1. Theodor W. Adorno, "Engagement," in Noten zur Literatur, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 2:423:

Die sogenannte künstlerische Gestaltung des nackten körperlichen Schmerzes der mit Gewehrkolben Niedergeknüppelten enthält, sei's noch so entfernt, das Potential, Genuß herauszupressen. Die Moral, die der Kunst gebietet, es keine Sekunde zu vergessen, schliddert in den Abgrund ihres Gegenteils. Durchs ästhetische Stilisationsprinzip, und gar das feierliche Gebet des Chors, erscheint das unausdenkliche Schicksal doch, als hätte es irgend Sinn gehabt; es wird verklärt, etwas von dem Grauen weggenommen; damit allein schon widerfährt den Opfern Unrecht.

      A more nuanced and provocative account of Adorno's sentences would emphasize not so much the reader's pleasure, but literature's own self-delight, the inevitable accents of mastery and joy in its expressive powers that all great art exhibits, irrespective of the immediate theme. From this perspective, what appalls Adorno is not the failure of literature to be adequate to the demands of its subject but, on the contrary, its limitless capacity to transform anything, including the death camps, into an "occasion" for the display of

      its potency. For a searching reaction to this problem in the light of our contemporary fascination with "poetry of witness," see John Bayley, "Night Train," New York Review of Books, vol. 40, no. 12 (June 24, 1993): 20-22.

2. Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 1.

3. Fackenheim then spells out the implications of his commandment as follows: "We are first commanded to survive as Jews, lest the Jewish people perish. We are commanded, second, to remember in our very guts and bones the martyrs of the Holocaust, lest their memory perish. We are forbidden, thirdly, to deny or despair of God, however much we may have to contend with him or believe in him, lest Judaism perish. We are forbidden, finally, to despair of the world as the place which is to become the kingdom of God, lest we help make it a meaningless place in which God is dead or irrelevant and everything is permitted. To abandon any of these imperatives, in response to Hitler's victory at Auschwitz, would be to hand him yet other, posthumous victories." This injunction was originally delivered during the symposium "Jewish Values in the Post-Holocaust Future," held in New York City on March 26, 1967. It was subsequently published under the title ''The 614th Commandment" in Judaism, vol. 16, no. 3 (Summer 1967): 269-73, and has been reprinted in Fackenheim's collection of essays, The Jewish Return into History: Reflections in the Age of Auschwitz and a New Jerusalem (New York: Schocken, 1978), 19-24.

4. Muselmänner (literally, "Muslims") is the term coined in the concentration camps for those "near-skeletons who, their feelings, thoughts, and even speech already murdered by hunger and torture, still walked for a while till they dropped to the ground." See Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World (New York: Schocken, 1982), xix.

5. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 11. Levi attributes the story to "the last pages" of Simon Wiesenthal's The Murderers Are Among Us, but this must be a faulty recollection since Wiesenthal's account is significantly different. Wiesenthal remembers being asked by SS Rottenführer (Corporal) Merz, "'Suppose an eagle took you to America. . . . What would you tell them there?'" After being repeatedly assured that he would not be punished for telling the truth, Wiesenthal told Merz, "'I believe I would tell the people the truth.'" But to this, Merz calmly replied, "'You would tell the truth to the people in America. That's right. And you know what would happen, Wiesenthal? . . . They wouldn't believe you. They'd say you were crazy. Might even put you in a madhouse. How can anyone believe this terrible business—unless he

      has lived through it?'" Simon Wiesenthal, The Murderers Are Among Us, ed. Joseph Wechsberg (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 334-35.

6. Himmler's speech is printed as "Document 1919-PS" in volume 19 of the Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal: Nuremberg, 14 November 1945-1 October 1946 (New York: AMS Press, 1948), 110-173. The passages cited are on page 145 of the transcript. A partial translation of Himmler's talk can be found in Lucy T. Dawidowicz, ed., A Holocaust Reader (New York: Behrman House, 1976), 130-40. For a fine analysis of the speech, see Peter Haidu, "The Dialectics of Unspeakability: Language, Silence, and the Narratives of Desubjectification," in Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution'' (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 277-99.

7. Levi, Drowned and the Saved, 83-84: "We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the 'Muslims,' the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose depositions would have a general significance."

8. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 19.

9. Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 8.

10. Helen Lewis, A Time to Speak (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1992), Foreword by Jennifer Johnston, ix.

11. Already before the Israeli Supreme Court ruling, District Judge Thomas A. Wiseman Jr., reviewing the case for the U.S. Sixth Court of Appeals, concluded in June 1993 that new evidence, largely from the secret police files of the former U.S.S.R., exculpated Demjanjuk from the "specific crimes" of Ivan the Terrible.

12. James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 26, 31.

13. Jonathan Boyarin, Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 86.

14. Dominick LaCapra, "The Personal, the Political, and the Textual: Paul de Man as Object of Transference," History and Memory, vol. 4, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1992): 15.

15. Thomas Keneally, Schindler's List (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 10. These examples were suggested to me by Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 133ff.

16. Berel Lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988), 4-6.

17. Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide, 135.

18. George Steiner, "The Long Life of Metaphor: An Approach to the Shoah," in Lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust, 160.

19. Aharon Appelfeld, quoted in Lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust, 83.

20. Henri Raczymow, "La mémoire trouée," Pardès 3 (1986): 180: "De quel droit parler, si l'on n'a été, comme c'est mon cas, ni victime, ni rescapé, ni témoin de l'événement?" The entire issue of Pardés, on the topic "Paris-Jerusalem—Les Juifs de France: Aventure personnelle on destin collectif?" is extraordinarily interesting and inflects the issues we have been debating here with the singular perspectives of the contemporary Franco-Jewish intelligentsia. In English, see Ellen S. Fine's helpful essay "The Absent Memory: The Act of Writing in Post-Holocaust French Literature," in Lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust, 41-57. My own interest in Raczymow was initially stimulated by Fine's sensitive discussion of his work.

21. Henri Raczymow, Un Cri sans voix (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 186: "Je ne vois rien. . . . Je ne veux rien voir. Vouloir voir me placerait du côté du S.S. chargé de voir par l'oeilleton de la chambre à gaz l'état des gazés."

22. Norma Rosen, "The Second Life of Holocaust Imagery" Midstream, vol. 33, no. 4 (April 1987): 58.

23. Ibid., 58.

24. See the interview with A. B. Yehoshua in Joseph Cohen, Voices of Israel: Essays on and Interviews with Yehuda Amichai, A. B. Yehoshua, T. Carmi, Aharon Appelfeld, and Amos Oz (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), 74, 77. See also Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi's analysis of this pattern as necessary for Israeli self-consciousness. She calls it "the slow but ideologically consistent process by which, in the decades after the war, the Holocaust was assimilated into the logic of Jewish regeneration so that it would not shake the foundations of the new state." Ezrahi, "Considering the Apocalypse: Is the Writing on the Wall Only Graffiti?" in Lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust, 137-53; and "Revisioning the Past: The Changing Legacy of the Holocaust in Hebrew Literature," Salmagundi, nos. 68-69 (Fall 1985-Winter 1986: 245-70). As is clear from the arguments in this section, I am inherently suspicious of the appeal to raison d'état in such a context, but at the descriptive, if not justificatory, level I find the specific details of Ezrahi's argument fascinating. Nonetheless, one of the things that makes the earlier silence more like an act of repression than a "slow but ideologically consistent process" is that when, in large part triggered by the Eichmann trial and then reinforced by the

      trauma of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, it became impossible to continue avoiding a confrontation with the Shoah, that confrontation followed so powerfully the psychoanalytic logic of the "return of the repressed." The topic flooded the national consciousness, until in Saul Friedlander's description, "There are today more books in Israel about the Shoah than about probably any event in Israel's history." From a roundtable discussion printed in Lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust, 288.

25. Freema Gottlieb, "A Talk with Aharon Appelfeld," New York Times Book Review, November 23, 1980, p. 42.

26. Yael S. Feldman, "Whose Story Is It Anyway: Ideology and Psychology in the Representation of the Shoah in Israeli Literature," in Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation, 229.

27. Tom Segev has shown how many of the most influential Zionist writers continued to maintain a punitive judgmental tone about European Jewry, even after the news of the death camps became widespread in the yishuv . Thus, for example, on November 27, 1942, " Davar [the left-wing daily paper of the Histadrut Labor Federation] published an article describing the extermination of the Jews as 'punishment from heaven for not having come to Palestine.'" Segev, Seventh Million, 98. In addition to the demoralizing tone blaming the victims for their fate, there is the absurdity of invoking "heaven" by an anti-religious, secular movement in order to add a still greater weight to the relentlessness of its historical self-confidence.

28. Esther Fuchs, "Author with a Dual Root: An Interview with Itamar Yaoz-Kest," a chapter in Fuchs, Encounters with Israeli Authors (Marblehead, Mass.: Micah Publications, 1982), 29. Appelfeld calls this strain in Zionism "a piece of wishful thinking. It tried to impose the peasant as the Jewish norm and cut itself off from the old Jewish typology of an uprooted people. . . . The Zionist wish to create a 'normal' society . . . does not take into consideration the greatness, as well as the flaws, of the old pattern. Though the early Zionist may have hoped to escape from the Jewish fate, one cannot escape from oneself, and should not really want to." Gottlieb, "Talk with Aharon Appelfeld," 42.

29. Segev, Seventh Million, 179.

30. Cohen, Voices of Israel, 138.

31. Alan Mintz, Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 204. Mintz goes on to empasize that the word for rescue itself, hatsalah, meant not just bringing the survivors to Eretz Israel but rehabilitating and "redeeming" them, which included having them forget the past. (243).

32. Segev, Seventh Million, 158. The strength of the yishuv 's desire to shed any signs of Diaspora weakness is evident even at the most basic level of speech. As Benjamin Harshav's The Meaning of Yiddish (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 132, points out, "The 'Sephardic' [North African] pronunciation adopted in Israeli Hebrew, with its strong, 'masculine' stress on the last syllable of each word, was the symbol of virility and determination as opposed to the whining 'oy' and 'ay' of Ashkenazi [European] Hebrew." That this decision was made largely by Ashkenazi Jews who continued to look down on Sephardic ones as culturally inferior is not the smallest irony in the complex issue of Jewish self-transformation in its Zionist version.

33. In a 1986 interview, Appelfeld protested against his reputation in the minds of English-speaking readers as the author of novels about the assimilated Jews in the Shoah: "I've published ten novels and five collections of short stories in Hebrew plus a volume of essays. There are many other manuscripts in progress. The five novels translated and published in America thus far happen to deal with assimilated Jews. . . . But they are not my only Jewish subjects. . . . I am also working on stories of Jewish life in eastern Europe sixty or seventy years ago. And I have done three novels on the lives of Jews living in the Middle Ages." Cohen, Voices of Israel, 133. Yet in the same collection of interviews, Yehuda Amichai, A. B. Yehoshua, and Amos Oz all refer to Appelfeld as notable primarily for his portrait of the world of assimilated Austro-German Jewry on the eve of the Shoah, so irrespective of the quantitative injustice of such a judgment, it clearly echoes more than merely the accidents of translation into English.

34. Robert Alter, "Mother and Son, Lost in a Continent," New York Times Book Review, November 2, 1986, pp. 1, 34-35.

35. On this theme, see Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800-1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983).

36. Austrian Jews had long been in the habit of vacationing at resorts that were Judenfreundlich [hospitable to Jews], less out of any particular "clannishness" or desire to remain exclusively among their own kind, than as a consequence of being barred from numerous other spas. George Berkeley quotes a proclamation by the mayor of Maria Tafel, one of these spa towns, issued in July, 1920: "It has been repeatedly observed that Jews are finding lodgings and meals in Maria Tafel. Owners of hotels, coffee houses, and inns are requested not to cater to Jews. . . . Maria Tafel is the most famous health resort in Lower Austria and not a Jewish temple." Berkeley adds that "an-

      other resort community, Erfinding, decreed that no Jew could stay in the town for more than twenty-four hours." Berkeley, Vienna and Its Jews: The Tragedy of Success (Cambridge, Mass.: Madison Books / Abt Books, 1989), 158.) In 1922, in order to be permitted to stay overnight in the resort town of Mattsee, near Salzburg, Arnold Schoenberg was asked to produce a certificate of baptism to counter charges that he was a Jew. Although Schoenberg had converted to Lutheranism in 1898, the incident at Mattsee, along with others of a similar character, acted as a catalyst for the composer's return to Judaism. Robert S. Wistrich, The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 630-32. Thus, no matter how assimilationist, or how eager to deny their identities, long before the date of the novel's actions, vacationers in a place like Badenheim would have been sufficiently conscious of being Jews to have chosen (or been indirectly forced) to go to a resort that was ready to accept them. Moreover, Appelfeld is fully aware of these details and freely uses them in his other novels. The Age of Wonders, for example, opens with the twelve-year-old narrator's memory of when he and his mother were suddenly expelled from the vacation resort where they were spending the summer of 1938 by anti-Semitic pressure.

37. Aharon Appelfeld, Badenheim 1939, trans. Dalya Bilu (Boston: David R. Godine, 1980), 147. Future references are to this edition and are acknowledged in the body of the text.

38. Gabriel Josipovici, "Silently Mending," Times Literary Supplement, November 19, 1982, p. 1269. Josipovici makes his comment in a review of Appelfeld's The Age of Wonders, but his description applies equally to Badenheim 1939, both in its accuracy and in its blindness to how Appelfeld actually achieves his commendable discretion.

39. For a powerful, but I think finally unpersuasive, statement of the opposite point of view, see Philip Roth's justification for Appelfeld's strategy: "In your books, there's no news from the public realm that might serve as a warning to an Appelfeld victim, nor is the victim's impending doom presented as part of a European catastrophe. The historical focus is supplied by the reader, who understands, as the victims cannot, the magnitude of the enveloping evil. Your reticence as a historian, when combined with the historical perspective of a knowing reader, accounts for the peculiar impact your work has—for the power that emanates from the stories that are told through such very modest means. Also, dehistoricizing the events and blurring the background, you probably approximate the disorientation felt by

      people who were unaware that they were on the brink of a cataclysm." Philip Roth, "A Talk with Aharon Appelfeld," New York Times Book Review, February 28, 1988, p. 28.

40. Thomas Flanagan, "'We Have Not Far To Go'" The Nation, January 31, 1981, p. 122.

41. See, for example, Irving Howe, "Novels of Other Times and Places," New York Times Book Review, November 23, 1980, pp. 1, 40-41.

42. Appelfeld himself has emphasized a spiritual affinity with Kafka, both the fiction writer and the diarist, and admirers like Philip Roth have stressed the pertinence of an Appelfeld-Kafka connection. Roth, "Talk with Aharon Appelfeld," 1, 28. It seems to me, however, that Kafka actually underdetermines the meanings and emotional resonance of a story, thereby making it hauntingly (re) interpretable as the reader is driven to work out its significance in new contexts. But the central place of the Shoah in Appelfeld's fiction, its function as a kind of negative sublime exceeding representation but drawing all of the local meanings into its darkness, has precisely the opposite effect from Kafka's uncanny openness to contradictory readings.

43. Idris Parry considers these similes as part of Appelfeld's technique of showing us "people who will believe what they want to believe, not what the evidence suggests," and aptly describes the novel's scenes as "created like a series of sharp perspectives in a model theatre." Parry, "The Voices of Sickness," Times Literary Supplement, November 20, 1981, p. 1374.

44. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, trans. Cedar Paul and Eden Paul (London: Cassell, 1987), 285. For an Italian parallel to the theme of Jews deliberately ignoring a tightening net of anti-Semitic decrees, see Giorgio Bassani's masterful novel, Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini (Torino: Einaudi, 1962), translated into English by Isabel Quigly as The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (London: Faber and Faber, 1965).

45. George Clare, Last Waltz in Vienna: The Destruction of a Family, 1842-1942 (London: Macmillan, 1981), 154.

46. It is only fair to point out that even in Badenheim 1939 there are occasional glimpses that a more complex and nuanced relationship to the characters is imaginable by the narrator. Apparitions like the old rabbi who suddenly materializes in the town just before the mass deportations, or the emaciated twins who present uncannily ritualistic recitations of Rilke, come close to being figures of sufficient resonance to elicit the kind of solicitude and affective sympathy that the rest of the novel is reluctant to provide. But in his very integrity, the rabbi serves principally to make evident how far the

      vacationers have strayed from any contact with Jewish tradition, while the twins' performance represents the kind of spiritually, and ultimately, physically self-destructive fascination that Austro-German high culture held for educated Jews. Nowhere does Appelfeld's sympathy, even when it alights on a particular character, bring with it a noticeable mitigation of his contempt for the decisions, daily habits, and cultural values of the assimilated Austro-Jewish community.

47. See Berkeley, Vienna and Its Jews, 266-97, for a description of Eichmann's methods and a tabulation of Jewish emigration from Austria. Norman Bentwich, who was the Attorney General for Palestine from 1920 to 1931, was in Vienna in the days of the Anschluss and has written a vivid account of "the savagery, the persecution, and the despair" with which the community was stricken. He describes "the vast queues that gathered outside the consulates of possible 'host' countries: the United States, South America, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Holland. The queues stretched for miles and were subject to constant attack." Bentwich, "The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Austria, 1938-1942," in Josef Fraenkel, ed., The Jews of Austria: Essays on their Life, History, and Destruction (London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1967), 468.

48. The number of Austrian Jews granted visas by other countries is shockingly small: Britain let in 31,000 and another 9,000 reached safety in British Palestine; the United States admitted just over 28,000, China 18,000, Belgium over 4,000, Australia and New Zealand together 1,900, and Canada 82. (These figures are cited in Berkeley, Vienna and Its Jews, 282.) One of the most detailed, and depressing studies of the reluctance of the United States to do anything to help Europe's Jews is David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (New York: Pantheon, 1984).

49. In one of his best stories, "1946," Appelfeld has a wonderful argument between two survivors temporarily sheltered in a Displaced Person's Camp in southern Italy in which the failure of assimilation is acknowledged, but the blame for it is put on the Aryans, not the Jews. Against this view is a kind of simple-man's, homespun, Fackenheim-like argument that only a return to traditional Jewish religious custom can make sense after the Shoah has made clear the catastrophic failure of other paths: "'An assimilationist is what I am—an assimilationist born and bred.' 'Your success has been rather limited, if you don't mind my saying so.' 'Correct, but through no fault of my own. I did what was required of an assimilationist. . . . You would like me to proclaim to the world that assimilation has failed. From now on,

      every assimilationist will put on phylacteries and pray every morning.' 'That would be an honorable position of a sort, in my opinion.'" "1946" trans. Dalya Bilu, Jerusalem Quarterly, no.7 (Spring 1978): 127. In many ways, "1946" can be read as a kind of inverse Badenheim 1939, but without the later novel's allegorical structure or coolly mocking narrative tone. "1946" is a prosaically realistic tale with a complex and variegated set of characters. The story concerns a group of Jews who survived the Shoah primarily by hiding in the forests of eastern Europe and are now waiting to get to Australia or, if necessary (since many of them are reluctant to go there), to Palestine. Perhaps because it is set after the genocide and thus is "narratable,'' Appelfeld can let himself describe different types of Jews more convincingly than in his pre-Shoah settings. Nothing in "1946" serves as a warning or a prefiguration of future events, and its irony (about Zionism as well as assimilationism) is fully earned by the characters' own behavior. The story even ends with the arrival of the ship that will take them all to Palestine, as part of the still illegal aliyah, thus exactly paralleling, but in a positive sense, the train awaiting the vacationers at the end of Badenheim 1939 .

50. Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation, 16.

51. Ruth R. Wisse, "Aharon Appelfeld, Survivor," Commentary, vol. 76, no. 2 (August 1983): 74-76.

52. I owe this phrase to a subtle, if ultimately hostile reading of this chapter by an anonymous reviewer for the journal Common Knowledge .

53. This motif is so central to Appelfeld's vision of Austro-German Jewry that it figures in almost every one of his novels on the theme. As an example, consider the similarity between the passage from Badenheim 1939 quoted in the text and the following formulation from The Age of Wonders (trans. Dalya Bilu [Boston: David R. Godine, 1981], 163-64): "Since nobody knew that these were the last days in this house, on this street, and behind the grid of this lattice . . . since nobody knew, everyone buried himself in his own affairs as if there were no end to this life . . . even when everything teetered on the edge of the abyss."

54. Roth, "Talk with Aharon Appelfeld," 30.

55. One of the strengths of recent studies like Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 1992) and The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992) is how clearly they show the crucial role of individual decisions and choices in carrying out the genocide.