more ambiguous representations of the Holo- caust: representations that are not so clearly captured by the division between fiction and non-fiction and even between Holocaust and non-Holocaust events. This applies in particular to more recent, what I call “new generational” Holocaust fiction, especially that written in the last decade, which resists the kind of literal referentiality found in earlier works. Geoffrey Hartman argues that the survivor generation of victims or eyewitnesses incorporate within their writing a return to the act of remembering in spite of the trauma they suffered (18). In effect, sur- vivors call up events that they experienced first hand, events to which they have a direct relation and which retain the power of direct experience for them and their readers. The first shift in this representation of the Holocaust appears with second-generation writers, who witness that event only through accounts related by survivors, the first generation. The second generation expresses what Hartman calls “the trauma of memory turning in the void” (18) because they face a differ- ent challenge: to confront the Holocaust, an event that continues to affect them profoundly, at one remove. Themes found in literature written by second genera- tion Holocaust writers often address questions of theodicy and suicide (Berger 184). Indeed, these more abstract, even ultimate topics seem to signal the special location of the second generation: the events of the Holocaust remain pressing, but the representation is less immediately proximate, more abstract.

The Holocaust fiction of the last decade exhibits a still broader range of themes and is written by authors who are both personally and thematically dif- ficult to quantify. This range itself may reflect the longer time frame and its correspondingly broader “emotional frame” that separates a new generation of writers from the actual events of the Holocaust that they choose to represent. These authors — my example here is Krauss — who seem to me third generation Holo- caust writers, serve as logical successors to the second generation of Holocaust

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writers. As such, these writers mark a second transition, or another remove from the eyewitness: the first transition from eyewitness to a recounting by the witness now becomes, as the Holocaust enters history, an indirect relation to the original eyewitness.5

The texts produced by the third generation (I use that term to refer loosely to authors born in the 1960s or later) are linked by a number of characteristics and themes.6 Their fiction regularly refers to and incorporates events from the Holocaust, but it also balances and counters these references with other narrative strategies or counterpoints. While for first- and second-generation Holocaust writers the historical experience “conveys” a sense of immediacy and impact, the third-generation writer views these events as an indirect part of the narrative, one balanced by other, also important, histories. (For example, Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay links the theme of physical salvation — escaping Nazi Europe — to the escapist nature found in art, comics and magic.) Unlike earlier fictionalizations of the Holocaust that often evoked criticism and controversy concerning their representation of evil, or the impossibility of rep- resenting the unrepresentable precisely because the Holocaust was the direct subject of the eyewitness, this new wave of American Holocaust fiction reflects on the Holocaust without sparking the accompanying wave of shock that often marked similarly designated fiction of the previous few decades.7 My notion of a third generation of Holocaust writers provides an etiology for this difference: it is accomplished as the representation of the Holocaust becomes indirect rather than direct, and so is not subject to the same sort of analysis. Readers can account for the reason behind this shift: the historical distance among contemporary authors, their audience and the Holocaust transforms these events from a direct experience, the experience of the eyewitness, or even the experience of those clos- est to them, their children, to an indirect experience. These stories resonate less with the explicit style captured by, for example, Bellow, Wallant and Ozick, and instead imagine the Holocaust in relation to other chosen historical events. The Holocaust is portrayed by this third generation Holocaust fiction in ways both explicit and obscured, and both as a memorial and a method. Such imagining raises important questions and with them I turn to a more systematic analysis of the text of The History of Love.

Surviving HiStory and History

In thinking about The History of Love as representing another generational shift in Holocaust fiction, the basic question that arises is this: why should readers con- sider it a Holocaust novel? Krauss is one of a number of Jewish American novelists to recast the Holocaust, making it a point of transition, a point of intersection where direct memory experienced by eyewitnesses and memory generated only through reading meet. This, in fact, is the mark or signature of the third genera- tion: within the novel the Holocaust is represented indirectly, positioned as part of one of a number of histories.

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Here is a brief review of the novel’s plot. The first of two primary narrators introduced in the novel is Leopold Gursky, who, it emerges, survived the war by hiding in the woods around Slonim, his sometimes Polish, sometimes Russian hometown. Before the war broke out he had written three novels, all essentially paeons to his sweetheart, Alma, the best of which, in his view, was entitled: The History of Love. On the eve of the war, he entrusts The History of Love manuscript to his friend, Zvi Litvinoff, who is departing for Spain, with the written instruc- tions: “To be held for Leopold Gursky until you see him again” (153). After surviving the war, largely by hiding, Leo sets out for America, determined to find Alma. They meet once again and she reveals that since their last encounter she has borne their son, Isaac, and married another man, whom she refuses to abandon. Leo finds work as a locksmith, remains single, essentially in mourning; when the novel opens, Leo is in his mid-seventies.

The second primary narrator is the fourteen-year-old Alma, whose Israeli father died of cancer seven years earlier. Alma is named after the heroine of a book called The History of Love, a book her father found while traveling in Spain, and the book with which he wooed her mother. Her mother, a translator, has been commissioned to translate The History of Love by none other than Isaac, Leo’s unacknowledged son, and Alma reads her mother’s translation as we read Krauss’s The History of Love. Thus, the novel is about recent and historical events, and, more abstractly, about the writing and reading of all events located in the past. In effect, readers are presented not with an eyewitness account, but with an account that reflects on different formative moments in each narrator’s history.

Zvi Litvinoff, believing Leo had been murdered by the Nazis, has published the book under his own name. The only evidence of the work’s original author appears in the final chapter, which is entitled “The Death of Leopold Gursky.” Leo does not know that his novel has been published. The young Alma, with help from her brother, Bird, slowly pieces together Leo and the old Alma’s past. Leo mourns the loss of his loved ones; Alma mourns the loss of hers. The novel cli- maxes with the two narrators discovering each other, alive, responsive, searching, and surviving in New York’s Central Park Zoo.

Survival links together the two primary narrators in both writing and read- ing. Leo survives the Holocaust; Alma survives the death of her father. Leo writes The History of Love; Alma writes How to Survive in the Wild. Taken together, Leo and Alma encapsulate a complex relationship between historical relevance and contemporary meaning. What does it mean for a narrative that invokes the Holocaust to compress time and history, in some way relating the loss experienced by a survivor with the loss experienced by a child born in the 1990s? How is the perception of the Holocaust, the relation of those who experienced it, changed by viewing it from a post-post-Holocaust perspective, i.e., a perspective in which knowledge of the Holocaust is removed both from a firsthand account, such as that provided by a survivor, and a secondhand source, one that interacts directly with a primary source? That is, how is the perception of the Holocaust changed when viewed by the third generation?

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These questions, and thus, too, the novel as a whole, reflect concerns and tensions associated with the transmission of memory, the cultural and historical inheritance that is inevitably passed on from generation to generation, serving both to connect and distinguish them from one another. Indeed, perhaps the most “Jewish” aspect of Krauss’s novel is not her development of a Holocaust survivor’s character, but the sense that she conveys of the ties linking younger and older generations, those who participated in the events of the Holocaust directly and those who can know it only indirectly. One conversation between Alma and her mother reflects the various ways Alma conceives of herself in response to the question, “What am I?” Alma, impatient with her mother’s intellectualized definitions, finally lashes out, shouting: “I’M AMERICAN!” Her brother, wit- nessing the exchange, corrects her: “No, you’re not. You’re Jewish” (96–97). Here Alma’s sense of identity is challenged by her own family history. Her declaration attempts to detach herself from her past and create herself afresh, from nothing- ness. That wish, fueled by her father’s death and the collapse of her family, is an impossibility, but one that reflects her sense of self and her desire to be, at least momentarily, unaffiliated with any culture, simply an individual. Her brother’s response, part denial — “No, you’re not” — and part affirmation — “You’re Jew- ish.” — encapsulates the thrust of the novel, namely that history renders impos- sible an absolute sense of individuality — that those around one will never allow one to be completely alone. For Krauss, history impacts the Holocaust survivor and the young girl equally; alone as Leo Gursky believes himself to be, and as separate as Alma may strive to be, neither can escape the embrace of the past or the inevitability of the future. Thus a history that reaches far enough back to include the Holocaust, as Leo’s does, and the more recent history of Alma Singer, are relevant and reinforce each other.

This relational concept is expansive and resonates with a much older sense of Jewish history, as seen in an early passage in Ecclesiastes: “One generation passes away and another generation comes, but the earth abides forever” (Eccl. 1:4). Humans are limited by their own mortality, by the shared sense that ultimately no one survives oneself. Although we come from a line of generations, and, although, like those before us, we will come and go, there is a common foundation on which we depend that not only endures but works to connect us. The Holocaust survivor depends on members of succeeding generations both to remember the past and to live anew, to relate to history that has not been directly experienced by them and, also, to create their own individual histories.

The experience of history as conveyed in Ecclesiastes, from generation to generation, becomes more fraught when considered in light of Holocaust memory, as illustrated by Krauss’s novel. The tension stems from the novel’s treatment of all histories, all historical events, with a manner of even-handedness. Alma’s history and Leo’s history are connected: Alma’s very name recalls his world in Poland before it collapsed around him. When Alma introduces herself to Leo in the Central Park Zoo, we see this dramatically acted out: “I stood in front of him. He barely seemed to notice. I said, ‘My name is Alma.’ And that’s when I saw

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her . . . She looked different than I remembered her. And yet. The same. The eyes: that’s how I knew her . . . Stalled at the age when she loved you most” (241–242). Instead of thinking, “Stalled at the age when she loved me most,” which would be the most natural construction, Leo pulls the reader into his emotional interior: “Stalled at the age when she loved you most.” The “you” is all-encapsulating, it refers to Alma and to Leo, certainly, and also to a more collective set of eyes wit- nessing this meeting, namely to those who are reading about it. Indeed, the “you” suggests that Leo has joined readers in reading the novel of his own making. It is this embracing concept of history that makes the novel so compelling: one story doesn’t overpower another; one character doesn’t reside in the shadow of another. History alone, whether of the Holocaust or of love — an odd conjunction — pro- vides a deep sense of interweaving between individuals otherwise unknown to one another; out of love, Krauss suggests, history can speak to the insistent inclusion of cultural memory, an inclusion that reaches beyond the pages of The History of Love, all four versions (Krauss’s, Leo’s, Litvinoff’s, and Charlotte Singer’s, the young Alma’s mother), and touches readers as well as authors, translators, and plagiarists.

“And yet” — to use a construction that Krauss employs in the novel — all histories are not equal. Elie Wiesel writes: “Whoever has not lived through the event can never know it. And whoever has lived through it can never fully reveal it” (A Jew Today 234). The challenge faced by first-generation writers of the Holocaust, those with the direct experience of survival, discloses the utter inadequacy of memory and representation for conveying their experience, both for themselves and for their readers.8 For second-generation writers, situated at a “further temporal and spatial remove from the decimated world of their parents,” memory and representation is an imagined re-creation of experience, an “imagina- tive investment and creation” (Hirsch 659).9 If the struggle of second-generation writers of the Holocaust involves re-populating a void of memory, the struggle for third-generation Holocaust writers lies in crossing not one but two gaps, that of experience and that of memory. In order to imagine the Holocaust, third- generation writers both rely on text and imagine text. In short, third-generation writers work to represent a text of the text.10

This duality, a sense of re-creating the re-created, asserts itself in The History of Love insofar as the novel is both the story of one man’s life and love, that man being Leo Gursky, and the story of life, of love. The contrast between the two is a contrast between the particular or individual and the universal. This tension between history, in its most sweeping sense, and individuality has recently been addressed by Daniel Mendelsohn, who writes in his memoir The Lost:

. . . [A]s decade followed on decade they [those murdered in the Holocaust] seemed more and more to belong not to us but to History. This, paradoxically, made it easier not to think about them, since after all so many people were thinking about them — if not them specifically, then about a kind of generic them, those who had been killed by the Nazis, and for this reason it was as if they were being looked after. (42)

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Mendelsohn himself wishes to find his lost relatives, six of them, not as a generic “those who died,” but as individuals with particularity of every sort. The tension Mendelsohn confronts in his search for the identity of his relatives lost in the Holocaust, the tension between belonging to “us” and belonging to history, is one that Krauss also identifies through the creation of two survivors, one a survivor of the Holocaust, one a survivor of contemporary life. Both authors confront the past with the present. Mendelsohn’s search for clues of what happened to his fam- ily, and Alma’s search for the author of The History of Love are both attempts to re-claim the particular from the universal, to peel back one layer of text in search of the story, to bridge both the gap of memory and that of experience in order to represent, and to remember, the Holocaust.

Let us return to the initial question: Why should we read The History of Love as a Holocaust novel? The answer is twofold: when understanding and reading the Holocaust in universal terms — that is, with the understanding that it could have happened at another time and another place and involved other victims and perpe- trators — then, yes, it is. Because the inheritance of the Holocaust can be read and understood not only historically — “this is what happened to your ancestors” — but contemporarily — “this is what could, and in some sense, would have happened to you.” The double remove involved in a third-generation text weights the his- tory of the Holocaust as different, and somewhat more, than other independent histories. Leo’s feeling of loss colors Alma’s life, and while it doesn’t prevent her from experiencing her own losses or her own history, it informs her understanding of them. But The History of Love requires readers to view the Holocaust also from a particularist perspective: understanding it as an event that involved individual victims and individual perpetrators. Failing to represent the Holocaust in this way — by generalizing it rather than particularizing it — falsifies it and makes it something other, and less, than it was (Lang 102). As a narrative tool, the Holo- caust in The History of Love becomes an entity marked by a singular kind of agency: one man’s story can be — is — accessed and processed and, in effect, runs into the problem of precisely not telling the story of the Holocaust that it professes to do. In short, the novel’s strength, creating a moving and compelling character, Leo Gursky, who survives the Holocaust — is also its weakness, creating a character (whether Leo or Alma) who survives.

“LaugHing & Crying & Writing”

The relationship between two generationally distinct characters in The History of Love illuminates the position of that book as a third-generation text, but is not the only aspect that establishes this. The use of the Holocaust in a popular and contemporary context informs not only the characters themselves, but also the novel’s style and tone, all of which serve to emphasize its position as a post- Holocaust, postmodern text. History and imagination, the gap separating them and the bridges built to connect them, define third-generation Holocaust litera- ture in general; in The History of Love, a novel about the writing and reading of

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history, they take on even more significance. The playfulness found in The History of Love, as evidenced in the novel’s often wry tone and its distinctive style involv- ing space and lettering, is a means by which Krauss works to define her voice in a field threatened by diffusion and submersion.

Humor colors the opening lines of The History of Love and, indeed, is found throughout the novel: “When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, “LEO GURSKY IS SURVIVED BY AN APARTMENT FULL OF SHIT.” Leo’s status as a survivor, as alive, is represented in some way by the inert staying power of the inanimate — newspaper clippings, clothes, pots and pans. This representation seems to diminish the act of living implied by survival, itself an achievement, making it seem dispensable and easy to overlook. There is undeniably a wry sense of laughter in this opening passage, one that is sustained through, for example, references to Leo’s nude modeling for an art class or in his attempts to generate attention to himself at drugstores by knocking over the stand holding K-Y Jelly. What is suggested here is that Leo is a survivor in many senses: the survivor of a heart attack, the survivor of numerous mostly unsuccessful visits to the toilet, the survivor of the Nazis. It is not just the scatological humor that marks Leo Gursky’s daily life, his observations of his “sagging knedelach” (16) or the various descriptions of his bowels that “never cease to appall” him (17). Rather, traces of laughter connect survival and the present.

Who laughs? Not the survivor/writers: Leo Gursky, Alma Singer, Zvi Lit- vinoff, and Charlotte Singer. They write about laughter in a way that recognizes both its elusiveness and its ordinariness. Leo’s first attempt for his book title is: “LAUGHING & CRYING” (27). He rejects that for: “LAUGING & CRYING & WRITING” and rejects that one for: “LAUGING & CRYING & WRIT- ING & WAITING” (29, 31). Alma writes that her father “LIKED TO COOK AND LAUGH AND SING . . .” (41) The two primary narrators not only write of laughter, they create it. Their actions, thoughts and responses provoke the reader’s laughter, or, at least, an awareness of irony, humor, wit. The production of laughter serves to draw Alma and Leo together, even as the variations in their lives and histories might separate them. Symbolically, this connection is signifi- cant because it serves to make relevant and relative a third generation perspective in a first-generation context.

Terrence Des Pres, while acknowledging the need to present the Holocaust as solemn, even sacred, also defends representing the Holocaust using humor as “a more flexible mode of response . . . The paradox of the comic approach is that by setting things at a distance it permits us a tougher, more active response” (280, 286).11 Krauss seems intent on making the reader actively feel. The History of Love does not evoke only pathos or horror or sadness, although it does that as well. It also evokes laughter, wistfulness, irony, all of which are tied to a sense of the unknown. Unlike fiction that takes place in a Holocaust setting, where the reader’s sense of an ending is a foregone conclusion — and can never end well — in The History of Love, Krauss creates, through emotional range, a sense of capacity, a sense of potential: we do not know how it will end.12 Leo and Alma confirm

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this understanding in their concluding dialogue when he asks her about his novel, The History of Love: “Tell me which parts you liked . . . I wanted to make you laugh . . . Also to cry.”

A more ironic example of humor occurs shortly before meeting Alma Singer at the end of the novel, when Leo recounts how he successfully hid from two Ger- man soldiers because one was so engrossed in telling the other of his wife’s affair:

Once I was hiding in a potato cellar when the SS came. The entrance was hidden by a thin layer of hay. Their footsteps approached, I could hear them speaking as if they were inside my ears. There were two of them. One said, My wife is sleeping with another man, and the other said, How do you know? and the first said, I don’t, I only suspect it, to which the second said, Why do you suspect it? while my heart went into cardiac arrest, It’s just a feeling, the first said and I imagined the bullet that would enter my brain, I can’t think straight, he said, I’ve lost my appetite completely. . . . (238)

In many ways, the passage is emphatically not funny: one man must hide, under the threat of death, while the other two talk about the goings on in their daily lives. One man barely lives while the other two live normally. But there is also an important irony underlying Leo’s description. He lives under fear of discovery; his would-be murderer has just become a discoverer. He imagines the bullet in his brain; his would-be murderer “can’t think straight.” As a Jew, Leo is a victim; as a cuckold, the soldier is a victim. In short, the passage illuminates commonalities between the people involved and also between the emotions evoked: humor and tragedy share positions at the ends of an emotional continuum.

Playfulness not only informs tone in The History of Love, but also style: Krauss toys with punctuating and typographical convention. In the novel’s final meeting between Leo and Alma, the series of exchanges, shift between being conventionally and unconventionally recorded. In the exchanges which Leo nar- rates, dialogue appears as italicized text; in the exchanges that Alma narrates, dialogue appears as it normally would, non-italicized and with indentation and quotation marks:

[New page] I said, “I was named after every girl in a book called The History of Love.” [New page] I said, I wrote that book. [New page] “Oh,” I said. “I’m serious. It’s a real book.” [New page] I played along. I said: I couldn’t be more serious. [New page] I didn’t know what to say. He was so old. Maybe he was joking or maybe he was confused. To make conversation I said, “Are you a writer?” He said, “In a manner of speaking . . .” (Krauss 243–247)

The absence of conventional punctuation reinforces the sense that at its most comprehensive, The History of Love is the history of the self — “I” — a single story. It is not so much about a Leo, or a soldier, or an Alma or a Bird; rather, the narration delivers a sense of meshed identity, a result of the various interactions

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accumulated over the course of a lifetime. In the passage where Leo hides from the two soldiers, they become part of his history, of his identity. This becomes clear not only through their moments of commonality, but also because Leo is also at times identified as the italicized speaker, the position occupied by the soldiers in that particular exchange.

In addition to flouting standard rules of punctuation, Krauss plays with the spacing of paragraphs and lines. Toward the novel’s conclusion, for example, very few lines cover each page. Instead, the rhythm of reading achieves a sense of urgency through movement: both the eye and the hand are flexed as the novel rapidly comes to a close. There is an inescapable sense of buildup to the climax, when Alma and Leo finally recognize each other, one that readers participate in actively. The narrative, centered in the middle of the page, is surrounded by blank space. The blankness is a historical record of sorts, one that symbolizes absence and silence, one that recognizes the limitations of language and narrative in a Holocaust context.13 But the space, the silence, is interrupted. It is interrupted with humor: “Excuse me, I called to [a man] . . . Yes? he said . . . Is someone sitting next to me? . . . Is it a girl, fifteen, possibly sixteen, then again she could be a mature fourteen? . . . He laughed and said, Yes. Yes as in the opposite of no?” (248–249) The space is also interrupted with death: “Who is Bruno? [Alma] asked .  .  . He’s the friend I didn’t have . . . He’s the greatest character I ever wrote . . . He’s dead . . . He died on a July day in 1941.” (249) The interruptions coalesce into narrative, one that celebrates and memorializes history and feeling.

Krauss’s The History of Love concludes with Leo Gursky’s obituary, the one that also marks the end of Litvinoff’s History of Love: “Leopold Gursky started dying on August 18, 1920. He died learning to walk. He died standing at the blackboard. And once, also, carrying a heavy tray. He died practicing a new way to sign his name. Opening a window. Washing his genitals in the bath. He died alone, because he was too embarrassed to phone anyone. Or he died thinking about Alma. Or when he chose not to. Really, there isn’t much to say. He was a great writer. He fell in love. It was his life.” His obituary neglects any mention of survival and any mention of the Holocaust, and is oddly impersonal. Instead it emphasizes death, love, life — universal and even ordinary components that are part of all people’s lives. Krauss cannot resolve the problem that writing about the Holocaust presents: namely, the need to memorialize both the particular indi- vidual and the idea of the individual. But she does create a sense that generational memory moves not only from the past to the present, but from the present to the past, from the old to the young and from the young to the old. This blurring effect between generations bridges the double remove of her position as a third-gener- ation Holocaust writer; and the mirror position of her characters, Alma and Leo, who face the similar problem of making history relevant to themselves as writers and to each other as readers. Their interactions and connections are embracing and inclusive. History, Krauss suggests, may be largely about loss and destruction, but love binds people together, creating couples, families, communities, worlds.

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Notes

1. See also Alexander. Three writers who first and most famously explored this tension are Theodor W. Adorno (“Engagement”), George Steiner (In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefini- tion of Culture), and Elie Wiesel (“The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration,” “For Some Measure of Humility,” and A Jew Today).

2. In her comprehensive review of more recent American Holocaust literature, Emily Miller Bud- nick defines three kinds of Holocaust stories: 1) “the handful of more popular, epic novels that appeared in the decades immediately following the war”; 2) fictions “that deal explicitly with the survivor experience”; and 3) “fictions that are Holocaust-inflected rather than about the Holocaust per se” (215–217). Regarding this last category of novels, Budnick includes the authors Rebecca Gold- stein, Allegra Goodman, Melvin Bukiet, Lev Raphael, Nathan Englander, and Thane Rosenbaum, arguing that while they all “write post-Holocaust, Holocaust inflected texts, in pursuit of their often different but collectively Jewish — and most importantly American — concerns,” they also, in writing the story of the American Jew, “may well have to rid [the story] of the past . . .” (Budnick 215–217). This sentiment resonates with Walter Benn Michaels’s argument that Jewish Americans, in order to “[sustain] identity,” lean towards memory rather than history (1–16), and Geoffrey Hartman’s view that as “even the most faithful memories fade, the question of what sustains Jewish identity is raised with a new urgency” (7). Another important review of contemporary Holocaust literature, although not limited to American Holocaust fiction, is provided by Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004).

3. Peter Novick and Philip Roth, among others, address the history of the Holocaust in American literature. Novick, while arguing that “the Holocaust wasn’t talked about very much in the United States through the end of the 1950s,” acknowledges that “commemorative activity took place within the survivor community” (127). Likewise, Roth believed that the subject of the Holocaust was present during this time, but “hidden, submerged, emerging, disappearing, unforgotten” (136).

4. Two comprehensive studies that examine American Holocaust fiction during this time are Dorothy Seidman Bilik, Immigrant-Survivors: Post-Holocaust Consciousness in Recent Jewish American Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1981) and S. Lillian Kremer, Witness Through the Imagina- tion: Jewish American Holocaust Literature (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1989).

5. The term “third generation survivors,” while found in some Holocaust-related discourse, remains only ambiguously defined. My general sense is that it is most often used to refer to the grandchil- dren of survivors, the first generation. At the very least, however, this is a cumbersome pedigree to establish. My modified terminology, “third generation Holocaust writers,” tries to correct for this limitation.

6. These novels include, for example, Jenna Blum, Those Who Save Us (2005), Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Rachel Kadish’s From a Sealed Room (2000), Aryeh Lev Stollman’s The Far Euphrates (1998), and Sara Young’s My Enemy’s Cradle (2008).

7. Indeed, Susan Vice claims that “Holocaust fictions are scandalous .  .  . [E]ffective Holocaust fiction cannot help registering the shocking and unassimilable nature of its subject in formal ways . . .” (1, 4). Recent Holocaust fiction, however, does just this.

8. This is (at least partly) the implication of Adorno’s oft-repeated line that to “write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” For helpful discussion on Adorno and post-Holocaust modernism, see Rothberg 19–58.

9. Hirsch calls this second-generation formation of memory “postmemory.”

10. This formulation intentionally resonates with the lines from ee cummings “i carry your heart with me”: “here is the deepest secret nobody knows / (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky or a tree called life . . .”

11. Also see Rovner.

The History of Love and the Transmission of Holocaust Memory 55

12. Transforming victimization into laughter is one of the defining features of Jewish humor. Martin Grotjahn writes: “The Jewish joke constitutes victory by defeat . . . one can almost see how a witty Jewish man carefully and cautiously takes a sharp dagger out of his enemy’s hands, sharpens it so that it can split a hair in mid-air, polishes it so that it shines brightly, stabs himself with it, then returns it gallantly to the anti-Semite with the silent reproach: Now see whether you can do half so well . . .” (22–23).

13. Sara Horowitz writes powerfully about the role of muteness in Holocaust fiction. See Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction (Albany: State U of New York P, 1997).

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