Reviews
Zev Garber
An invaluable anthology, Bittersweet Legacy is a belletristic and artistic response to the Shoah and its aftermath. Seventy-four contributors affected directly or indirectly by the greatest tragedy in Jewish history, bear testimony to life lived before, during, and after the horror of genocide and the challenge to continue and sustain that legacy. Through the media of art, poetry, and story, the memory of the murdered millions are written and artistically expressed with tear-laced quill and tool on burning parchment. Collectively, events in the Event are presented in kaleidoscopic fashion and despite what appears to be here and there a detour, the reader is confident that the journey to hell and back is accurate. A sensitive and synthesizing selection that Shoah happened and the confidence to hope and to live (n)ever again.
- Zev Garber, Lose Angeles Valley College
Michael Berenbaum
From the Foreword of Bittersweet Legacy - Creative Responses to the Holocaust
Theodore Adorno commented that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
Martin Buber has written:
"The more powerful the response, the more powerfully it ties down the You and as by a spell binds it into an object. Only silence toward the You, the silence of all tongues, the taciturn waiting in the unformed, undifferentiated pre-linguistic word leaves the You free and stands together with it in reserve where the spirit does not manifest itself but is. All response binds the You into the It world. That is the melancholy of man, and also that is his greatness. For thus knowledge, thus works, thus image and example come into being among the living." (I and Thou, pp. 89-89 Walter Kaufmann translation,).
Irving Howe, the distinguished literary critic asked: "Is the debris of our misery (as one survivor described it) a proper or manageable subject for stories and novels? Are there not perhaps extreme situations beyond the reach of art?" The questions that are asked of one imaginative art form also apply to the others whether they be art or literature, poetry, sculpture or music.
And yet there can be no doubt that poetry has been written, good poetry, powerful poetry that seeks to come to terms with the destruction of European Jewry. Poetry has been written even in the German language in powerful works by Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan for example.
And yet there also can be no doubt that the silence has been broken, even by those such as Elie Wiesel who long for silence, who argue for silence, who plead for silence.
Still, there also can also be no doubt that despite the acknowledgement that there are extreme situations beyond the reach of art, the artist must confront that limit, must move toward the abyss and must create from it.
It is with these thoughts in mind that one reads this collections of poetry, stories and art that Cynthia Brody had edited with such care and dedication. The authors, the artists, are diverse -- Jews and non-Jews; those linked directly to the Event as witnesses, survivor artists; those linked by bonds of kinship, the second generation and the third; those who inherited the Holocaust as an atrocity that happened to their people, the Jewish people, and those who inherited it as something that happened to their people, the human family. They wrestle to understand and to express, to give voice and form to what has become a defining, signature event of 20th century humanity. With all due respect to the reservations of grappling with the Holocaust, could we also not ask: how can one not give voice to this moment in history which robs art of a simplicity of understanding, which demands that forms be pushed to their limits to express the inexpressible, to apprehend the ineffable?
In this anthology diverse authors of greater and lesser talents are represented, but their efforts make use of their talents, require the best of their talents. The results are impressive, the shattering insights offered by poetry are joined with the powerful emotions conveyed by art and enhanced by the fragments of memory and legacy transmitted in story. Because of the variety of authors and the diversity of points of view, Bittersweet Legacy is a document of its time, it conveys with authority the way in which the Holocaust is perceived in our time.
Fifty-five years from today when a generation more than a century away from the Holocaust and almost a generation removed from the last of the survivors asks, how did that generation -- the only generation -- to live at a distance from the Shoah and yet still in the presence of its eyewitnesses respond to that Event and give voice to it, they would not be unwise to turn to this anthology for it is a collective expression of its time.
- Michael Berenbaum, Los Angeles, California; Johannesburg, South Africa November 2000
Stephen Feinstein
September 6, 2000
How will we remember the darkness of the Holocaust? History provides us with the compelling narrative. Yet, the answers to the perplexing questions raised about the "why" may never be answered. Bittersweet Legacy, however, offers a view of post-Holocaust aesthetics and unique insight into how artists, writers and poets are processing the meaning and message of the Holocaust into the next century. Because of the relentlessness of the historical narrative, one might speculate that art may be the most powerful device to create some understanding, despite Adorno's warning of "No lyric poetry after Auschwitz."
- Stephen Feinstein, Professor Emeritus of History, University of Wisconsin-River Falls, Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota.