RESISTANCE

When reviewers or interested people write me why they will not review my book, I have noticed in some instances that the two stories they do like are what I call “Ann Frank” efforts; that is, they are safe, gives humanity a free pass and play on the cello strings of the human heart. I felt them at the time and I wrote what I felt. Most of my 27 stories offer  idiosyncratic points of view, gritty, graphic, savage, caustic, satirical, and stories that take no prisoners. When the head of a Jewish studies program writes me that she “shuddered” upon reading my other stories, I find that schizoid.  In a world in which we now have beheadings, her dainty perspective and head up her ass attitude is hard to take. She is an intellectual wuss.

Films are much more graphic than books, but books incise into the mind in a different kind of way. So here is an Holocaust educator who has circumscribed what she reads, to admit and accepts only what is safe. In Terence Des Pres’  book, The Survivor, about the concentration camp experience,  he graphically describes how camp guards made some Jews eat their own shit. It happened. Learn from it. As a writer use it. Don’t flinch. Or get out of the Holocaust experience as a writer.

So if I write a story in which an inmate had to eat his own shit, I wonder if that would be rejected out of hand. Of course, it would. It would make her “shudder.” So my literary imaginings get to her more than beheadings and Jews eating shit.

Another writer and educator complains to me, barely containing her rage, that she has no time for fiction about the Holocaust; that we should spend more time taking down the stories of survivors, become memoir recorders, assisting them in encapsulating their experiences. I have no problem with that at all, but in the same breath she castigates Holocaust fiction as a waste of time at this historical moment. Holocaust as memoir, Holocaust as remembrance, is that all there is? So no more Primo Levi, no more Elie Wiesel, no Olga Lengyel, no time for explication and exploration, or interpretation. I will take my copy of The Heart of Darkness and incinerate it and go up the mountain and crah.

I must say judgmentally that I experience these responses as a kind of moral cowardice. I have no need to defend my book nor to explain its contents or explain why and how I came to write it. When you mine for gold, digging produces slag, detritus; when you explore the heart of darkness you make things messy and muddied, conflictual,  and nowadays for the weak-minded, aggravating and annoying. However, it is the search that counts, always does. My mind wanders back to 1958 to a Contemporary Civilization course at Queens College. The instructor began to speak about Karl Marx and one of the undergrad women got upset with the mere mention of his name. The teacher went up to her seat and said Karl Marx…Karl Marx…Karl Marx…Karl Marx in an attempt to desensitize her, I imagine, of the very sound of Marx’s name. And so it is with the mentioning of the Holocaust.

When I receive these responses I feel soiled by human beings who want  the Holocaust neatly wrapped up, literally ended or tidied up or just not written about at all. Underneath is a need to be safe. And my Jewish brethren are as guilty as any one else. It is the dark and nether consequences of resistance, to put out of conscious mind what is nettlesome, frightening, scary and personally repulsive to bear under the scrutiny of awareness.

In short, it comes down to fear. I wrote in another place that fearlessness leads to authenticity in writing. I stand by that. I am so old that authenticity in living is still a vital principle to live by or struggle to attain. And when I come across prissy responses to my book I don’t relate to it well, for it is foreign to me, but it is the low flying scud in this rapidly collapsing culture. I’m naively taken aback that people don’t want to see, and yet I spent years dealing with the unsaid in my clients. So I have determined that if my book is to be read I must give it away which I am doing in certain cases — Holocaust museums, Holocaust studies programs, instructors and the like. After all, I am into sharing what I own and what I feel and what I can write about without an inordinate concern about marketing and making royalties;sweet gumdrops, assuredly,but they do not make up the fabric of myself.

Apparently any book on the Holocaust  nowadays,  like the Jews in the 40s, is met with indifference; ho-hum is the response. An ennui has settled in and like a miasmic swamp occludes efforts to understand again and again what the Holocaust is. Human beings are a shabby lot, one of my lifelong learnings.  I have no expectations of man because my own fellow man has not the slightest realistic expectation of himself, except to make money and fuck.

Kazantzakis said it well on his epitaph: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.”

Apparently I may like to get bruised or kicked in the ass, to perseverate in this agony or I don’t really give a damn. I do have a measure of hope. I hand out my book free, like a business card, just to share: “Hey, brother, I can spare a dime.” To be read is all that I require, to be asked a question is a wonderful chakra, something to behold. It is the teacher in me. At my age I experience what Erickson called “generativity,” the need to give what wisdom one has attained to the young or to those who are willing listeners.

And there is also the asbestos-like silence. I have mailed out over 1,000 queries,  and more than a handful to reviewers who have read my earlier works. And they don’t nibble at all. In my imagination they feel not to reply is not to be involved with a foul subject, or one that makes them shudder, or equivocate, or flee; whatever, the motivation , what I am left with is silence from previous supporters.  It is deafening.You might label this, Holocaust aversion. Human beings rarely ever face what they are capable of; consequently the hatred for Freud. Some “well intended” individuals want to protect survivors from the very horrors they have experienced — how interesting, and  self-servingly odd. In education reading readiness, if I recall, has to do with the child’s ability at a certain age and grade, to be introduced to reading or to another level of reading. I suspect Holocaustphobes are not “ready.” Apparently many of us cannot advance beyond Anne Frank’s outside experience. Although hidden from the concentration camp, not a few historians feel her diary is not part of Holocaust literature. Psychologically, many human beings suffer, with regard to the Holocaust, from arrested development. I have let out the genii from the bottle from my powder keg. A writer can never control the consequences of what he says in print, the misinterpretations, the misunderstandings or the lack of nuanced reading.

I also sense that I have touched upon several taboos  as reviewers write back. I am well aware that I rarely censor myself, or hold back  what I have to say; that is, I don’t send out my work to the cleaners. I am not a safe person to be around in any case. Some people cover holes with stones; I unearth them for a look see, call it characterological.