The line between novel and memoir, between story and history, is fine
indeed. Franklin illustrates how many exemplary (though not necessarily
renowned) Holocaust works dance between genres—and are no less
valuable for it. In Piotr Rawicz's Blood From the Sky
, the narrator (who may or may not be a survivor) patches together a
semi-invented character's chaotic manuscript, with dates and names
changed or omitted, all amid surrealist elements. W.G. Sebald blends
facts and borrows histories and layers narration to produce his
masterpieces. Jakob Littners Aufzeichnungen aus einem Erdloch
is a book originally believed to be fiction and later discovered to be
based on fact (its history is a dizzying stream of authorships,
ghost-authorships, translations, and revisions, all superbly traced by
Franklin); and despite its shifting context, it retains its value
(albeit in various currencies).
Memoirs, even Holocaust
memoirs, might be properly understood as, or at least overlapping with,
literature. This is no downgrade. Literature is supplementary, not
antithetical, to history: it allows, and in the best instances demands
readers to universalize, empathize, to visualize and imagine, not
merely to be informed. Testimony is critical, of course, as are
scholarship and personal histories. The Holocaust is one of the most
thoroughly documented events in history, and still entirely resists
comprehension. The unadorned facts and uninflected history—pictures,
texts, accounts—are almost unbearably distressing. Viewing images of
stacked corpses or skimming meticulously organized lists of dead
children or hearing of the unlimited fuel for the ovens, what soul
doesn't collapse?
Literature, though, affects us in ways that
even the most brutal history cannot. It vivifies and propels an event,
however geographically and temporally and psychologically removed,
towards the personal and immediate. If history teaches and (harshly)
informs, then literature rouses and intimately disturbs. Literature is
an emotional chronicle, a history of the intangible, a quest to impart
sentiment, not information. Conveyance of the Holocaust is an
impossible but necessary appeal to our imagination; and literature is
the pathos to history's logos. Not merely learning about, but
identifying with.
Memoirs are surely part of this legacy.
Night's power isn't derived only from its harrowing story, but from its
unflinching, deceptively plain delivery of that story, as well. Like
other celebrated Holocaust works, it hits a perfect emotional pitch, if
you will; notes of tragedy in agonizingly effective arrangement—an
arrangement that's measured, appreciated, and felt with literary
instruments. Knowing the history isn't enough: literature—and
humanism in general—is, as Franklin points out, the spiritual retort
to the Nazis' crazed and brutal program of dehumanization. It's more
than memory that we must keep alive. Literature reminds us that
significance isn't time-dependent, that empathy isn't delimited by
proximity, that victims aren't statistics. For the role of Holocaust
literature—the eternal role of literature, period—is to make it new
again, to make it real, to make it felt.