The American Century: Literature since 1945 741the posthumously published Meshugah. “Although I did not have the privilege of
going through the Hitler Holocaust,” Singer writes in a caustic author’s note to
Enemies, “I have lived for years with refugees from this ordeal.” And, in each of these
narratives, characters try to exorcise the millions of ghosts created by genocide. In
Enemies the protagonist, a refugee called Herman Broder, shuttles uneasily between
three women – a mistress and two wives, one he married in America, the other he
thought had died in Europe. At the same time, he careers between the ordeal of his
European past and the challenge of his American present. Persistently reinventing
himself, Herman encounters postwar culture as a mildly deranged survivor who is
alienated from the grand narratives of history and trapped in wartime memories.
“Where are the Nazis?” his psychotic mistress asks him, when he takes her on a trip
into the American pastoral of the Adirondack mountains. “What kind of world is
this without Nazis? A backward country, this America.” Like her, Herman suspects
trauma and disruption everywhere; he cannot reconcile the Holocaust with his
American experience and so form a new cultural identity. All he can manage, finally,
after his mistress commits suicide, is to set up a strange, but strangely touching
ménage à trois with his two wives. It is not a reconciliation of the warring opposites
of his life, perhaps, but it is a form of survival. In The Penitent the protagonist
survives in another way, by leaving “the Golden Land” of America for Europe. In
Meshugah the narrator negotiates a sort of survival when he marries, in a muted,
postlapsarian gesture of forgiveness, a woman who had collaborated with the Nazis.
It is, we are told, “the quietest wedding since the one between Adam and Eve.” Despite
such gently or quirkily redemptive moments, though, all three books in the post-
Holocaust trilogy are marked by a comic absurdism of tone and a carnivalesque
nihilism of spirit. Meshugah, Singer reminds the reader, is a Yiddish word meaning
“crazy, senseless, insane.” That reflects the feeling, expressed by one character, that
“the whole world is an insane asylum.” Or, as another character puts it: “the Hitler
and Stalin catastrophes demonstrated that humanity’s dreams of permanent peace
and a united mankind were unreal.” The only genuine relief in this fiction comes
from its antic narrative rhythms and mad, mordant humor. As Singer confessed not
long before he died, some of his characters may finally have “made peace with the
cruelty of life, and the violence of man’s history ... but I haven’t.”
The characters in the stories of Tillie Olsen (1913–2007) are not so much haunted
by the Holocaust as haunted by silence. What they are faced with are the numerous
denials of voice and identity imposed by poverty, by suffering, the Depression, and
world war – by “the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being for
them,” as Olsen put it, “but cannot,” particularly if they are women. Olsen experienced
such silencing herself. The daughter of a couple who fled from Russia when the 1905
revolution failed, she began work, at the age of 19, on a novel concerned with the
efforts of a family to survive on the farms and in the packing houses of the Midwest.
Marriage, motherhood, and the need to find a means to survive economically all
intervened. It was only much later that she was able to return to the unfinished
manuscripts. “The book ceased to be solely the work of that long ago young writer,”
Olsen recalled, “and, in arduous partnership, became this older one’s as well.” “But,”GGray_c05.indd 741ray_c 05 .indd 741 8 8/1/2011 7:31:42 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 42 PM