Vol. 1, Number 3	Fall 1998 issue

 

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The Holocaust haunts my family. We are haunted by it. I am haunted by it. To many of you, this may make little sense. I was born in 1978, more than 30 years after the war, two generations after Hitler killed relatives I never knew in a place I have never been. But to those of you who are also haunted, I suspect that my statement rings strangely true.

I remember discussing the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. with a friend last semester. He admitted that he isn't entirely comfortable with the multi-million dollar, multi-floor testament to the destruction of European Jewry. Finally, someone who felt the same way I did. Just a few more moments of discussion, and I discovered that his mother's parents, like my father's, were survivors.

Imagine that forces beyond your control lifted you up and destroyed everything you used to define yourself-your home, your family, your friends, your patterns of life-and set you down, alone, battered, in a strange new place where no one spoke your language or shared your values. You cannot return to the world you once had, because it no longer exists.

How are you going to make sense of what you find around you? Can you recreate some of what you once had, or do you even want it back? The Holocaust not only destroyed communities, towns and a particular way of life; it also destroyed the lives of those who survived.

Think about it this way, and somehow it is less surprising and more believable that each character in Isaac Bashevis Singer's Shadows on the Hudson, all of them survivors, contemplates suicide at some point in the novel. Living in New York, they are little more than shadows of their former selves.

The novel is a multifaceted attempt to answer the difficult question: how does a Jew live in America? Its answer is most unsettling. The only character able to find contentment is Hertz Grein, who moves to the ultra-Orthodox Me'ah Shearim neighborhood in Jerusalem. In the book's epilogue, he declares that "one cannot be a Jew if one does not belong to God's army and does not wear God's stamp upon oneself. There is no such thing as a Jew without a beard and sidelocks, without a fringed ritual undergarment and a Gemara." A fringed ritual undergarment and a Gemara are Grein's solutions after he has already abandoned (and emotionally destroyed) three different women in his search for some sort of inner peace.

Grein's woes are only the beginning of Singer's tale. Over the course of the novel, each character embarks upon his or her own journey in search of contentment. None finds it. There are more marriages, more affairs and more desertions in this book than it is possible to count.

The one constant throughout the various escapades, however, is the haunting presence of the past and of Judaism. Regardless of how much Judaism the characters welcome into their lives-regardless of whether they keep kosher or pray three times a day, regardless of whether they speak Yiddish or Polish and try to recreate life in Europe-they cannot escape feelings of guilt. Every failure leads to deep soul searching, to penitence, to questioning one's relationship to God, and to vows to observe the commandments. What might be seen as a declaration of freedom from shtetl life, the choice not to be observant, is soon seen only as a sin-one of many sins made possible by Hitler.

These guilty thoughts lead to questions: how could there be a God who would not only create a Hitler but allow the building of ghettos and concentration camps for the murder of God's Chosen People?

For every post-Holocaust declaration of faith, this is the responding chorus, echoing the doubts on everyone's mind, lurking behind everything. The characters discuss the viability of Judaism with each other over tea or vodka. Alone, they lie awake at night wondering whether their lives would be better if they lived strictly according to the tenets of Judaism.

I hesitate to call this book a work of fiction. The story and characters are, of course, Singer's creations. There never was an Anna Makaver who ran off with Hertz Grein before blaming herself for the death of her second husband and eventually returning to her first husband. There never was an Anita Grein, daughter of Hertz, fiancee of a young German man with Nazi relatives. At the same time, though, I believe that the emotions of Singer's characters ring unbelievably true to the survivor experience.

Singer published Shadows on the Hudson serially in the Forward, a Yiddish newspaper, in the 1940s. I sense that it might as well have been printed in the News section of the paper, each chapter under a new variation of one headline: "Jews Suffer."

This is a book about Judaism in America and the echoes of the Holocaust. It is a book about a people learning to live with a God who allowed the destruction of 6 million of their peers-while allowing them to live. This is a book about a misplaced people, struggling like a building with a cracked foundation. It is not an easy read. It often feels like it will never end. It will exhaust you to the point that you cannot even cry, yet you will grieve for Singer's characters long after turning the last page. For some, it will touch that part of you that you try to keep tucked away somewhere you don't often look, that part of you that is aware that you live your life, not only for yourself, but also for the six million.