My Holocaust

by Tova Reich

  Was it at that moment, when Fisher’s voice glided legato-like to a whisper and he blew out the light, that Maurice suddenly realized that the children had stopped torturing him with their screaming, or was it a moment later, when Bunny let out that horror-stricken shriek? For Maurice, that was just about the last straw, a shriek that nearly put the finishing touches to what was left of his hearing. Bunny was positioned, when she erupted, with a direct line to his ear, straightening out beside his wheelchair from bending over with her DustBuster after having vacuumed up the letter originally meant for Norman, which had been affronting her across the floor, glaring white detritus spotlighted by Koan Gilguli’s memorial candle, refusing to let her rest. Maurice could actually discern through his canals the paper being sucked in by her appliance and crunched into quarks, thank God, which was a gratifying sign in the aural prognosis department, but then came the trauma of Bunny’s blistering scream, an animal cry, the kind of savage, otherworldly sound she probably never knew she had it within her to emit, she most likely didn’t even recognize her own voice, and once more Maurice could not vouch for the integrity of what he was hearing. My heart, over and over again, My heart, My heart, Bunny cried, They’ve taken my heart, My conceptual heart, My God, My heart. She was bereft, in anguish from the knowledge that had just dropped like a meteorite out of the sky and crushed her. She was motherless. Her mother had been taken from her. Her mother was gone. But when his eardrums stopped quivering after the initial puncture of her scream, Maurice thought he could make it out more clearly as she raved on and on—My art, she cried again and again, My art, My art, They’ve taken my art, My conceptual art, My God, My art.

  Within the circle of memorial candles on the floor of the Hall of Witness, the twins Rumi and Rumi were contentedly playing with plastic Lego blocks—building toy concentration camp barracks and toy crematoria, setting out a complete Konzentrationlager model in accordance with the illustrated instructions in the set as read to them by Naomi-zenchin, little toy white skeleton prisoner figures and little toy black helmeted guard figures administering beatings, electrocutions, burnings, hangings on miniature toy gallows, shoving bodies into toy gas chambers and toy ovens, little white toy corpses heaped up in pyres. While the lights were still burning, the nun, wandering through the floors of the museum, had paused before the Lager Lego installation on exhibit in a glass display case outside the Hall of Remembrance. It was conceptual art that the museum had to own, one of the more recent additions to the permanent collection, it asked you to consider how history and truth and evil are plastic; the artist was Polish, the legend informed, and therefore, he explained, poisoned. With the inconsolable cries of the children pressing in all around her, the nun revisited this exhibit. By the light of a memorial candle, she removed from the nearby wall a brass and burl-wood plaque, as heavy as a millstone, which mediated and gave context to the art. The inscription on the plaque hailed Maurice Messer for his courage and selflessness as a partisan and resistance fighter during the Holocaust. Wielding this testimonial plaque with two hands like a club, she smashed the glass of the display case. The power had been cut; there was no danger of the alarm going off. When she brought the Auschwitz concept as an offering to the children, they were pacified at last.

  He imagines they’ve stopped crying, but I still hear them, the ones who are present in this place and those far away, the living and the dead, the cherished and the discarded, the dark babies with swollen bellies and overexposed eyes, the benumbed babies set down alone on a rag in the marketplace with a beggar’s tin can at their feet, the ashen babies ripped from their mothers and tossed alive into the burning pits. It is my calling to keep their cries acute in my ears, not so loud that I am benumbed, not so even that I grow complacent to the disturbance, not so soft that I become corrupted by the illusion of distance in time, in place, in fortune, but always piercing, jagged, present, like stigmata eternally renewing themselves between my eyes, perpetual pain, with no escape into oblivion, and no relief. Beyond vocation, it is also my passion—to keep all the suffering that ever was and ever will be everlastingly fresh in my mind, a seal set on my heart, undistanced and uncorrupted by memory, to take the never-ending anguish into account every minute, to be forever in a state of shock, of not believing my eyes, of being unable to breathe, of not being able to comprehend. Again and again, minute after minute, my hand must spring to my mouth in horror. Don’t let me get used to it, Lord; that’s all I ask. Let it always hurt just as much, it is the desire of my body and my blood. Keep me forever suspended in thin air, in complete consciousness and pure terror, in the space between the leap from the burning tower and the final crash onto the cold ground.

  I float through this ruin of a museum to illuminate the images and icons by the light of a memorial candle. The young girl struggling to cover her breasts will always be transfixed in the moment after rape. The old man with the half-butchered beard will always be in the grip of his tormenters. The dark-eyed boy with the cap on his head and his hands in the air will always be frozen at the point of the gun. The respectable matrons bizarrely naked out of doors in an open field under the shivering sky will always be mortified by our lurid gaze as they stand in line, awaiting their turn to be murdered. And always in full awareness they will be awaiting their turn.

  You will always be nailed to your cross.

  I am nailed to you.

  I immerse my hands up to the wrists in the ashes of the Jewish dead from the base of the remembrance altar, and move through the darkness of these chambers bearing my candle. I am your watchdog faithfully making rounds, guardian of the awake and the sleeping, protector of all damaged children, the grown and not yet grown, suffering them all to come to you, bestowing your tenderness on all survivors, the consolation of your pity upon my dying companions. I touch Naomi lightly on the brow. A blue vein pulses on her temple as she sleeps. I touch Shahid between eyes that race frantically back and forth under diaphanous lids. The defenseless puffs of his breath warm the pale hairs of my arm.

  In the center of the hall, Foggy Bottom is at his post, glaring fixedly into the void. He sits upright on the floor, legs folded, back straight, chest bare, the harness of grenades exposed at his midriff. The old man brakes in front of him in the wheelchair. Your papa’s lost his noodle, Big Chief Hassenfeffer, the old man says. If Schmaltz the proctologist thinks for one minute that by threatening to go public with the so-called truth about what we did in the war he can blackmail the Honorable Maurice Messer, chairman of the Holocaust, to give in to the demands of terrorists, then his brain must have migrated south to the area of his specialty. He thinks I’m afraid, your papa? He should know better by now that I’m never afraid. Let him say whatever he wants. Who’s going to believe him? That’s the beauty of our Holocaust, that’s what makes it so popular. It’s unbelievable. It was always unbelievable, even while it was happening. It has made anything possible.

  Foggy Bottom’s fingers constrict around his detonator switch. I calm him with my touch, and pass on.

  The High Priest is stopped at the checkpoint on the other side of the glass doors, seeking entry into the promised land. His forehead and the palms of his hands are pressed against the glass as he squints into the darkness. He starts when I touch the glass partition at each of his three points of contact—father, son, holy spirit—but he does not notice me; I am not a player, insignificant, invisible to him. He has been equipped with a cutting-edge-model headset telephone through which he communicates with Pushkin Jones. Pushkin Jones will not let him in until he makes a solemn promise and pledge signed and sealed before witnesses to join the Million Martyrs March coming soon to the local Mall. I can hear only Pushkin Jones’s side of the negotiations that have been stretching through the night. The High Priest is holding back for reasons of appearances. Brother, why you keep asking me who else is going to be on the speakers’ platform? Pushkin Jones says into his phone. Why you keep fretting how it’s going to look?

  Pushkin Jones is lounging
at his ease across the cushions borrowed from the post–Holocaust tour contemplation benches in the Hall of Remembrance. The cushions are now piled up luxuriantly in the typical Gypsy wagon. Over the vest of his three-piece suit Pushkin Jones has slipped into the typical Gypsy dress, suitable for wild dancing with its full lacy skirt and polka-dotted bodice, on which he has pinned the pink triangle for homosexuals. Now and then he punctuates his remarks to the High Priest with incidental music by passing the bow over the strings of the typical Gypsy fiddle, or by quoting supporting passages from the brittle pages of the Jehovah’s Witness Bible open in his lap, lit by a memorial candle. These and other items are on loan from the Other Victims exhibition on the fourth floor, Pushkin Jones has stated, and while they amount to little more than pathetic inclusivist tokenism, these non-Jewish artifacts may ultimately be likened to the irritant around which a pearl of magnificent lustrous proportions will form following the universal triumph of United Holocausts, Pushkin Jones says.

  As I draw near, Pushkin Jones calls out, Touch me, bitch, go on, touch me. Swiftly I touch him on the brow, and I make my mark on the old man too. He has pulled up in the wheelchair to observe Pushkin Jones’s negotiations with the High Priest. The old man parks and will not budge. He gives an appreciative connoisseur’s nod toward Pushkin Jones. One of the world’s great preachers and rap artists par excellence, the old man says, well worth the price of admission. The old man is speaking to a general audience, not to me; he cannot see me, this station is too close, I am too low. You’re a man after my own heart, brother, the old man says to Pushkin Jones—a fellow survivor, a megillah guerrilla, the old man says.

  I crouch down at my place at the hitch of the wagon, awaiting the lash to pull. Blot me out, Lord, I pray You, from the book You have written.

  “Ich bin ein Berliner,” Pushkin Jones addresses the High Priest. I am a Middle Passager. I am Roma. I am Lesbian. All of them I am, Pushkin Jones sings, spiraling down into the profundities of the testosterone basso of his persecuted brother Paul. I am Christian, Muslim, Jew—Pashtun Jones, descendant of the tribe of Benjamin through Pithon and Afghana in the lineage of King Saul son of Kish hiding among the vessels, exiled with the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel across the churning river Sambatyon hurling up her boulders six days of the week and on the Sabbath she rests, in the exile of the kingdom of Samaria by the Assyrian Shalmaneser. I am mounted upon my mighty white steed, galloping across the deserts beyond Kandahar and the mountains of Tora Bora, the jihad of Pathan burned into my flesh. I am the boy prophet Samuel, child of Hannah and Elkanah of the tribe of Levi from Ramatayim-Tzofim in the mountain of Ephraim, Pushkin Jones says. And you—you are the High Priest at Shiloh, blind and forsaken, confined to your holding cell outside the door of the tent of meeting. Your descendants have corrupted and befouled the sanctuary. They have grown fat and depraved on the gifts and the offerings, despoiling the holy place, devouring the sacrifices, deluding and violating the faithful for profit and power and pleasure, glory and renown. You have not taught them well, you too have battened on the dead, you have not been a good example. You have outlived your time, your line has been cut off, you are no longer relevant. The schools of prophecy have been passed to me and to mine, affirmative action—torn from our mothers’ breasts, sold into lifelong servitude, alone and bewildered, sacrificed on our beds, terrified by voices in the dark of night. “Hineini,” I once cried, running to you, Here I am. But you were a false god, and now the idol is smashed.

  You were a transition figure, Pushkin Jones says to the High Priest. And yours was a transition Holocaust. Your Holocaust is history—buried in the archives and the tombs. It had a longer-than-average run for a human tragedy and atrocity, but finally and at long last, the Shoah’s over, the curtain has fallen, the thumbs of the people have turned down. It’s our turn now. A new universal Holocaust is coming, the horror of which has never been seen before and will never be seen again, Pushkin Jones says. Your Holocaust has been superseded, eclipsed. The blazing signs have been seared across the skies.

  Blood. And fire. And columns of smoke.

  Total cremation. Everywhere ash.

  From the ashes, the old man staggers to his feet, a dazed and battered phoenix. He rises from the wheelchair at dawn amid the congratulatory bouquets of microphones, struggling to resurrect himself in the incubator of the media lights held aloft on this patch of globe spinning in the vast universe to radiate on the passage of him alone. On his forehead a cross of ashes is illuminated, incandescent. The generations of children have vanished, leaving behind only the constant waves of their cries from the abyss for those with ears to hear. The High Priest has turned to vapor outside the gates and only his fractured shadow remains for those with eyes to see. Bent over, an old dog, I haul the wagon into the dead-end caves of the interior where the monsters are bred.

  Like a ghost I pass. The old man is telling the world he has seen the light. He is a survivor, and his Holocaust will survive in the coming day. We may have been bought out by the international global Holocaust cartel, the old man says, but we’re still in business, thank the Lord. The whole world may be burning, the old man says, but we’re still here, mir zeinen do, as I used to sing with my comrades when I was a partisan and fought against the Nazis in the woods.

  The old man announces the new name of the museum in accordance with the terms of the agreement hammered out: United States Holocausts Memorial Museum.

  One little s, the old man says. It’s no big deal, ladies and gentlemen. But two s’s? SS? Never! That’s where we draw the line.

  About the Author

  Tova Reich is the author of the novels Mara, Master of the Return, and The Jewish War. Her stories have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, Conjunctions, AGNI, and elsewhere. She lives on the fringe of Washington, D.C.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Advance Praise from Cynthia Ozick for Tova Reich’s My Holocaust

  I have now read, with an accelerating sense of astonishment, every stupefying word of Tova Reich’s My Holocaust, and have been mentally rehearsing how best to express my conviction that this is a novel before which one ought to fall on one’s knees. Put it that Philip Roth’s merited status as our most acerbic contemporary American satirist melts away in the blaze of Tova Reich’s burning brand. In My Holocaust (aha, the title alone!), she is ten times wickeder than Roth, a hundred times wilder, and his sharpest jabs seem in comparison no more than the irritable umbrella-pokes of a meek little old lady in a lace cap, faintheartedly peering into her reticule to pluck out a complaint. In Tova Reich’s unafraid boldness, in her heroic recklessness, there is something to offend everyone and everything, every preening and every piety. Nothing and no one ’scapes whipping—not even the institutions and persons one might most wish, for fear of public opprobrium, to spare.

  Here is a novel that cuts, cuts, cuts: it is satire, caricature, comedy, farce; it makes you laugh and wince, often simultaneously; it judges and condemns; but it also clears away cant and pomposity and fakery. And much more than merely cant and pomposity and fakery: it accuses the prevailing tone of American society, a cultishness cultivated from the top down—the cult of rivalrous victimization, celebrated among the humanities in all American universities, from women’s studies to black studies to postcolonial studies, from literature departments to history departments to Middle Eastern departments, all those braggart elitist realms where grievance and suffering are crowned with laurel.

  Tova Reich’s verbal blade is amazingly, ingeniously, startlingly, all-consumingly, all-encompassingly, deservedly, and brilliantly savage. All the same, she doesn’t lecture or scold; her language is not that of a moralizing jeremiad. It is (seemingly) as detached as any of the natural disasters our planet has lately endured: with the force of a tsunami, a flood, an earthquake, it rolls over what human hands and minds have made of civilization. She is Dean Swift’s Jewish sister; but poor deprived S
wift had only human nature to deal with. Reich has what Swift, that unlucky goy, lacked, and (even with all his mammoth pessimism) could not have imagined: Reich has the Holocaust—or, better yet, the Holocausts, since, as she elucidates, everyone covets his or her own supremely desirable Holocaust. Her deadpan riffs and ironies, those long cresting waves of shocking wit, wash over egotism, greed, envy, falsehood, corruption, exposing their bones and stones without mercy. And still we laugh. There is no cranny of American crank culture (or couture) that is invulnerable to Reich’s skewer. Her several fantastically imagined rosters of all the possible copycat Holocausts that our competitive American spirit has devised are outdone only by reality.

  Tova Reich’s My Holocaust is a ferocious work of serious satiric genius. I believe it to be one of the most penetrating social and political novels of the early twenty-first century next to which the last century’s Animal Farm is a mere bleat. Its publication is certain to raise a howling hullabaloo; but if there was ever a hullabaloo worth raising, this is the one. Yet this extraordinary writer’s intent is the very opposite of destructive. She shows us how the temple of Holocaust memory has been defiled. She means to cleanse the temple.