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In Josh Lambert’s Tablet Books Column, A Familiar Name

by Erika Dreifus on
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If you follow this blog, it’s likely not news to you that one of my most trusted resources for information on new Jewish books is Josh Lambert’s column on Tablet. But I found something especially newsworthy in this week’s column: a mention of William C. Donahue‘s Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink’s Nazi Novels and Their Films (Palgrave).

To explain why this discovery resonated so strongly, I must backtrack.

Almost eighteen years ago, when I was entering a Ph.D. program in Modern French history, I found myself in an intensive summer school class, trying to acquire sufficient skills to pass the German portion of my department’s language requirements. Yes, I was focusing on France, but the department required me, as a Europeanist, to demonstrate sufficient reading knowledge of both French and German.

Never mind that my paternal grandparents had been born and raised in Germany. Never mind that my father grew up speaking German at home–his grandmother, who joined the family in New York in 1946, never really learned to speak English. Never mind that, at times throughout my childhood, my father and his parents would switch to German when they wanted to communicate something they did not want my sister or me to understand. I hadn’t learned German. I hadn’t wanted to learn it. But that summer of 1993, I didn’t have a choice any longer. And William C. Donahue (Bill), then pursuing his own doctoral studies, was my instructor.

Bill was an excellent teacher (as was the other then-graduate student, Joe Metz, who worked with our group in additional drill sessions). And although, as his new book’s title suggests, his primary scholarly interests rested in German literature, Bill was very conscious of and sensitive to pedagogical issues—including the issue of how Nazism and the Holocaust were taught and represented in elementary German-language instruction.

Ultimately, Bill wrote (and won an award for) an article titled “‘We shall not speak of it’: Nazism and the Holocaust in the Elementary German Course.” I am proud that one of the appendices to this article comprises questions that I conveyed that summer from my classmates to my grandparents during a weekend visit, and my grandparents’ responses. (If you click the link above, you’ll see only the first page of the article. Bill mentions the interview there, but you’ll need full access via a participating library or publisher to see the article and interview in their entirety.)

One word that I learned that summer working with Bill and Joe appears more than once in what is the effective title story of my forthcoming collection, Quiet Americans. It’s a word that resonated strongly when I learned it, and, evidently, it stayed with me long past the time when most of the others that I’d learned that summer had, frankly, disappeared from my memory.

It’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

As the story’s narrator explains, “It’s a word that means, roughly, ‘coming to terms with the past.'”

Bill Donahue has helped me–and, I am sure, many others–with that process of coming to terms with the past. I look forward to reading his new book.

Oh, and by the way: Bill (and Joe) also helped me pass my department’s German exam that long-ago fall.

Jewish Literary Notes from Around the Web

by Erika Dreifus on
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Shabbat shalom, and Happy New Year!

Richard Holbrooke’s German War Photo–And Mine

by Erika Dreifus on
4

I’ve been quietly reading as much as I can find about Richard Holbrooke since the diplomat’s unexpected death earlier this month. And I’ve noticed that in several articles, including this reprinted excerpt from Abigail Pogrebin’s Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish, mention has been made of a certain photograph close to Holbrooke’s heart:

A New York Times profile of Holbrooke during his tenure in Germany described how he displayed, in his elegant ambassador’s residence, a photograph of his grandfather in a World War I uniform: “I show it to German visitors as a symbol of what they lost,” Holbrooke told the Times. When I ask him about it now, he shows me the very picture. “Every German family has a photograph like that. And so I just kept it in the living room. Some people would ignore it; others would stop and stare at it. Some would demand to know why it was there—what was the message I was sending? I said, ‘This is an existential fact; this is my grandfather. You may read anything you wish into this photograph.’ And I also said, ‘If history had turned out differently, maybe I’d be Germany’s ambassador to the United States instead of America’s ambassador to Germany.’ My mother didn’t like it at all. She said it was a militaristic picture and there are a lot of nicer pictures; she’s not into symbolism at all. And it’s true; I could have had an ordinary picture of my grandfather. But don’t you find that picture—the original, with his handwriting—extraordinary?”

I don’t know about every German family, but my German-Jewish (now American) family has a photo like this, too. And I have a copy in my home, clustered within a group of other family photographs. It depicts my great-grandfather, Kaufmann Dreifus, with his German soldier fellows.

My great-grandfather, Kaufmann Dreifus, is in the front row, second from the left.

We’re not sure of the date, but we know that Kaufmann (like the character modeled after him in “Matrilineal Descent,” the second story in my forthcoming short-fiction collection, Quiet Americans) served his native Germany in World War I. (He died a few years later, a diabetic before insulin became widely available.)

It’s true. I, too, could display an ordinary picture of my great-grandfather.

But don’t you find this picture—not to mention the fact that a copy remains for me to scan into a computer from my home in New York City—extraordinary?

A side note: I reviewed Stars of David when it was published five years ago. To read the review, please click here.

Notes from Around the Web

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled
  • Adam Kirsch reviews poet Rachel Wetzsteon’s posthumous book, Silver Roses.
  • The Boston Bibliophile reviews Howard Jacobson’s prize-winning novel, The Finkler Question.
  • The Jewish Week reminds me that I have got to get to the Hannah Senesh exhibition at the Museum of Jewish Heritage sooner rather than later.
  • One take on highlights in Jewish books for 2010, courtesy of Jewish Ideas Daily.
  • Uri Friedman examines the dilemma observant Jews face concerning reading on the Sabbath in a digital age.
  • My recent review of a new anthology of Jewish-American fiction has prompted some kind comments, one on the Jewish Journal’s website, and some I’ve received privately. Which I’ve found reassuring, because I suspected that not everyone would like what I had to say.

    • Shabbat shalom!

    Review of Promised Lands: New Jewish American Fiction on Longing and Belonging

    by Erika Dreifus on
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    My latest book review, a discussion of Promised Lands: New Jewish American Fiction on Longing and Belonging (Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, $26.00), edited by Derek Rubin, is now online at JewishJournal.com. As good as most of the stories in this anthology are–and they are, indeed–this was a challenging review to write. See what you think of this review, and please consider the questions that I’ve raised there about how anthologies are compiled. I’m interested in your thoughts.