26 The New York Reviewwith such phrases, and in Pollak’s
world, monuments serve as mile-
stones, whether of cultural prog-
ress or an individual life. They are
what counts.The Laocoön group provides von
Trotha’s Pollak with a monument
freighted with as many layers of signif-
icance as Rome itself. In Vergil’s Ae-
neid, Laocoön, in his authority as priest
of Neptune, warns his fellow Trojans
not to accept the gigantic wooden horse
that their Greek adversaries have mys-
teriously left on the beach. “I’m afraid
of Greeks even when they’re bringing
gifts,” he declares (timeo Danaos et
dona ferentes). Swiftly, troublemaking
Minerva sends a pair of supernatural
snakes to rid Troy of this turbulent
priest, with results that Vergil describes
in lurid detail (here in John Dryden’s
translation):And first around the tender boys
they wind,
Then with their sharpen’d fangs
their limbs and bodies grind.
The wretched father, running to
their aid
With pious haste, but vain, they
next invade;
Twice round his waist their
winding volumes roll’d;
And twice about his gasping
throat they fold.
The priest thus doubly chok’d,
their crests divide,
And tow’ring o’er his head in
triumph ride.
With both his hands he labours at
the knots;His holy fillets the blue venom
blots;
His roaring fills the flitting air
around.
Thus, when an ox receives a
glancing wound,
He breaks his bands, the fatal
altar flies,
And with loud bellowings breaks
the yielding skies.The marble sculpture depicting the
“doubly chok’d” seer and his “tender
boys” may date from the same time
as Vergil: the age of Augustus, who
reigned from 31 BCE to 14 CE. It is
probably the same work praised two
generations later by the Roman writer
Pliny as the creation of three sculptors
from Rhodes— Agesander, Atheno-
dorus, and Polydorus— but Pliny gives
no indication of its date or the patron
who commissioned it. Scholars con-
tinue to debate when it was created
(possible dates range over some three
hundred years, from 200 BCE to the
70s CE) and whether it is a precise copy
of a lost bronze original or an elabo-
rated version.
To Michelangelo, who rushed to see
the statue as soon as it was discovered,
the priest’s exaggerated muscles and
anguished expression revealed heroic
new ways to portray human endurance.
Laocoön in his agony embodies ev-
erything that separated “bread- eating
mortals” from the gods of antiquity.
He has stood in the Vatican since 1506
next to one of those marble divinities,
the lithe, elegant Apollo Belvedere, as
graceful as Laocoön is contorted, as
youthful as Laocoön is aged, as blithe
in his arrogance as Laocoön is rackedby suffering. Renaissance sculptors
often claimed that the Laocoön group
had been carved from a single block
of marble, but Michelangelo certainly
knew better, and so, probably, did ev-
eryone else who took a close look and
saw the carefully crafted joins. But the
challenge of producing a three- in- one
statue appealed irresistibly, and around
1512 another Tuscan sculptor based in
Rome, Andrea Sansovino, carved just
such a marvel: a Virgin, Child, and
Saint Anne, still on view in the church
of Sant’Agostino.
Laocoön, who saw so clearly, pro-
vides a powerful image of impending
doom, but Pollak, the first modern
person to imagine the sculpted Laoc-
oön in its original form, seems to resist
acknowledging his own dire situation.
K. urges the elderly archaeologist to
act:We know how this journey ends,
though, I responded. That’s why
I’m here.
With all due respect, Pollak
countered, even the highest au-
thority among those who sent you
does not know what the future
truly holds. The here and now is
not his concern; it is the hereafter,
which in my case does not apply.
Although—
He didn’t finish the sentence.
But, he added, please convey my
sincerest thanks to everyone in the
Vatican. Yes, he said, I am touched
that they sent you.In 1766 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
used the Laocoön group, which he had
seen only in engravings, to engage in
philosophical battle with Johann Joa-
chim Winckelmann, who had seen the
real statue, albeit outfitted with its Re-
naissance arm rather than the original.
Winckelmann’s Thoughts on the Imi-
tation of Greek Works in Painting and
Sculpture (1755) had asserted that La-
ocoön, befitting his own idea of Greek
art as a triumph of “noble simplicity
and quiet grandeur,” exhibited the
“anxious and subdued sigh described
by [the Renaissance poet Jacopo] Sado-
leto” rather than Vergil’s “loud bellow-
ings.” To Lessing, comparing a work of
sculpture to a poem was an exercise in
nonsense. In Laocoön: An Essay on
the Limits of Painting and Poetry, he
insisted that each art retains its own
distinctive character; hence Vergil’s
poetry and the ancient sculpture set
for themselves, and achieve, entirely
different expressive aims. Neither illus-
trates the other, nor can it, for each is
an entirely independent creation. Lao-
coön’s pain, moreover, is anything but
subdued: it is explicit.
Von Trotha’s Pollak, in turn, believes
that his discovery of Laocoön’s bent
arm has entirely changed the meaning
of the statue. The outstretched arm,
reaching upward through the chaos,
expressed the priest’s extremities of
suffering as an epic struggle toward im-
mortality. The bent arm, the real arm,
has brought Laocoön and his agony
crashing back down to earth, bound by
the incurable pain of being human:He’s no hero, and neither nobility
nor g ra ndeu r is on d isplay. Si mpl ic -
ity, maybe. And a bloodcurdling
scream ringing in the silence....
The extended arm is monumen-
tal, sublime, and wrong. The armthat will never reach out again. My
arm— the arm of a doomed man—
that is the real arm.K. fidgets, and still Pollak spins out
his siren song as the light of day be-
gins to fade (von Trotha has taken that
small liberty with the facts— the Ge-
stapo may have wrapped up operations
just before a late lunch, but his version
of Pollak’s story requires the light of a
setting sun):He turned and looked me straight
in the eye. One must give a per-
sonal account, he said. Particularly
when the end is imminent. One
must tell stories. One must write
them down. One must ensure that
memory remains, so that others
might remember when you no lon-
ger can.Pollak’s memories are indissolu-
bly linked to the glorious, weighty
heritage of Judaism, and hence to
anti- Semitism, the serpent that has
confined him in its coils since his birth,
a monster unleashed by an angry God
for some unfathomable reason— or
perhaps the same reason that drove
Minerva to throw snakes at Laocoön:
to stifle a seer’s second sight. From an
earlier encounter with Alfred Dreyfus
to his gradual exclusion from every as-
pect of contemporary Roman life amid
Germany’s, and then Italy’s, growing
compliance with Adolf Hitler’s racial
doctrines, Pollak’s devotion to beauty
has been wrung at the price of a con-
stant battle against ugliness and evil.
One of the unkindest cuts occurred
in 1935, when he was denied entry to
the great art- historical library founded
in Rome by the Jewish benefactress
Henriette Hertz as a place where
women could read alongside men. “I
was the first and most faithful visitor
the Hertziana ever had,” Pollak tells
K. “And then— ”
Yet Pollak’s long soliloquy ends with
apparent denial. He tells K., “They will
not come for me tomorrow.” And they
didn’t. They came that same day.
The Gestapo arrested Pollak and
his entire family, corralled them in the
Collegio Militare with more than a
thousand other prisoners for two hell-
ish nights, and then sent them off to
the ultimate hell of Auschwitz. Like
the senators of Rome in 390 BCE, von
Trotha’s Pollak discovers that his noble
stand could hold off the barbarians
only to a certain point, but the story of
that stand, that refusal to bend to bar-
barism, would outlive them all.
The Gestapo’s roundup, or rastrel-
lamento, of October 16, 1943, lives in
infamy. But as a military operation it
failed in its objectives, which were to
deport eight thousand people, not one
thousand, and to terrorize the Ro-
mans, who instead resisted the Nazis
more stubbornly than ever. Before the
trucks arrived, Roman Jews had been
warned to take refuge in the country-
side, and many did. Others escaped the
Gestapo’s net by climbing over roof-
tops or knocking on their neighbors’
doors. Hundreds hid in out- of- the- way
corners of churches and convents, in
private homes, or within the walls of
the Vatican with the help of Monsignor
O’Flaherty and his associates. One
man simply got into a Roman cab; the
driver spent the rest of the day chauf-
feuring him around the city and saved
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Melvin TRowland 25 26 .indd 26 3 / 9 / 22 2 : 19 PM