New Jersey Jewish News
Life and Times Feature

A writer finds a rueful smile in a Shoa memoir

by Marilyn Silverstein
NJJN Staff Writer

When he was growing up in Haifa, said prizewinning Israeli author Amir Gutfreund, his mother saved every scrap of food to feed to the neighborhood’s dogs, cats, pigeons, and birds.

“In this heaven for the animals of our home, there was one exception — ants,” Gutfreund told the more than 60 students and community members who had crowded into a small auditorium on the Princeton University campus to hear his lecture.

“My mother hated ants in a way which had no connection to the other parts of her character,” he said. “When she saw a row of ants entering our house, she would come with cans of exterminating materials. She was pulling the trigger. Ants were not dying of the poison — they didn’t know how to swim,” he said, eliciting murmurs of laughter from his audience.

“Yes, it’s funny — but it’s not so funny,” Gutfreund said. When he was 16, he said, his father finally told him the story of why his mother so despised the ants. During the Holocaust, as she was being led away by the Nazis, the last image she had of home was of her mother’s body lying in the dirt, covered with blood and ants.

That story, seen first through the prism of a child’s eyes and then through eyes of understanding, is one of many that fill Gutfreund’s novel, Shoah Shelanu, which was recently published in English as Our Holocaust by The Toby Press. In 2002, the novel won Yad Vashem’s Buchman Prize for the Memory of the Holocaust in Research and Literature.

In Princeton in mid-March, Gutfreund discussed and read excerpts from his novel during a lecture, Writing with Humor About the Holocaust: The Journey of a Survivor’s Child, sponsored by the university’s Program in Judaic Studies.

“If you will forget all my lecture one hour from now, please, please remember only one thing from my lecture: The Holocaust is not funny,” he said. “Under no circumstances. The Holocaust is very, very horrible.

“But the point of view on the Holocaust could be very funny — a childish point of view, for example,” he said. “When children are trying to reveal Holocaust family secrets, the result is very funny. The humor in my book is coming mainly from the direction of this childish point of view.”

As he wrote about in Our Holocaust, “Since I was a child, I knew two different Holocausts: the formal one, which I met mainly in memorial days and school ceremonies, and the domestic one — the Holocaust that I met as the son of Holocaust survivors.”

The formal Holocaust could not elicit a smile, he wrote, but “the domestic Holocaust” revealed a more complicated picture.

“I knew admirable survivors and ridiculous ones, stupid and wise, multi-misers and very generous,” he wrote. “I wanted to write their story with love and compassion, and describe them exactly as they were: regular people thrown into the most horrible episode of the 20th century — the Holocaust.”

He grew up surrounded by those people — grandfathers, grandmothers, uncles, and aunts, Gutfreund told his audience. “It took some years to reveal that each one of them was not a real uncle, a real grandfather, a real grandmother. I really had no real family.” But his parents, Polish-Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, needed family, and so they made family, he said. “When I was born in 1963, this fake family looked very natural to me.”

Israel is filled with second-generation children who grew up in such families, according to Gutfreund. “They were overprotected — over-overprotected,” he said. “They had to eat everything, without leaving a little piece on the plate. They had to eat it until the last spoon, and nobody told us why.

“It is not recommended to be second generation,” he said sardonically. “If someone suggests it to you — don’t.”

When he decided to write about his memories, Gutfreund said, he wanted to describe his family exactly as they were.

“You know, Holocaust survivors are treated like saints, like in a museum, very precious, behind glass,” he said. “I wanted to throw away those glass enclosures through my writing so people could touch them.

“My relatives are very funny,” he said. “I can remember until today when I was a child sitting near two people — Holocaust survivors, of course — arguing over who suffered more during the Holocaust. It’s funny — but it’s tragic.”

Nevertheless, he had a happy childhood, Gutfreund added. “But from time to time, the Holocaust entered my life, because it was always there. It was like vapors. No one can see them, but they are there,” he said. “You just need a little sparkle to light them.”

For example, he said, now, in the middle of his life, that vapor comes alive when he looks at his blond, blue-eyed son. “You know what is coming to my mind? In the next Holocaust, I can hide him. He doesn’t look like a Jew.

“Those thoughts are crossing my mind. That means I am not so normal,” Gutfreund said. “It is not only for the second generation. The whole state of Israel suffers from that phenomenon.

“Somehow, we are sushi eaters and espresso drinkers; we look like a civilized people,” he said. “But we are traumatized as a society, as a state. And I, myself — I am traumatized, because the Holocaust is in my life. It is nowhere and everywhere.”

MOST OF THE TIME we were left to our own devices, and we made the most of it: this was what we had been waiting for. Buchenwald. The rules of the game were simple: no eating. Then we replaced the absolute rule with less severe derivatives: eating was allowed, but only scraps from the kibbutz trash-cans, fruit peel, waste, bones. We were willing to be disgusted, to get ill. We toughened our spirits. It was not a game played for immediate victory, but in the service of the senses, to acquire skill, depth, and the possibility of touching the truth. Then we added another rule: we could eat whatever we stole.

It was not an easy time between Effi and me. She was fourteen, I was at bar mitzvah age (“Comfort, comfort my people,” began the haftorah I was learning to recite), and all sorts of things were erupting in my body. Strange discoveries emerged constantly, everything seemed peculiar, in constant flux. Effi had begun to hide things from me and was often busy. She had recruited a staff of girlfriends. When I wanted to go to the library, she would say she was busy, and eventually she confessed: “I’m kind of sick of the Shoah.” I felt betrayed. With great anger, I would go alone to read in the library, more diligent than ever, now representing the righteous, the neglected, the abandoned. I traded horrible thoughts and self-pity for studious reading. What I found out, I kept to myself, a little treasure for the treasureless.

On the kibbutz, the rift was somewhat healed. We knew it was Buchenwald time. Effi put her new interests (which, to my horror, had begun to take on the corporeal form of Yaron from the ninth grade) on hold. We played Buchenwald. We fasted and did not drink. We licked water from leaking taps, slipped behind the dining hall, stole old hunks of cheese and ate with trembling hands. We even sucked on straw, like Littman had done when he had escaped. We shared a sour, blackened banana peel in a tender moment of mutual destiny. Then, one day, there was an event of a different kind.

— From Our Holocaust by Amir Gutfreund

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