claire m. tylee
against memory, practicing ‘‘an Orwellian falsification of memory, falsification of
reality,negation of reality’’...fifty years after the notorious Wannsee Conference
at which the Final Solution was first given political and bureaucratic shape, the
Holocaust and its memory still stand as a test case for the humanist and universalist
claims of Western civilization’.^7 As Wiesel admitted, ‘The holocaust in its enormity
defies language and art, and yet both must be used to tell the tale, the tale that must
be told.’^8 Echoing Hemingway, the Holocaust survivor Ruth Kluger has claimed
that we must ‘start with what is left: the names of places’;^9 these are like the concrete
piers of a destroyed bridge, all that remains to enable us to connect with the past
and the dead. But now that even such signals as names risk collapse into cliches, ́
how can we renew their significance? Poetry aims to restore meaning by provoking
its readers to construct imaginary connections.
Thus in 1971, Harold Fisch ignored Adorno’s viewpoint in his discussion of
1950–1960s Holocaust poetry by two British Jews.^10 One, Nathaniel Tarn, had
responded with Hasidic inspiration in such poems as ‘The Master of the Name
in his Privy’. The other is the better-known Emanuel Litvinoff. Fisch quotes from
Litvinoff’s 1952 poem ‘To T. S. Eliot’ to demonstrate how ‘partly due to the memory
of the Holocaust which has seared itself into the consciousness of all, the non-Jew
is now called to judgement’. Claiming Bleistein as his relative, in a parody of Eliot’s
anti-Semitic poetry, Litvinoff delivered what Fisch called ‘an angry but dignified
rebuke’, imagining himself walking there when
the smoke drifting over Treblinka
reeked of the smouldering ashes of children,
I thought what an angry poem
you would have made of it, given the pity.^11By 1995, Hilda Schiff was able to compile an international anthology of Holocaust
poetry. Her introduction acknowledged the problems. The aesthetics of traditional
poetry could not cope, could it? Certainly, ‘Beauty wasnottruth, as Keats had
(^7) Huyssen,Twilight Memories, 251. Huyssen quotes Levi,The Drowned and the Saved, 31.
(^8) Wiesel, quoted in Herbert Muschamp, ‘Shaping a Monument to Memory’,New York Times,11
Apr. 1993, sect. 2, 1.
(^9) RuthKluger,The Landscape of Memory: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered(London: Bloomsbury,
2003), 74–5. 10
Harold Fisch,The Dual Image: A Study of the Jew in English Literature(London: World Jewish
Library, 1971), 108–9.
(^11) Emanuel Litvinoff, ‘To T. S. Eliot’, in Peter Lawson (ed.),Passionate Renewal: Jewish Poetry
in Britain since 1945: An Anthology(Nottingham: Five Leaves Press, 2001), 235–6. Lawson repeats
(pp. 17–20) the story that surrounds this poem, which Litvinoff wrote for an ICA event in 1952
after Eliot had republished inSelected Poemshis early anti-Semitic poetry of the 1920s, including
‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’. Litvinoff had just started to read ‘To T. S. Eliot’
when Eliot entered the room. Dannie Abse recalled Eliot ‘putting his head down’ afterwards. In the
1990s Michael Rosen ridiculed George Macbeth’s defence of Eliot’s anti-Semitism as normal for its
period in ‘English Literature’: ‘Our lives are so much the richer|For reading English literature’ (in
Lawson (ed.),Passionate Renewal, 272).