Peter talked about the question that the Nazis had and the ways in which they had translated what had become an issue in European culture called the Jewish question. But they put it this way, what shall we do with the Jews? And [COUGH] this was the question of the political party, but it was also a question of the state which was now as he told you, a state that was controlling all aspects of its citizens' lives. It was an authoritarian state. Well, the question, the Jewish question, [COUGH] was a question for the Jews. Because it was clear to them that the modern state, this modern state of the Nazis was controlling all kinds of things. And [COUGH] they would control, or try to control, or define, what to do with the Jews. So for the Jews, which is in some ways, my question, right. Not what to do with the Jews, but what is it that the Jews could do for themselves in this increasingly hostile environment? Now, we are reading accounts that Jews have written and about their experience. And some of those accounts were written like the diary of Rywka Lipszyc while this was going on, while she was in the ghetto. And one of the questions about storytelling, which is also a question for history-telling, is why do you do this? Well, one of the reasons you do this is because the stories frame or help you understand what your life experience is about. It's what you do when you come back to your room and talk about what you just experienced. So, they are, if you will, I don't know what to call it, life guiding, framing, experience. They direct possibilities for understanding what may have happened, but also then, make you aware of possibilities for the future. And these are, after all, issues that we've seen in reading Elie Wiesel, in reading Primo Levi, in reading Rywka Lipszyc, what is the sense of what is happening to me? And these are questions of the narrators. And these are also questions raised by Sholem Aleichem, and especially by Andre Schwarz-Bart in The Last of the Just. And if we look at these stories, we look at a diary. We look at a memoir, we look at a novel. We ask what kind of a story is this? [COUGH] And Sholem Aleichem's story is a lot in some ways like Andre Schwarz-Bart's, in that it is a story about one person who is representative, who is part of a larger community, not just an unusual individual. And in some ways the questions that Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi ask are also questions by one person, who is representative. And they are asking questions about themselves, but also about their neighbors, about the neighborhood. And in that sense, these accounts are accounts of communities. So what they are trying to understand is what's happening to them as individuals, representative for families and communities. So it isn't only Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, right? It's got a status of reaching to communities. And that leads me to ask, what kind of a story is The Last of the Just, which you are reading now, and I hope you'll finish by Friday. But I'll try not to give you a spoiler. I won't tell you the ending. But, what kind of a story is the Last of the Just? And that also leads me to ask, what kind of stories are we telling in this course that these writers are working with? So if you will for a moment, a sidebar that will I hope illuminate what we're talking about, we call this story, this course, Holocaust. And that's how it's known in the curriculum, that's what you studied. I think it's the wrong name. And so does Elie Wiesel, who bears some responsibility for it. Because Holocaust, as some of you may know, is a Greek word that's a translation of parts of the Hebrew Bible, referring to a sacrifice. The notion that you offer a sacrifice to the God, and it is wholly consumed by fire, there are different kinds of sacrifices. Sometimes in the Hebrew Bible, the sacrifices are really for barbecue purposes. Everybody gets to eat, but not the Holocaust. It's completely consumed. And therefore it is acceptable, and it takes care of the problem. So, if you follow that logic, the Jews were a sacrifice. It's all been taken care of. And now there is happiness, redemption, peace. Well, it seems to me, clearly the wrong metaphor, the wrong analogy. And I would say that we're not reading books, if you think about the ones we've been reading, which say, yes it was all taken care of. We survived. We weren't only lucky. But this means we've entered a new moment in world culture, and everything is taken care of. Although I do think that the events they're describing produce a rupture, as I've said before, in Western culture, in European culture, in liberal humanist culture. But the result is not, it's all taken care of. Now the Holocaust is also known by the Hebrew word Shoah, and Shoah really means a kind of enormous catastrophe. And one could say, much of what we're reading is about the great catastrophe. But I think that this misses the nuance of what we're looking at because the books that we're looking at seem to me to fit more under the Yiddish term, Khurbn. Khurbn is a Yiddish word that comes from a Hebrew word that means destruction, but it's referring to the destruction of communities. And that's really what these people are aware of, and Primo Levi will tell us, the Italians came to Auschwitz. The Greeks came to Auschwitz, right, these were communities. And one of the things that happened afterwards at one of the killing camps, Treblinka, when they were talking about memorials, it was decided. And they brought boulders from each of the communities that was destroyed at Treblinka to memorialize not individuals, but the communities, town by town. And I would say that it seems to me that these books that we're reading are about Khurbn. They are about the destruction of the communities that these people are part of, the communities that they represent. And this reminds us that there wasn't a Nazi memo that said, let's get Elie Wiesel. We didn't have the hit list that some of our presidents have had, if you remember that past history, or of other people. This was about what shall we do with the Jews. It's a general issue, but it's also from the Jewish point of view, community by community. And that's also how you can understand the fact that, one of the things that was done was if you were a Polish Jew living in Germany, they wanted to throw you out. That was one of the early stages. So what we've been doing is, it seems to me, reading different kinds of books, and I just started to make a list this morning or last night. And they all deal with this, they are diaries, right. They're memoirs, Nechama Tec, Wiesel. They're novels, like what we're reading. And many of them, most all of them right now, that we've read are in the form of the Bildungsroman, right? We've talked about that. They are stories of coming of age, of initiation. And then they also are in the genre if you will, of heroic sagas, of families and clans. There's lots of those including Biblical accounts and Homeric accounts. And we've also looked at lyric poems. But for the most part, they involve us in realistic narrative like historical narrative. And then, I thought, well, if I'm making a list of kinds of books about the Holocaust, and the very fact that we have so many different kinds, tells me that this is a huge phenomenon, that it wasn't just a small group that was affected. The graphic novel, right, and I'm sure you've read Maus and other graphic novels. And on the recommended list, I have another book that imagines that the way to tell the story Is to create a family album. And this is the book by Sebald. Some of you may have a chance to read it. And the notion of telling the story of the Holocaust as a family album is a very interesting one. And it's become a major idea in the contemporary novel.
