Is the Holocaust best understood through fiction? That was the theme of a recent revue of Ruth Franklin’s novel, Higher Truth appearing on the Jewish internet journal Tablet. The revue provided a setting for an unlikely week-long exchange between Holocaust denier Michael Santomauro and me. I contacted Michael before submitting this article and he agreed to allow his name to appear but asked, “please reference me as a Holocaust Revisionist -and an amateur one at that.” A degree of humility that likely allowed for our extended discussion.
Continue readingPrimo Levi
Another Jewish life cut tragically short by the Nazis
Author and Auschwitz survivor Yehiel Dinur dies of cancer at 84
Author Yehiel Dinur, who used the pen name K. Zetnik, died last Tuesday of cancer at his home in Tel Aviv, at the age of 84. […]
Continue readingThe great pretenders
In April 1998, the cover of The Jewish Journal featured the person who called himself Binjamin Wilkomirski. Naomi Pfefferman (“Memories of a Holocaust Childhood,” April 24, 1998) compared his writing — his one and only book, called Fragment” — to that of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. During an emotionally filled performance at a Beverly Boulevard synagogue, Wilkomirski was accompanied by a lady who called herself Laura Grabowski. Both claimed to be soul mates who, at long last, were reunited survivors of Dr. Mengele’s experiments in Auschwitz.
Continue readingIan MacMillan’s new novel dares to go where perhaps no novel should
- VILLAGE OF A MILLION SPIRITS: A NOVEL OF THE TREBLINKA UPRISING, by Ian MacMillan. Steerforth, 257 pages, $24.
Death by denier
The man who bore witness
Primo Levi, an obsessive chronicler of his life as a Holocaust survivor, gets a biography from someone else.
PRIMO LEVI: Tragedy of an Optimist, by Myriam Anissimov, Overlook Press, 452 pages
Continue readingThe importance of communication (even for revisionists?)
We [the prisoners of Auschwitz] were able to understand very well, then, that on the great continent of freedom, freedom of communication is an important province. As with health, only the person who loses it realizes its true value. But one does not suffer from it only on an individual level: in countries and epochs in which communication is impeded, soon all other liberties wither; discussion dies by inanition, ignorance of the opinion of others becomes rampant, imposed opinions triumph. The well-known example of this is the crazy genetics preached in the USSR by Lysenko, which in the absence of discussion (his opponents were exiled to Siberia) compromised the harvests for twenty years. Intolerance is inclined to censor, and censorship promotes ignorance of the arguments of others and thus intolerance itself: a rigid, vicious circle that is hard to break.
Source: Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, Summit Books: New York, 1988, pp. 103-104