Oh, the shame of being underread, incapable of keeping up with even my own demands, let alone the expectations for the Ivy League English major. I didn’t realize until much later in life that nearly everyone, except those lucky bastards who can devote themselves 24-7 to the task, feels this way, too. It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I understood it was okay and even right to read what you wanted rather than what you ought.
But at college this did not feel like a smart state of mind. All around me, semiotics majors had an ambitious agenda, busily deconstructing every subject into smithereens. A surfeit of criticism swirled around campus, yet I still didn’t understand what it was we were meant to critique. I still wanted to take in what they wanted to tear down. I wanted to believe, not disdain. I wanted to absorb, not fend off. I wasn’t ready to have a critical opinion. To quote Virginia Woolf, “If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticize at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read.” Instead, Woolf urged, “open your mind as widely as possible … and it will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other.” If only I’d read her at the time.
CHAPTER 6
Into That Darkness
Voyeurism
“I’m going to read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” I informed my dad the summer after freshman year of college. Now I’d done it. My ambitions had been made public and I couldn’t lose face. The book would have to be read.
For years, I’d stared up at William Shirer’s doorstopper of a history, looming from my father’s war bookshelf among endless guides to military aircraft and illustrated weaponry, like a dare. Someone had once suggested with probable sarcasm that if I wanted to know anything when it came to World War II, I’d have to read Shirer.
And so I would, and, I also knew, despite the dauntingly thick spine, I would love it. Give me a dark premise—dying, death, murder, genocide—I am there. This is more a confession than a boast. Many people I knew, several in my own family, almost religiously avoid books and movies about the Holocaust. Why would you even want to go there, they wonder, as if learning about it made you complicit, a sick curiosity. (My father, however, could read endlessly about the war’s killing machinery, to me equally baffling.) It wasn’t the acts of violence that fascinated me; it was how they could happen, and what it meant once they did.
I don’t think the desire to read about these things can be entirely reduced to prurience. Part of it, I tend to think, is the opposite, a kind of yearning not only for answers but also for comfort. Dark books say to us, “This isn’t about you. You are in fact alive and safe.” Yes, there’s an implicit and unavoidable warning, an edge of danger; these things happen, the books say. And yet, as bad as it gets inside this book, you, the reader, are securely outside.
If I’d actually bothered to complete any of the reading for Martha Nussbaum’s class, I might have come across her own writing about the purpose suffering in literature holds for readers. “When we have emotions of fear and pity toward the hero of a tragedy, we explore aspects of our own vulnerability in a safe and pleasing setting,” Nussbaum observed. This not only allows us to access our own emotions, it also enables us to cultivate empathy for others. You can’t truly know how something feels unless you experience it, but reading about those experiences gives you a semblance.
Like many other morbid kids with Jewish ancestry, I was drawn to Holocaust reading from the moment I entered adolescence, seeking out the death and torture and deprivation and evil. The high point (or low) may have been Gitta Sereny’s Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience, based on interviews with Franz Stangl, the former commandant of Treblinka, which I immediately followed up with Sereny’s The Case of Mary Bell: A Portrait of a Child Who Murdered. Reading these books about how tenuous and scary life is, I feel, at a gut level, more alive and more keenly aware of the startling tenuousness of that existence.
My old friend from France, Franz Kafka, perhaps put it best, describing not just the draw but also the necessity of dark reading. “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?” he wrote to a childhood friend. “We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”
Back and forth on the Long Island Rail Road to the city, where I was spending a summer working for my stepmother’s promotional items company, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich did more than just break through the tedium. I ran the gamut of human emotion every day on that train. I’d flinch and tear up and tremble as I turned the pages, if the skin on my body had been scrubbed and exfoliated raw—and yet somehow, at the same time, I felt more reassured each time the train pulled into the station, safe.
This was not my first foray into the Holocaust nor would it be my last, because I wanted to take it one step further. A year later, while on a semester abroad in France, I developed a penchant for a kind of literary tourism unavailable to me on Long Island. My mother came to visit me in Paris, where I was then studying, and offered to take me to a city of my choice for a mother-daughter vacation. “Anywhere you like!” she said with visions of Saint-Tropez.
“I want to go to Besan?on,” I told her. I not only wanted to see the provincial hell Julien Sorel had been so anxious to flee in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, I also was keen on visiting a small exhibit devoted to the artwork of concentration camp victims from inside the camps. The collection featured tiny decrepit figurines carved out of soap and drawings etched in human ash. My mother, not sharing my unholy fascination, did not appreciate our destination as much as I did.