In the belly of Israel’s Holocaust ‘memory monster’

THE MEMORY MONSTER
by Yishai Sarid
176 pages. Translated by Yardenne Greenspan. Restless Books. $20

Yishai Sarid’s novel, “The Memory Monster,” newly translated from Hebrew, takes readers to the center of Israel’s Holocaust remembrance tours of Auschwitz and other former death camps in Poland. It is a grim tale involving descriptions of the most intimate and grisly details of the Nazis’ industrial murder processes; the angry, anguished descent of the unnamed narrator — an expert tour guide — into near-madness; and glimpses of the stress and moral confusion experienced by tour participants, mostly Israeli high school groups. Love of the State of Israel is infused into every aspect of the tours, most visibly as the students literally wrap themselves in the Israeli flag in the evenings of their week-long immersions in the Holocaust — a rite of passage for many Jewish Israelis.

The short novel consists entirely of a “report” that the narrator is addressing to the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and museum, by which he is employed. The letter is obsequious and highly confessional. We gather that the chairman has been hugely important to the writer’s success as a Holocaust Studies Ph.D. but is now seriously annoyed with his protege.

The somewhat hapless, but dogged, narrator plunges deeply into many seamy corners of his tour-guide work, which he has always found difficult. While he never sums it up this way, it’s clear he has trouble trying to reconcile his drive as a historian to get the whole factual truth of what went on in the camps with his job as a guide, teaching young Israelis how to understand the Holocaust. He wants to tell them too many disturbing things that undermine the desired focus of the experience planned for them — things that begin to eat at him as well.

His letter to his boss earnestly expresses support for the official system of Holocaust remembrance. The guide is so humble, in fact, that he won’t even presume to praise the institution he serves to a man he considers vastly superior to himself (“I have always seen myself as your loyal emissary,” he says). His strategy to win back the chairman’s favor is to be mercilessly honest about his own shortcomings and errors as a guide to — and an expert consultant on — the Nazi death camps.

The reader immediately picks up that his approach is inept, especially when addressed to a boss glowingly flattered as “the official representative of memory,” who dresses in “fine fabric,” and whose office atop the high stone walls of Yad Vashem overlooks the beautiful “Jerusalem Forest.” The account our guide gives of himself confirms that he is socially tone deaf. He seems to lack certain herd instincts that warn us not to ask questions or think too hard about certain subjects, especially sacred subjects. Doomed to never quite fully belong, he has the quirky powers of observation of the outcast. Sensing his limitations, perhaps, he chose to narrowly focus his scholarly efforts on the task of gathering in excruciating detail the mundane realities of the Nazi killing programs (how the different camps dealt with the victims’ hair, for example). He berates himself often for lacking the charm and empathy needed to connect with the fuzzy emotions of the young students.

The narrator’s naivete and his passion to please the chairman doubtless explain why the commanding figure has promoted him so much, even setting him up for lucrative consulting assignments. In any case, he makes for an interesting narrator through whom Sarid takes readers deep into the citadel of Zionist soft power to reveal the “memory monster” within.

In his letter, the narrator notes that the students he guided through the camps “sang sad songs, wrapped themselves in flags, and said prayers for the ascent of the souls of the victims as if their death had been a divine decree.” As people, however, the victims remained vague and disembodied. He confides to his boss that he feels he too has never come to know the camp victims, maybe because there were just too many of them. But of course, as a scholar of the Holocaust specializing in death camps he has never needed to know how the victims lived or what they believed — his task has simply been to track their deaths, which, we are told, usually occurred on the very day of their arrival and without even a notation of their names. By contrast, our narrator has developed detailed personal knowledge of the German camp officers. To the students, he explains German aspirations to regain a mythical lost national past of purity and strength and how intolerable it felt to Germans to have “alien” Jews all over their land. (The spooky similarities to hardline Zionist dreams and feelings go unmentioned.)

Frustrated by the “feel good” unrealities clung to by the youngsters with their songs and their flags, the narrator goes beyond his official brief and confronts them with the implacable realities faced by all parties involved, whom he sees as driven by their “animalistic will to survive” into being perpetrators and collaborators, most particularly the cruel Jewish kapos, the lying sonderkommandos, and the ubiquitous menials who prepped victims for the gas chambers, lugged the corpses out, after pulling the gold out of their teeth, and cleaned up the blood, piss, and shit left behind. He pushes the students to admit that very likely they too would have done all the shameful, horrible things any of the people involved did – and would have failed to do the brave and dangerous things they should have done. Hammered by these images of the Nazi victims, the students not only feel horror and pity at what happened to their ancestors but disgust at the sort of people they were when they lived as Jews in Europe. Thus, he writes, the students are “filled with hatred, not for the murderers, but for the victims.” Readers can see that Israeli citizenship stands in their minds as key to their moral worth as well as to mere safety.

Many entertain violent and genocidal thoughts as they move through their tours. They whisper to each other, “that’s what we should do to the Arabs,” or “to survive we need to be a little bit Nazi.” Or they mutter, “death to left-wingers,” whom (the narrator explains) some students identify with the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe slaughtered by the Nazis. They despise the Ashkenazi because “they weren’t able to protect their wives and children, collaborated with the murderers … [and today are] cowards, softies letting the Arabs have their way.”

Conversely, the Nazis in their “Hugo Boss uniforms” become the real stars of the education program, the narrator writes. “It’s hard for us to hate people like the Germans. Look at the photos … they looked totally cool in those uniforms, on their bikes, at ease, like male models on a billboard.” The students, at least unconsciously, even admire the killing: “the decisiveness and ruthlessness, the audacity, the final, focused, and cruel act.”

Eventually, the guide relates, he has come to believe that the ultimate purpose of the tours is to make clear, as he blurts out to the students, that their survival is “all about power, power, power … because without power we’re like beasts, chickens for slaughter.”

The psychic tension between the narrator’s efforts as a historian to understand the Holocaust and the pressure to correctly guide the students stresses him. Finally, he spins into some semi-hallucinatory states of mind where he thinks he sees or hears the long-dead victims crying out in the camps. His increasingly harsh outbursts and mental disturbances alienate tour company organizers until they no longer call on him. But the chairman asks him to accompany a prestigious German film director, who is researching a movie about the camps. The assignment ends badly. As the narrator closes his letter, he notes that the chairman has “broken contact” with him. Again, he apologizes for his inadequacy. But he warns that “there is a monster out there. … It has bit into my flesh and I haven’t stopped bleeding ever since.”

The narrator does not define the monster but what the death-camp trauma-drama has done to the students’ minds is monstrous: Despite their acting out rituals of grief and mourning, they come away from his tours repulsed by their ancestors, the victims of a horrific genocide, whose murderers they are pumped up to emulate, as they confront the Arabs, whom they see as their enemy.

Like much Israeli writing in the twilight of liberal Zionism, the novel is beautifully wrought. Nonetheless, it indicts Israeli weaponization of Holocaust Memory. Its relevance to Israel’s implacable harshness toward Palestinians is clear. Yet, since its publication in Hebrew in 2017, the book’s significance to the Israeli-Palestinian struggle has not been a focus of discussion.

U.S. reviewers of the English translation seem largely to have discussed the book from a psychological perspective. In the New York Times Book Review, for example, Gal Beckerman described “The Memory Monster” as a warning against the destructive obsession that the Holocaust can become. He praised the book as a “brave, sharp-toothed novel that serves as a brief against letting the past devour the present.” He sees that the narrator is driven half-mad by the trauma of immersion in the ghastly killing of Europe’s Jews but not that the memory cult of the tours is the monster that “bit into [his] flesh” and into the minds of the students. In fact, the novel precisely shows how the “present” is — and long has been — “devouring” the “past” in order to aggrandize the Jewish State.

The failure of reviewers to bear in mind the existential struggles of the Israelis and the Palestinians when assessing a book about Israeli Jews’ Holocaust remembrance ultimately is not tenable, even though it is understandable. It’s true that the narrator never brings up the Palestinians in his letter to the chairman, but one wouldn’t expect him to. It’s also true that the book has not been marketed as relevant to the conflict, and that Sarid himself has discouraged that line of thought, flatly stating to a reporter that the Palestinians are “not the subject” of his book. But it is undeniable that Palestinians have been adversely affected by Israeli Holocaust ideology, which is a preeminent bulwark of the Jewish State in privileging its Jewish citizens and displacing the Palestinians. Only the alleged Biblical justification for Jewish rule over the land of Palestine is as fundamental to Israel’s defiance of its critics.

Sarid’s dismissal of the idea that his book reflects on how Israel uses the Holocaust against the Palestinians is curious. Perhaps he hopes he can shield the dream of a Jewish State. Or maybe he is hiding his hand to avoid a backlash. Either way, the novel’s truth stands independent of its author’s opinion. His stories go where they will, and it is up to his readers to draw conclusions. The book shows what the Palestinians are up against and will be useful to those working for justice in Israel–Palestine.

There are reasons Holocaust ideology is overheating as the story shows: The original foundations of Zionism, embedded in late 19th-century ethnic nationalism and imperialist-colonial orientalism, are obsolete, which leaves Holocaust ideology, along with nationalist religion, as the only transcendent ways to justify an ethno-sectarian state. The Holocaust functions as Zionists’ key evidence in arguing that a Jewish State is the only way to ensure Jewish survival. How long Israel and its supporters can defend the ramparts of the manipulated memory exposed by The Memory Monster is still to be seen, but the book shows the heavy toll put on Jewish psyches, as well as on Palestinian bodies, minds, and souls.