For an interview with Aliki inthis issue. For a paper on Eva andChagall This talk was originally presented at Associated WritingPrograms Conference in Vancouver, B.C. March 31, 2005. “Day Breaks on Andros, 1944” originally appeared in We Jewsand Blacks: Memoir with Poems by Willis Barnstone (Indiana UniversityPress, 2004).

In Defense of a Poetics of Witness byAliki Barnstone I’m definitely on the side of sticking with thedocuments and morally opposed and emotionally opposed to themythopoeticization of those events in form or genre. And yet, for somereason, I keep writing Holocaust fiction. It is something that hashappened to me; I can’t help it. If I had been there and not here Iwould dead, which is something I can never forget. —Cynthia Ozick       I am writing a book of poems,tentatively entitled Eva’s Voice, which is written in the voiceof an imaginary poet, Eva Victoria Perera, a Sephardic Jew fromThessaloniki. Until 50,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz, Thessalonikihad a large and thriving Jewish community, was known as “the Motherof Israel,” and was the seat of the Sephardim, who settled thereafter their expulsion from Spain in 1492. Theodor Adorno famously wrote,“To write poetry after the Holocaust is barbaric.” Less wellknown is Adorno’s retraction: “Perennial suffering has as muchright to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may havebeen wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer writepoems.” For anybody who writes about the Shoah, the questioninevitably raised is “Is such a poetics ethical or morallydefensible?”       One central objection towriting about the Shoah is that it is an appropriation of one of themost horrific events in human history and only survivors have the moralright to depict it. A writer who is not a survivor and who portrays theHolocaust, or any atrocity, may be accused of exploiting the sufferingof others for her own profit, whether it is the pleasure of making artor the potential of receiving renown for her work or even furthering hermoral and political agenda. The issues raised by the specter ofexploitation are compellingly explored in the essay, “Who OwnsAuschwitz?” by Imre Kertész, the Nobel Laureate and Holocaustsurvivor. He writes: “A Holocaust conformism has arisen, along witha Holocaust sentimentalism, a Holocaust canon, and a system of Holocausttaboos together with the ceremonial discourse that goes with it;Holocaust products for Holocaust consumers have been developed.”While others have made the claim that the Shoah can only be representedby historical documents and first hand accounts by survivors,Kertész rejects the guise of historical fact in favor ofimaginative recreation. He fervently denounces Steven Spielberg’sSchindler’s List as “reptilian kitsch” because thedirector tries “to make his representation of a world he does notknow seem authentic in every detail.” In contrast, he is mostlaudatory about Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, which wascondemned by many as being an inauthentic and comic treatment ofAuschwitz. But Kertész asserts that the film’s critics “failto see that Benigni’s central idea isn’t comic at all, but tragic. ...[T]he spirit, the soul of Life is Beautiful is authentic, andit moves us with the power of the oldest kind of magic, the magic offairy tales.”        Another agonizing concern regardingwriting about the Holocaust is epistemological. Even writers who havespent their lives writing about the Shoah doubt whether it can be done.As Elie Wiesel puts it “Auschwitz cannot be explained nor can it bevisualized. . . . [T]he Holocaust transcends history.” Primo Levi writesthat “for the first time we became aware that our language lackswords to express this offence, the demolition of a man.” There arethose who claim that the Shoah is unique in human history and isunknowable. This leads us to the untenable notion that any comparison ofthe extermination of the Jews or the rise of the Nazi party is regardedas not just specious but obscene, that it diminishes the magnitude ofthe Holocaust to draw parallels between it and other atrocities. Thisinterdiction against comparison translates into another interdictionagainst imaginative language, which might involve metaphor, allegory,or, as Kertész says, “the magic of fairy tales.”       The Holocaust is evidence of aterrible evil in humanity. Its horror should not be understated, hencethe prohibition against comparison. The problem is that if nothing iscompared to the Holocaust, nothing can be learned from it. Kertészwrites: [I] regard as kitsch representations that seek to establishthe Holocaust once and for all as something foreign to human nature;that seek to drive the Holocaust out of the realm of human experience. ..where Auschwitz is regarded as simply a matter concerning Germans andJews, and thereby reduced to something like the fatal incompatibility oftwo groups; when the political and psychological anatomy of moderntotalitarianism more generally is disregarded; when Auschwitz is notseen as a universal experience.       On the one hand, we areexhorted to remember the Shoah, on the other, as Sidra Dekoven Ezrahiobserves, “the imagination in any but its most constrained formsappears to many as a desecrating agent.” But she argues againstthis censorship of the imagination because it plays into the hand ofHolocaust deniers, by allowing them to define the terms of remembrance.Furthermore, I ask, why remember, if we are forbidden to use comparativelanguage in order perhaps to prevent future atrocities—or at thevery least to create resistance to the kind of political atmosphere thatleads to genocide? Ironically, one of Hitler’s invectives against theJews was that they made a claim for the universality of theirsubjectivity. The Jews, he said, defined art “as nothing but aninternational communal experience, thus killing altogether anyunderstanding of its integral relationship with an ethnic group. ...There was no longer any art of peoples or even races”(Modernism, 561). Jews, in other words, had the audacity tocompare themselves to other people, regardless of ethnicity, and tospeak for them through art.       As you’ve probably gathered, I’mmaking a case for my project, for writing in the voice of a Holocaustsurvivor, for lyric subjectivity, and for the moral imperative todevelop a poetics of witness. But beyond theorizing, my truth is a lotsimpler and more particular. I didn’t decide to write in Eva’sVoice. She came to me. I have wrestled with the questions above, andthe result is Eva did not go to Auschwitz. She survived by buying afalse Christian identity. I cannot speak for death camp survivors, norfor those who died in the death camps. Nonetheless, Eva tells me towrite in the voice of a survivor, who feels the fear of detection,sorrow for the loss of loved ones, the guilt and shame of surviving, tobe alive and among the lucky while others suffer and die.       I keep coming back to the terriblesilence in Greece about the murder of 96.5% of its Jewish population.The Greeks seem to have forgotten that Thessaloniki was a Jewish city.The fact of the extermination of nearly 62,000 Greek Jews in the deathcamps does not appear in Greek textbooks. My friend Christopher Bakken tells me that when he taught at AristotleUniversity in Thessaloniki, he made a point of telling his students thehistory of the Holocaust in their city. The students were dumbfounded.They’d never been told. When they went home and asked their parentsabout the murder of 50,000 of their fellow citizens, their eldersreplied, “No, that never happened here.” Greek survivors andtheir descendants, including members of the Jewish Community ofThessaloniki, with whom I’m in personal contact, are engaged in avaliant effort to break this silence about the Holocaust, seekrestitution for lost lives and property, and to make the factinternationally known that Jews have a long and illustrious history inGreece. As Cynthia Ozick says, “History is the ground of our being,and together with imagination, that is what makes writing.”I am writing in the voice of a single person, who is Greek and who livesfrom 1917-2001. I consider it my ethical responsibility to give carefulattention to the history and to bring it to the light in the now.       In the States, so often when I tellpeople about Eva’s Voice, I hear: “Oh, there were Jews inGreece?” My friend John Meghir is a Greek Holocaust survivor, whosefamily, like Eva’s, had false Christian identities. He speaks properBritish English, recites poetry in several languages, and is a gallantand charming host. Sometime he forgets names. Yet when I asked him oneevening to tell me about his experiences during the German occupation,he described them with the most vivid details, forgetting nothing. Hismother posed as a maid in the home of Christian friends. When Germansoldiers came to inspect the house, the friends ordered her to servethem tea, so there would be no hint of concealment. His two cousins’Jewish identity was discovered and they were trucked off to theirdeaths. When we said goodnight, he said to me,“I must tell you, what I find terribly annoying is no one remembersand no one cares.” Eva asks me to translate the voices of GreekJews into poetry, and I want to do it for her. This poem in Eva’s voiceis located on the island of Andros, where she and her family were takenin and protected by Christian friends:       Day Breaks on Andros, 1944 When all at once dogs bark from the cobblestone labyrinth in mynightmare and donkeys clop, more burdened than ever, and theroosters panic with church bells, footsteps, a screaming lamb, I think, they know who I am, and they’ll take me away. . . atlast, they’ve identified me, however narrowly. Cerberus howls his unwanted welcome; the doves grunt with the wearysouls in the underworld. Then just as suddenly I wake, a taste on my tongue likesomething spoiled. The red hibiscus flowering outside the windowspins a second among sunrays, then stops. A gust of wind. I’m on the island, safe for now. I reach for my glasses on the nightstand, put them on, and theroom’s colors shift into focus. Then I turn my head slowly on thepillow, almost afraid to reassure myself. My daughter is asleep, there on the small bed next to mine, her lipsmoving a little, her braid coiled along her neck, her handresting on the chest of her doll. I remember it is Easter Sunday and the scream I heard was thelamb carried off to be slaughtered. Today I will celebrate, too,posing as a Christian, and I will call out with the rest, Christosanesti! Christ has risen. We’ve been passed over. I allow sleep to lay its heavy body onmine and I sink beneath it for a few more hours, still anddreamless. *** Works Cited The Atlantic Online, “The many faces of Cynthia Ozick,” May 15, 1997 . Vassiliki Kolocotroni, JaneGoldman, Olga Taxidou, Modernism: AnAnthology        of Sources andDocuments, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Sidra Dekoven, Imre Kertész, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel in “Holocaust Reflections,” An Online Journal and Multimedia Companion to Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2000) . Edited by Cary Nelson. .