In the spring of 1996, many years ago now, I went to Haverford College to hear literary critic Marianne Hirsch give a talk about family pictures and Holocaust memory. When Hirsch visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, she thought a great deal about the role of photographs in preserving and transmitting Holocaust memory, connecting these images to her notion of ‘postmemory’. (In Family Frames, she writes ‘Do pictures provide the second- and third-generation questioner with a more concrete, a better access to the abandoned parental world than stories can? Or, as indexical traces, do they perhaps provide too direct and material a connection to the past?’13)
According to Hirsch, postmemory is tied to the particular cultural, his-torical and intellectual context of the second half of the 20th century. As she explains in Family Frames, her book about photography and memory,
‘Art Spiegelman’s Maus functions as a paradigmatic and generative text’.14
12 I am also interested in the various narratives, images and stories that other non-Eastern European Jews might bring to the museum, much less non-Jewish visitors.
Here I would be especially curious about the kinds of Jewish family stories someone like the American Jewish artist Shimon Attie, whose family comes from Syria, might bring to this exhibit. This kind of identification across these Jewish legacies, especially in relation to the Holocaust, is not something that Attie has addressed thus far in his work, although he has done some work on American Jewish memory with his ‘Between Dreams and History,, which projected writing on the walls of the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1998. See Michelle Friedman’s discussion of this work in relation to his work on Holocaust memory in her essay ‘Haunted by memory:
American Jewish transformations’, in Impossible Images, 31–50.
13 Hirsch, 248.
14 ibid., 12.
Hirsch goes on to explain that Art Spiegelman’s delayed, indirect, secondary memory captures best what she means by postmemory.
Maus is a familial story, collaboratively constructed by father and son.
The Spiegelman/Zylberberg families have lived through the massive devastat ion of the Holocaust, and thus the details of family interaction are inflected by a history that refuses to remain in the background or outside the text. Their story is told, drawn, by the son, who was born after the war but whose life was decisively determined by this familial and cultural memory.15
Postmemory works as an ambivalent practice that captures both Spiegel-man’s ‘passionate interest and desire’ in terms of his parents’ history and his ‘inevitable distance and lack of understanding’ of this same legacy.16 According to Hirsch, it is this deferred, mediated, secondary memory that has cast its shadow over contemporary life and helps explain the power of family photographs in the museum in Washington, DC. As she explains, these photographs help bring whole new generations of viewers into this realm: ‘at their best they allow viewers with little connection to the Holocaust both Jewish and non-Jewish visitors alike to imaginatively identify with … the memory of survivor children’.17
‘Past Lives’ revisited, 2003
In the final chapter of her book Family Frames, Hirsch uses an image by artist Lorie Novak to frame her argument, explaining:
I choose as my chapter title and emblem ‘Past Lives’, a 1987 photograph by the Jewish American artist Lorie Novak. ‘Past Lives’ is a photograph of a composite projection onto an interior wall. Novak populates this domestic space with a picture of the Jewish children hidden in Izieu and eventually deported by Klaus Barbie, superimposed on a picture of Ethel Rosenberg’s face [accused Soviet spy and Jewish mother convicted and executed for espionage in the early 1950s by the United States], superimposed on a childhood image, from the 1950’s, of Novak herself held by her mother.18
15 ibid., 12–13.
16 ibid., 13.
17 ibid., 249.
18 ibid., 246.
‘Past Lives (for the children of Izieu)’, Lorie Novak 1987 (Original in colour)
www.lorienovak.com Reproduced courtesy of Lorie Novak.
For Hirsch, this layered photographic work clearly enacts the aesthetics of postmemory. It brings together ‘many ghosts’, connecting public and private memories as well as different temporal moments and geographic places. Here Holocaust memory and American memories are intermingled in the intim-acy of the all too familiar figure of mother and child. For Hirsch, this work
‘begins to define the aesthetic strategies of mourning and reconstruction of her [Novak’s] generation of postmemory’.19 Like the various images Hirsch discusses, this work is haunting. Here, ‘space and time are conflated to reveal memory’s material presence’.20 This is how, according to Hirsch, art and memorial works enact postmemory. And yet, I am struck by this notion of Novak’s ‘own generation’.
As I see it, what happens as viewers encounter the intimate images in the Tower of Faces is not homogenous. Hirsch emphasises through her repeated use of the phrase ‘at its best’ that the Tower and the Museum in Washington, DC ‘elicit in its visitors an imaginary identification – the desire to know and to feel, the curiosity and passion that shape the postmemory of survivor children’, and that, ‘At its best, it would include all of its visitors in the generation of postmemory’.21 I disagree with this assessment.
For those of us with no direct ties to survivors such inclusion is not poss-ible. Instead, within the Tower, our own ghosts confront us.22 For us, the challenge is to distinguish between the various layers of desire that both separate and connect us to these faces. In part, this means seeing more clearly what separates me from Lorie Novak and each of us from various children of survivors. It also means seeing the distances among and between those of that first generation of postmemory.23 Here, even at its best, the generation of children of survivors does not share a single position, especially in relation to the Tower of Faces.
19 ibid.
20 ibid.
21 ibid., 249 (my emphasis).
22 On this question of ghosts, see Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
23 For a clearer account of the ways Lori Lefkovitz’s position differs from Hirsch’s see Lori Lefkovitz, ‘Inherited memory and the ethics of ventriloquism’, Shaping Losses, 220–230.
In this essay Lefkovitz offers what she describes as ‘an alternative to the con cept of postmemory through a reading of ambiguity in a family photograph’. As she goes on to explain in this essay her notion of inherited memory is about ambivalence. For Lefkovitz, even as a child of survivors, what she experiences is her own ‘dynamic, con-fused, and mixed reaction to the “entitlements” of proximity to the Holocaust’. E-mail to Laura Levitt, June 2004. Again I am grateful to Lori for her help in clarifying and nuancing these distinctions even for children of survivors, something I conjecture but I appreciate having this reference back to her essay to help substantiate the claim.
The Tower lends itself to a broad range of responses. In other words, in the Tower the gap between those with personal connections to the Holocaust and each other, much less those of us without these ties, is never bridged.24 If anything, at its best, the gap is made wider, creating a space where images and memories of other times and other places, other losses, can all come together. It is in this gapping space that images like those offered in Lorie Novak’s ‘Past Lives’ find their place. It is here that postwar and even pre-war memories become visible. Although they are often shaded by the legacy of the Holocaust, as in Novak’s work, they are not effaced. They seep through.
If we don’t turn away and instead look more closely, we see the faces of Ethel Rosenberg and Lorie Novak and her mother as they fade in and out of the faces of the deported children.
By acknowledging this layering as ongoing, I do not believe that the Tower can bring those of us without personal connections to the Shoah into the generation of children of survivors. As I see it, Hirsch’s insistence on a single stance reinforces the dominant American Jewish legacy of privileging the Holocaust to the exclusion of other memories in its current norm of commemoration. This is the desire I want to challenge. By rigidly safe guarding against the Holocaust’s displacement by any other legacies, a just ifiable fear becomes all consuming, keeping us from seeing those other losses, those other pasts that we necessarily bring to our engagement with the Holocaust. Ironically, by not acknowledging these other memories, I believe we are kept from more fully appreciating all that the Holocaust means for us in the present. Instead, through the interplay of connections and differences between ordinary and extraordinary losses, we come to under-stand how all of these losses are a part of our everyday lives. This is how they remain alive and meaningful in the present. In other words, this recognition of connections and distinctions is how we keep Holocaust memory alive and vital.