The Rothblatt Memorial Education Fund paid for eight Wednesday nights in the social hall at Beth Israel of Pico, coffee and rugelach included, and printed a flyer with a photograph of a barbed wire fence at dusk.<\/p>\n
Sy Rothblatt (b. 1948) had made his money in commercial carpet and had given the shul its memorial wall, which runs eleven feet along the lobby and holds four hundred and six names in brass. His mother came out of Bergen-Belsen at nineteen weighing seventy-one pounds. The donor plaque under the names is in a larger typeface than the names.<\/p>\n
Rabbi Dov Kalman (b. 1966) suggested Grossbard because Grossbard was the most learned man in the neighborhood and because the last series, on the parsha and leadership, had drawn nineteen people.<\/p>\n
Sixty-two came the first night. Grossbard had a lectern, a stack of eight paperbacks, and a single sheet of paper he did not read from.<\/p>\n
He began by saying that they were going to study a market.<\/p>\n
He gave them Jeffrey Alexander<\/a> (b. 1947) in twenty minutes. A catastrophe becomes a catastrophe when a group of people make a claim, and the claim has four parts. You must represent the nature of the pain. You must represent the nature of the victim. You must establish the relation of the victim to the wider audience, which means you must make the audience say, that could have been me. And you must assign responsibility, and therefore meaning, and redemption.<\/p>\n “Four representations,” he said. “Every memoir you have ever been given performs all four. Tonight I want you to notice that this is a performance requirement and that requirements have costs. Somebody pays them.”<\/p>\n A man named Feldstein asked whether he was saying the Holocaust was a construction.<\/p>\n “The killing was not a construction. Nothing about the killing was a construction. What we do with the killing is a construction, and it has been constructed by people with names, working for institutions with budgets, and I intend to introduce you to some of them.”<\/p>\n The room liked this. There is a pleasure in being told you are about to be shown the back of the set. Sixty-two people went home feeling they had signed up for something.<\/p>\n He handed out the reading list at the door<\/a>. Eight weeks, thirteen books. Nobody looked at it closely under the fluorescent lights of the lobby, and the ones who did assumed the famous ones were coming later.<\/p>\n Week two he gave them what he called the control group, and he was generous.<\/p>\n Halina Birenbaum (b. 1929)<\/a>, who went in at ten and came out at fifteen, whose book has been read by more Polish and Israeli schoolchildren than any other testimony, who has spent fifty years on the March of the Living and answers every letter a teenager sends her. Rena Kornreich Gelissen<\/a> (1920-2006), who went to Auschwitz on the first women’s transport and organized her whole account around a promise she made her mother about her sister, so that three years of atrocity resolve into one obligation a fourteen-year-old in Encino can understand. Edith Hahn Beer<\/a> (1914-2009), who survived by marrying a Nazi Party member in Munich and being a good German wife. Heda Kov\u00e1ly<\/a> (1919-2010), who came out of Auschwitz into Prague, whose husband was hanged in the Sl\u00e1nsk\u00fd trial in 1952, and whose book therefore says that the machine has more than one operator.<\/p>\n “These are true books,” he said. “Being true is not what got them onto your daughter’s tenth grade reading list. Look at what they share.”<\/p>\n He listed it. A victim who can be identified with. A pain that can be represented without disgust. A relation to the audience that widens rather than narrows. An assignment of responsibility that lands on someone outside the room.<\/p>\n “Hold those four. For the next six weeks I am going to show you books that fail.”<\/p>\n Mrs. Ruchie Zelikow (b. 1954), whose mother came from Mukachevo and had the number, said from the third row, “Fail them according to who?”<\/p>\n “According to the buyer.”<\/p>\n “And who’s the buyer?”<\/p>\n “You are,” Grossbard said. “That’s the course.”<\/p>\n Week three was the procedural, and the room went down to fifty-one.<\/p>\n Mikl\u00f3s Nyiszli<\/a> (1901-1956) was a Hungarian pathologist who survived by performing autopsies for Josef Mengele on bodies delivered from the gas chambers, including the bodies of the twins he had examined alive the week before. He describes the dissection room. He describes the equipment, which was good equipment. He describes the working relationship, which was in a certain register cordial. He describes the day the Sonderkommando found a sixteen-year-old girl alive under the bodies and revived her and could not save her.<\/p>\n Filip M\u00fcller<\/a> (1922-2013) spent almost three years in the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau and wrote the operations down. The airtight doors. The time from the pellets to the silence. The way the bodies were found, the strongest at the top, the children and the old at the bottom, because of what happens in a room when people climb. The hair. The teeth. The rotation of the shifts. What the Sonderkommando ate, which was better than what everyone else ate.<\/p>\n Grossbard read four paragraphs of M\u00fcller aloud in the social hall and then closed the book.<\/p>\n “Notice what did not happen in you just now,” he said. “You did not identify. You cannot identify with a man who has just told you the operating procedure for the door. The third representation failed. Alexander’s third leg. There is no relation established between that victim and this audience, because you will not permit yourself to occupy his position for even a sentence.”<\/p>\n Feldstein said, “So we’re supposed to say we would have done it.”<\/p>\n “You are supposed to notice that the book will not let you say you wouldn’t.”<\/p>\n A woman near the coffee said she had come to a class about survivors and this felt like something else.<\/p>\n He gave them Borowski<\/a>, and read the paragraph where the narrator eats while the transport unloads, and a man in a Dodgers cap got up and went to the parking lot and did not come back.<\/p>\n Week four was Olga Lengyel<\/a> (1908-2001) and Gisella Perl<\/a> (1907-1988), and week four was where it broke.<\/p>\n Lengyel was a surgical assistant in Cluj who went to Auschwitz with her husband, her parents, and her two sons. On the ramp she was asked how old her older boy was and she made him younger, because she believed younger meant lighter work. She sent her mother with him to keep him company. She writes it down. She writes that she killed her son and her mother by her own hand and gives the reasoning she had at the time, which was decent reasoning made out of the information she had, which was none.<\/p>\n Perl was a gynecologist from Sighet who performed abortions on the dirt floor of the barracks at night, without instruments, because a pregnant woman went to the gas. She estimates the number in the hundreds. She wrote that she saved their lives by taking their children’s, and then she went to New York and delivered three thousand babies at Mount Sinai and said a prayer before each one.<\/p>\n Grossbard put the two books next to each other on the lectern.<\/p>\n “Perl can be canonized and has been, a little, because her act is legible as sacrifice and the responsibility for it lands on the Germans. Lengyel cannot, because Lengyel made a decision on a ramp with her own mouth and the sentence in the book is in the first person and she does not ask for absolution. The apparatus can carry a woman who did a terrible thing for others. It cannot carry a woman who made a mistake.”<\/p>\n Mrs. Zelikow stood up. She did not shout.<\/p>\n “My mother chose,” she said. “On the ramp. She was nineteen and they asked her about her sister and she answered and she was wrong, and she told me once, in 1979, in the kitchen, and never again, and she died in 2011, and I have never said it out loud in a room with other Jews in it in my life. And now I have.”<\/p>\n Nobody moved.<\/p>\n She sat down. She came every week after that, including the weeks when there were eleven people.<\/p>\n Week five, a woman named Dara Weisbrod asked the question during the break, standing by the urn with a styrofoam cup.<\/p>\n “Rabbi, forgive me. When do we do Night<\/a><\/i>?”<\/p>\n “We don’t.”<\/p>\n She waited for the rest of it.<\/p>\n “We don’t do Night<\/a><\/i>,” he said. “We don’t do Anne Frank<\/a> (1929-1945). We don’t do Frankl<\/a> (1905-1997). We don’t do Levi<\/a> (1919-1987). Not one word for eight weeks.”<\/p>\n “That’s a joke.”<\/p>\n “No.”<\/p>\n “You’re teaching a Holocaust<\/a> class and you’re not teaching Elie Wiesel<\/a> (1928-2016).”<\/p>\n “Correct.”<\/p>\n “Why?”<\/p>\n And he gave her the answer he had prepared, which was a good answer and was not the true one. He said that they had all had those four since the sixth grade, that there was nothing he could add to a book that had sold ten million copies and been read aloud in this building, that a syllabus is a statement about scarcity and those four are not scarce. He said he wanted to run a controlled experiment on a Wednesday night in Los Angeles: take away the material that does the work automatically and find out what happens in a room when the books refuse to do it.<\/p>\n Dara Weisbrod said that sounded like a stunt.<\/p>\n “It might be,” he said.<\/p>\n She put the cup in the trash and went home at the break and the second half had forty-one people in it.<\/p>\n Week six he gave them Rudolf Vrba<\/a> (1924-2006).<\/p>\n Vrba escaped from Birkenau in April 1944 with Alfr\u00e9d Wetzler and produced a thirty-two page report on the killing operation, with maps, with the layout of the crematoria, with the arrival figures, and got it into the hands of the Jewish leadership in Slovakia and Hungary before the Hungarian deportations began. Four hundred and thirty-seven thousand Hungarian Jews were deported anyway, in eight weeks, on schedule, without resistance, believing they were going to work.<\/p>\n Vrba spent the rest of his life saying that the leadership had the report and did not warn the communities, and that the reason involved a negotiation between Rezs\u0151 Kasztner and the Germans over a train of sixteen hundred and eighty-four people, and that the people on that train included Kasztner’s family and the Jewish notables of Kolozsv\u00e1r.<\/p>\n “He was right about the report,” Grossbard said. “The document existed and reached them. What he was right about after that is contested. Vrba performed all four of Alexander’s representations at a level nobody has matched. His pain is documented. His victimhood is total. His relation to the audience is heroic, an escape, a warning, a man running through the woods with the numbers in his head. And on the fourth representation, responsibility, he pointed at us. And the apparatus that ought to have made him the most famous Jew of the twentieth century made him a difficult figure, a bitter man, a professor of pharmacology in Vancouver.”<\/p>\n Feldstein said, “You’re saying the Judenrat killed the Hungarians.”<\/p>\n “I am saying that a memoir that assigns any portion of responsibility inward gets no distribution, regardless of its accuracy, and that this is a rule you can observe operating in every memory regime on earth, including the Rwandan one, where I have watched it operate at close range.”<\/p>\n Sy Rothblatt was in the back that night. He had not come to the first five.<\/p>\n In the parking lot he said, “Shlomo, whose class is this?”<\/p>\n “Mine.”<\/p>\n “It’s my mother’s. I gave that money so people would remember. You’re teaching them to audit.”<\/p>\n “Remembering is auditing.”<\/p>\n Rothblatt looked at the lit windows of the social hall. “My mother watched her father give a watch to a kapo for nothing. Nothing. The man took the watch and walked away. She talked about the watch more than she talked about her father.” He put his keys in his hand. “You think I don’t know what you know?”<\/p>\n “I think you know it and have decided it should not be said in a room with a coffee urn.”<\/p>\n “That’s right,” Rothblatt said.<\/p>\n Fourteen people came to week seven.<\/p>\n He gave them Ruth Kl\u00fcger<\/a> (1931-2020), who went in at eleven and came out and became a professor and then wrote a book that attacks the memorial industry from inside the survivor position, that says the camps taught nothing, that says the sentimental German penitent is a species she can smell across a room, that refuses to be anyone’s occasion for feeling.<\/p>\n He gave them Jean Am\u00e9ry<\/a> (1912-1978), who wrote that the man who has been tortured stays tortured, that the trust in the world is not restored, that he retains his resentment and considers his resentment a moral achievement, and who took his life in Salzburg in 1978.<\/p>\n He gave them Charlotte Delbo<\/a> (1913-1985), who came back with what she called useless knowledge and put it in fragments because the sentences would not connect, and Imre Kert\u00e9sz<\/a> (1929-2016), who wrote that the worst part was that it was survivable and that survival is banal.<\/p>\n Fourteen people. Mrs. Zelikow in the third row. A young man named Ari Fromowitz in the back who had come every week and never spoken.<\/p>\n “Notice,” Grossbard said, “that these four are respected. Kl\u00fcger has a chair. Kert\u00e9sz has the Nobel. Delbo is taught at Yale. The apparatus admires them and does not use them. Nobody puts Am\u00e9ry on a wall. Nobody prints a Delbo fragment on a program at a commemoration. There is a category we should have a name for, which is the honored and inoperable.”<\/p>\n He heard himself say it and thought about his book with four hundred and eleven copies sold<\/a>.<\/p>\n Week eight was the counterfeits<\/a> and there were eleven people, and Rothblatt was one of them.<\/p>\n Binjamin Wilkomirski<\/a> (b. 1941), who was Bruno Grosjean, a Swiss Protestant boy who was never in a camp and who wrote a childhood in Majdanek<\/a> that won prizes in three countries and was taught in schools. Misha Defonseca<\/a> (b. 1937), who walked across Europe with wolves. Herman Rosenblat<\/a> (1929-2015), who met his wife through the fence at Schlieben, apples every day for seven months, and told it on daytime television twice and sold it to a film company.<\/p>\n “Every one of these was believed by professionals,” Grossbard said. “Editors. Prize juries. Historians. Survivors. The frauds were not caught by the apparatus. They were caught by outsiders, late, and in each case the apparatus resisted the correction. Ask why.”<\/p>\n He waited.<\/p>\n “Because a counterfeit is manufactured to specification. Wilkomirski’s book performs the four representations more efficiently than any true memoir can, because a true memoir is encumbered by what happened and a fabrication is free to supply demand. Rosenblat’s fence is impossible. There is no place along that fence where a boy could stand and a girl could stand. Every specialist who looked at the map knew inside a minute. It ran for fourteen years anyway, because a Jewish boy and a Jewish girl and an apple through the wire is what the market was ordering, and here is a man willing to fill the order.”<\/p>\n He put his hand on the stack of paperbacks.<\/p>\n “For eight weeks I have shown you the supply the market would not clear. Nyiszli. M\u00fcller. Lengyel. Vrba. Kl\u00fcger. Am\u00e9ry. And I have shown you that the market cleared a Swiss Protestant with a fabricated childhood at a hundred thousand copies. That is the finding. The filter does not run on truth. It never has, in any nation, about any atrocity. It runs on what a community needs to keep being the thing it is, and the community is not lying when it does this, and neither are you, and neither am I.”<\/p>\n Nobody said anything.<\/p>\n Then Mrs. Zelikow said, “Can I say something to you.”<\/p>\n “Please.”<\/p>\n “You didn’t leave out those four for us.”<\/p>\n He waited.<\/p>\n “You keep saying experiment. Controlled experiment, you said, in week five, I wrote it down. It’s not an experiment. You left them out because you wanted them punished. Because they got everything and your people got nothing, and you had a room and a lectern for eight weeks and you took it out on the dead.”<\/p>\n Rothblatt, in the back, laughed once, at the ceiling.<\/p>\n Grossbard stood at the lectern in the social hall with the coffee urn cooling behind him and the barbed wire flyer still taped to the door and understood that she was correct in every particular, that she had seen it from the third row in week two and had sat through six more weeks to be sure, that he had built the syllabus out of a grudge against a man with a Tony and an Oscar and a medal, and that the syllabus was also true. Both. The way it had been in the church with the second take.<\/p>\n “Yes,” he said.<\/p>\n “Yes what?”<\/p>\n “Yes, that’s what I did. And every book on that list still belongs on it.”<\/p>\n Mrs. Zelikow gathered her coat. “I know,” she said. “That’s why I came back.”<\/p>\n Rabbi Kalman did not renew the series. He was decent about it and said the room had not been right, which was true. Rothblatt’s fund sponsored a scholar in residence from Yeshiva University the following winter on the theme of resilience and drew two hundred and ten people, and the shul put out a nicer flyer.<\/p>\n In March, Ari Fromowitz emailed. He was twenty-four, he worked at a hedge fund in Century City, he had gone to a Modern Orthodox day school where they read Night<\/a><\/i> in ninth grade and again in eleventh.<\/p>\n He wrote that he had bought all thirteen books. He wrote that he had finished M\u00fcller on a Sunday and gone for a four hour walk. He wrote that he had one question and would understand if there was no answer.<\/p>\n He wrote: if the filter is real, and if my community will only carry the versions that flatter it, then what was I supposed to do with the eight weeks. I can’t unread it. I can’t teach it. Nobody I know wants it. What is it for.<\/p>\n Grossbard read the email four times and typed a long answer about interpretive communities and deleted it, and typed a shorter one about Alexander and deleted that too.<\/p>\n What he sent said: It is for you. That is the only market it has. You will find two or three others in your life and you will know them within ten minutes of meeting them and you will not be able to explain to your wife why those two or three matter to you so much. That is the community. It has no building and no fund and no flyer. Come learn Wednesday nights if you want, eight o’clock, my table, no coffee.<\/p>\n Fromowitz came the first Wednesday. He came the second Wednesday.<\/p>\n He did not come the third.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Rothblatt Memorial Education Fund paid for eight Wednesday nights in the social hall at Beth Israel of Pico, coffee and rugelach included, and printed a flyer with a photograph of a barbed wire fence at dusk. Sy Rothblatt (b. … Continue reading