I have been away working on a new book of short stories dealing with the Holocaust. In part because it demands much more of me as a person and writer. I have to dig deeper into myself and I like digging into myself. It is not painful — it is, at times, enlightening or purposeful or just fascinating if not damn interesting. Some of us build castles in the sky –neurotics; some of us live in them — psychotics. I like to excavate. Ah, the symbolism of holes, ports of entry and good old-fashioned tunneling. The new work has the tentative title of “Working Through the Holocaust.” In a series of remarkable essays written after the turn of the century, Freud wrote about the practice of psychoanalysis. If I remember my studies, he wrote very few essays on methodology, the rest metaphysics and examinations of his failed cases. He defined “working through” as really an attempt by the analyst and analysand, to use the terms at that time, to resolve a major issue or issues that permeate the client’s soul. By doing so, the Sysyphus boulder is shunted aside — alas, there usually is another one after that. All this is worked through — supposedly.
The short stories are an attempt, in fact, to work through issues that strike me as essential to myself. The dawning realization I came to very slowly is that The i Tetralogy and this new book are an attempt by me to grasp the ineffable, which has been my characterological ‘bad habit” for most of my life. I want to know, how culturally Jewish of me. And as I began to compose some of these stories I stepped back and perceived how I was in struggle, and as a writer I began to use that specific struggle as the spine of each story and have progressed within the last few weeks to churn out at least twelve stories, some composed months ago, but all now in reasonable good expressive and artistic shape if not completion.
The quotation above I came across serendipitously. It may very well end up being the quotation I use on the front page of this new book. So much is contained within it. Others feel it has been the key to Winicott’s theory, which is that there must be an empathetic witness to the pain of this traumatic loss, that the person who suffers this loss must be able to give testimony to someone as a way of working-through or processing this loss, and that finally certain “transitional” or “intermediate” objects (persons) might be necessary in order to move from the state of dependence and reliance on the Other to a renewed state of self-sufficiency after the traumatic severance.
This brilliant geode refracts so much about our inner lives, about the Holocaust itself — -how to understand its impact, about the need to bear witness and the healing aspects of that as well. And it explained to me what I was doing. I had the small insight that I was working through in these new stories. It rang true and so I titled it. Metaphorically, whether we realize it –or we know it — or if we happen upon it in our lives, in one way or another, we are the road to working through. Dead souls, I affirm, are totally blind to working through anything!! However, Winicott in the above quotation for this blog affirms that we need empathy or we will go mad, and I think he only mildly exaggerates. There are parts in my stories in which the characters are mad, or are going mad which means I am going mad as well. “Jupiter Thitch” is one such story.The survivor must be heard. We all need to be heard, one definition of human beings.
I thought it might be fascinating if I could get into the shoes of a young Holocaust denier after finding a page on myspace which reeked with venom. This young adult could write well his Hitlerian screeds; alas, perhaps on unconscious levels, I lost the page. I wanted to reference it. Perhaps it is best it is now lost in cyberspace for I had to conjure up this corrupted soul on my own and not crib from myspace. So I created Jupiter Thitch. Joop, as I name him, is a different kind of Holocaust denier. He does not deny the ovens. He denies the Holocaust because it threatens who he is. He is fearful of seeing. Projecting upon the Jew, he hates the Jew because he asks him to look at what man has done, to examine his own behaviors and proclivities. Using this tact, I hope I have taken a different approach, hating the Jew because the Jew places a great deal upon inner awareness. So an outer-directed young man feels threatened by an inner directed people, speaking with hyperbole. And so the tale deals with his “adventures” at home, in a synagogue, in a jewish cemetery and within his own mind. I am working through what it is to deny the Holocaust. I believe, on one level, that hatred of the Jew has to do, here and there, with the awakening of intelligence. Human beings do not want to see nor know. We are more fearful of the light than the dark. We do better in the dark. And so this is one of the stories I am at.
The other stories are a series of reflections within several stories by a survivor, how he experiences his life at this time, how he remembers the camps; two stories deal with golem, one called “The Disenchanted Golem,” which has become a personal favorite. A golem speaks with a tzaddik about his past adventures throughout the centuries and what he makes of the Jewish requests to seek vengeance for them; it explores the tzaddik’s conflicts over invoking the golem because of an ongoing pogrom in his shtetl. The Jewish Frankenstein is helped to seek out a better way for himself by the old reb, a kind of working-through. It is an exploration of the hatred of the Jew and how the Jew dealt with that doing the Diaspora.
Some stories are fantasy such as “Food” in which a prisoner in the a camp is visited by a Jew from the future (my wish fantasy); an encounter between a Jew buying a piece of Jewelry in Nazi Germany and being refused service and the dialogue that ensues; “The Tea Table” a fictionalized reminiscence of an event in my childhood regarding what I believe to have been a survivor but unknown to me at the time; and other stories dealing with a survivor’s reminiscences that repeatedly flashback upon him even at 80. One can argue that Post Traumatic Shock Disorder is a cliche for understanding Holocaust behaviors after the event. And since I am not driven by Madoff lust nor the engines of capitalism, I will publish it because I have to publish it.
As a coda, on Sunday I went to the Tucson Festival of Books. I met a mild acquaintance and his wife who published a book on Jungian dreams. We both had our books published at Wheatmark which had a table at the event. The first thing out of his mouth was how the book was selling. I answered that as a Jungian he should realize that for me it was a creative act and that although I am certainly not adverse to coin of the realm, I was not overly concerned with that. He looked at me as if I was his arch enemy, a Freudian. I am not a Freudian; however, I’ll take vaginas, anuses, holes of any kind, sex and sexuality over gnomic little creatures running rampant in the Black Forest of Germany led by that alchemical anti-Semite, Jung, who called psychoanalysis the “Jew science,” while practicing under Nazi rule. By the way, it is the jew science — it is competely Talmudic.
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