mediation between the reader and the experience of these grotesque and
horrifying deeds" (302) in order to intensify their effect on the reader,
who is then more "apt to feel actually what happened" (my
emphasis). But a reader can no more experience the actual Holocaust
through reading the poem than Reznikoff could through studying the legal
testimonies, despite his stated objectivist stance: "I see something and it
moves me and I put it down as I see it. In the treatment of it, I abstain from
comment" (Interview 194). Of course Reznikoff does not comment in his own
voice, but his selection and presentation of the documents are comments, are
rhetorically determined acts. He sought the kinds of narratives that moved him.
Another reader of the records would likely select different ones. Therefore,
despite his claims to "abstain from commenting," Reznikoff’s
construction of Holocaust is itself a particular comment on the events.
It is Reznikoff’s account that readers respond to, not the Holocaust itself. Yet
rather than lacking emotion, as Ezrahi claims, the accounts in Holocaust are
invested with emotional power by means of Reznikoff’s adaptation of them. My
discussion of the evolution of a representative passage (from the "Gas
Chambers and Gas Trucks" section) as it was developed from the edited
photocopies, through the various typed drafts, to the final published version
will demonstrate how.
There are four basic stages in Reznikoff’s transformation of legal testimony
into poetry. Selection (Fig. 1): This involves the reading of many
volumes of law records (in the case of Testimony literally thousands of
volumes) to find suitable material. "I might go through a volume of a
thousand pages," Reznikoff says, "and find just one case from which to
take the facts and rearrange them so as to be interesting"
("Conversation" 117). Editing (Fig. 1): Reznikoff cuts the
selected testimony to a core of material that he feels has poetic value. Often
he reproduces the legal language verbatim, but he does not hesitate to alter it
for the sake of clarity and direction. Scoring (Figs. 2, 3): The edited
law case is lineated, typed out as verse. Those details Reznikoff wants to
emphasize are strategically placed, both within the line itself and in the
entire selection. Rewriting (Figs. 2-4): This process may consist of a
number of drafts and is essentially a honing of the lines’ rhythms and details
in order to enhance the intended emotional and poetical effects.
[. . . .]
Reznikoff knew that no matter how many specific details he included in his
poem it was impossible to create more than a general historical sense of the
Holocaust:
Of course, in the case of a great catastrophe affecting as in the Holocaust
millions, only comparatively few incidents are available. The great majority
or detail has been lost with the victims. Of what happened in the Holocaust It
the hands of what was generally thought to be one of the most advanced among
the nations of the world, . . . in spite of many excellent biographies that
have been written or memoir[s] found and published[,] only comparatively
little of all that happened remains. (Box VII, Folder 26)
By recognizing the limits of his materials, however, he was able to avoid the
formal difficulties that had diminished the effectiveness of Testimony. Neither
Holocaust nor any other account could ever be a complete depiction of
this catastrophe; therefore by necessity what he could produce would be at best
only representative. Reznikoff’s acceptance of this encouraged him to abandon
the arrangement of Testimony, which was based largely on repetition.
Rarely does he present more than a few incidents under any particular category.
The result is a haunting spareness that evokes for the reader the historical
magnitude of these crimes without deadening their emotional effect through
excessive repetition. Out of the whirlwind of seemingly limitless horror,
Reznikoff rescues specific human accounts, stories of men, women, and children
whose fate seems more comprehensible because of his emphasis on the human
dimension. Probably the greatest emotion is evoked in the reader by Reznikoff’s
persistent return to the destruction of that most basic unit of humanity?the
family. Some of the poem’s most incomprehensible and horrifying moments are
those depicting the special grief of survivors who had witnessed the massacring
of families:
Her father did not want to take off all of his clothes
and stood in his underwear.
His children begged him to take it off
but he would not and was beaten.
Then the Germans tore off his underwear
and he was shot.
They shot her mother, too,
and her father’s mother?
she was eighty years old
and held two children in her arms;
and they shot her father’s sister;
she also had babies in her arms
and was shot on the spot. (36)
Reznikoff’s choice of individual testimonies is not the only means by which
he invests Holocaust with emotional power. Often the numbered sections of
the poem’s particular "books" are concluded with especially horrible
or poignant scenes. The majority of these are brief but gripping moments, as for
example the following account from book five, "Massacres":
They gathered some twenty Hasidic Jews from their homes,
in the robes these wear,
wearing their prayer shawls, too,
and holding prayer books in their hands.
They were led up a hill.
Here they were told to chant their prayers
and raise their hands for help to God
and, as they did so,
the officers poured kerosene under them
and set it on fire. (40)
Or this even briefer scene from the book devoted to "Children":
Women guards at the women’s section of the
concentration camp
were putting little children into trucks
to be taken away to the gas chambers
and the children were screaming and crying, "Mamma, Mamma,"
even though the guards were trying to give them
pieces of candy to quiet them. (70)
We read these passages and gradually become unwilling to turn the page, to
continue on to the next section. We are offered no relief from the memory of
these moments in the succeeding white spaces?only blank pages and solitary
Roman numerals introducing yet another section. The traumatic effect of these
moments lingers, until we break it by beginning the next section and entering
further into l?univers concentrationnaire.
In describing the difficulty confronting any author who chooses to write on
the Holocaust, Rolf Hochhuth explains that "because he is faced with such a
plethora of raw material, as well as with such difficulties in collating it, the
writer must hold fast to his freedom, which alone empowers him to give form to
the matter" (288). Reznikoff’s drafts of the opening description of the
camp, as well as the larger design of the poem itself, prove that Holocaust is
more than a simple "transcription of reality." Furthermore, it is an
error to assume (as Shevelow and others have demonstrated) that Reznikoff’s
method consists solely of copying verbatim the court records and then arranging
them as verse.
[. . . .]
Reznikoff’s detailing of the facts is an orchestrated procedure that directs
the reader’s emotions to a greater degree than Reznikoff acknowledges, but its
adequacy as a response to the Holocaust is finally due to the very union of
poetic innovation and moral stance.
Ezrahi, however, includes Holocaust among a group of
"documentary" responses to the Holocaust that she criticizes for
hiding behind the "camouflage of ?factuality.’" They are, she says,
guided by "explicit or implicit ideological perspectives which generate
specific selections and interpretations of history and different modes and logic
of relating and manipulating the historical reconstruction of reality in
literature" (47). We should of course question claims to absolute
factuality, as Ezrahi suggests, even the claims of those who testified, yet I
believe she too readily dismisses a vast middle ground occupied by works such as
Holocaust that attempt to combine historical "fact" and
imaginative response.
Langer loosens the strict notion of document as only factual evidence and
reminds us of its original meaning in the Old French document, as both
evidence and lesson. "History provides the details?then abruptly
stops," he says. "Literature seeks ways of exploring the implications
and making them imaginatively available" (9; my emphasis).
Reznikoff’s desire to have the readers of Holocaust draw their own
conclusions and experience the feelings inherent in the events described
indicates his own awareness of the dual demands of factuality and imagination on
the author of Holocaust literature. The poem’s historical accuracy?at least
the history found in the law records?is maintained by his allegiance to the
court testimonies and by his attempts (through footnotes, for example) to
provide a general overview of the catastrophe. Yet as his many deletions,
rearrangements, and additions to the original prove, Reznikoff was intent on
using the powers of art to give the historical details emotional depth.
Despite Ezrahi’s claim that in a work such as Holocaust it "is
the very pretense of factuality that precludes imaginative transformation of
events " Reznikoff succeeds because he actively frustrates the rhetoric of
fact by depicting/interpreting the catastrophe in the terms Yehuda Bauer has
called for: Holocaust is "an alliance of the Chronicler with
Job" (49), a consummate union of historical narrative and human tragedy.
from "’Detailing the Facts’: Charles Reznikoff’s Response to the
Holocaust." Contemporary Literature 29.2 (Summer 1988).
Charles Bernstein
Dear Jean-Paul Auxem?ry,
[. . .]
I won’t ever forget the first night, and first morning, of this year’s Jewish New Year,
where we celebrated the work of Reznikoff in a former Christian abbey at Royaumont, near
Paris. I won’t forget that our Reznikoff panel ended with your overwhelming reading
of Holocaust–your French translation of a work barely known in its native land. My
own intervention had focused not only on Reznikoff’s Testimony, as you note, but
also more particularly on his Complete Poems. What I remember thinking was that Holocaust
had never sounded so necessary, so appropriate (in your sense that Reznikoff always
found the most "apropos" words). Yes, I have had my difficulties with Holocaust–the
most unrelentingly painful to read of Reznikoff’s work, about the most unmitigated
horror of our common, "modern" history. I think I must have said this work was
about a problem specifically European; I could not have meant that it was
"solely" European, however, since the destruction of the European Jews is of the
most urgent relevance to all Americans, to all Jews, indeed to all humans. I think I must
have suggested that Holocaust is necessarily Reznikoff’s most problematic work at a
technical–in the sense of aesthetic or formal–level, in the sense that no American work
of poetry had found a form to adequately acknowledge that which is beyond adequate
acknowledgment; so that Holocaust stands apart and beyond the achievement of
Reznikoff’s Poems and Testimony.
I say specifically European for a very practical, literal reason that you, with
your remarkable involvement with Olson, would certainly appreciate the implications of
Reznikoff’s work, apart from Holocaust and his biblical poems and talmudic
"collages," has been a profound investigation of "American" materials:
it is work immersed in the local and particular details of this place that he found
himself in, first generation in his family, and also of a language, English, that was an
intrinsic part of that emplacement. One of my favorite Reznikoff remarks is one he made to
Marie Syrkin, his wife, in explaining why he would not go to Palestine with her in 1933;
he told her that "he had not yet explored Central Park to the full." Indeed
Reznikoff never left North America or English (an "American" English of course)
in real life or in his poems, with the primary exception of Holocaust, which not
only involved a European site or place (lieu) but also for the first time working
with documentary materials not originally in English. For me, what was so striking about
your reading of Holocaust in French was that one could imagine those incidents
happening near the place, even Royaumont; we were close by the scene.
Reznikoff’s Complete Poems and Testimony explore the tragedy and
violence that is the grounding of this Republic, call it United States. It is not a story
that Americans are familiar with or, even now, ready to acknowledge. Each poem of
Reznikoff’s, always placed in series, shocks by its recognition of something otherwise
unstated or unsaid: say, unacknowledged or repressed or denied or suppressed. Testimony,
while a litany of sorrows, finds new avenues to locate the transgression of dominance
against the human spirit.
By contrast, the violence, the repulsiveness, of the incidents in Holocaust are
always and already known, hence preclude the insinuating subtlety of Testimony. And,
for Americans, always and already projected outward to the German, to the Nazi, to a
European story. If it does not hit home, it is because the story of World War II has been
the greatest source for American self-congratulation: we defeated the Nazi monsters. NOT:
the Nazi monsters in us, which go on, largely on the loose. This is like saying, North
America has not had a twentieth-century war on its soil. Reznikoff shows otherwise. The Complete
Poems and Testimony testify to a system of domination and disregard that has won;
Holocaust to a system of explicit violence that, at least on the face, lost.
From The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics. Ed. Rachel Blau
DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain. Copyright ? 1999 by The University of Alabama Press.
Norman Finkelstein
That Reznikoff’s world is one of endless wreckage becomes all too clear in his long
poems, Testimony and Holocaust. In both, "wreckage upon wreckage"
are hurled at our feet. The poems, particularly Holocaust, could be regarded as the
endpoint of Objectivism’s testimonial strain, as the subjectivity and presence of the poet
virtually disappears, replaced by the dispassionate court records from which the texts are
drawn. Like the angel of history, we can only stare, aghast at the sight of human violence
and depravity as we are blown into an ever-worsening future. Yet this is not to say, as
does Robert Alter, that "this is an extended exercise in masochism conducted under
the cover of an act of testimony."According to Alter, "History, it would seem,
had become a hypnotic vision of unrestrained murderous impulse for the poet: the ultimate
breakdown of his whole problematic relation to the past is starkly evident in the
flattened landscapes of disaster that take the place of round imagined worlds in these two
long poems of his old age." Granted, Reznikoff’s relation to the past is problematic,
but Holocaust does not constitute a "breakdown." It is, I believe, a confrontation
with history set at the limit of Reznikoff’s art:
The bodies were thrown out quickly
for other transports were coming:
bodies blue, wet with sweat and urine, legs covered with excrement,
and everywhere the bodies of babies and children.
Two dozen workers were busy
opening the mouths of the dead with iron hooks
and with chisels taking out teeth with golden caps;
and elsewhere other workers were tearing open the dead
and looking for money or jewels that might have been swallowed.
And all the bodies were then thrown into the large pits dug near the gas chambers
to be covered with sand. (Holocaust 46)
Holocaust offers so radical a challenge to the conventional category of poetry (or,
perhaps, of the aesthetic) that in reading it we must put aside most of our assumptions
about literary texts and historical representation. Drawn entirely from records of the
Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, Reznikoff’s poem demands a sort of religious silence