Tales Of Elijah The Prophet Book

"In the beginning was the Holocaust. We must therefore begin again." - Elie Wiesel

"To reconstruct the research on women and the holocaust, we must begin with new questions" - Joan Ringelheim

"[The Holocaust] remains out there, a moral, political, and theological black hole from which no good will come." -Zachary Braiterman ()

Ringelheim's essay, from which her quote above comes, should have been at the beginning! The editors themselves say that almost all of their material concerns Auschwitz, which is fine, as that was what was available before the fall of the USSR. But the editors didn't show any sort of doubt about the portrait that they had painted in the first two sections of the book, entirely composed of accounts from survivors. So the Auschwitz-centric nature of the book, as well as the potrayal of life during the Holocaust (more on that below), seemed very old-fashioned, very much what books like Bloodlands are pushing back against.

The accounts about the woman freezing on the train and of the women blowing up the crematoria (a story that I had maybe heard of once or twice before, not enough) were very affecting. I got a sense from these stories of how ghetto and camp and partisan resistance were all connected, and not separate things, which I guess had unconciously been how I'd thought of them before.

Vera laska refers to herself as a gatherer or memories. Irena Klepfisz has called herself a keeper of accounts - how do the tasks of the historian and the survivor intersect?

I am curious how the writers of the camp memoirs approach writing their stories, whether they felt that they need to tell the hopeful stories to counteract the common wisdom about the inhumanity of the camps.

Ringelheim's essay puts an interesting twist on the hopeful stories that precede it (although obviously not all of them are hopeful). Her introduction on the connection between 'cultural feminism' and survivor's memoirs is also very powerful. The other scholarly essays on the disparities between male and female victims were also very interesting - a large-scale view that provided a different persepctive than the survivor's tales.

Ringelheim takes a higher level view of women during the holocaust, and positions them in Primo Levi's grey zone, where they are all navigating different compromises in order to stay alive. For example, the 'families' and close knit groups that survivors recall might not have been so wonderful for the people who were not part of them. I think she's right, and this is one place where the reliance on memoir makes history much harder. The point is not to say that the people who survived were bad people, as she makes clear, but she does sort of snap you out of your haze of thinking that there was hope in Auschwitz, because the people who are telling us that there was hope are the ones who survived. The questions she asks the reader at the end were formatted the same way that Klepfisz asked questions in one of her essays in Nice Jewish Girls.

"Q8. Did anyone really survive the Holocaust?" This made me think of Irena Klepfisz's friend, Elza Frydrych Shatzkin, who died by suicide at age 26 in NY after surviving the war. She was a writer, and one of her stories is in Tribe of Dina. But many who 'survived' and many who didn't also left stories, even if we can't access them today. That material would be illuminating in a different way than the material in this book.

Painful, but utterly worth it.