OUR HOLOCAUSTS : AREN’T WE VICTIMS, REALLY ?
Steve Pollack
In the beginning, you’re not quite sure what to make of Tova Reich’s “My Holocaust
It’s not until you’ve gotten more than halfway through the book that you realize Reich’s mockery is not limited to Holocaust survivors: with this book she’s likely to offend Catholics, Poles, Germans, Buddhists, Israelis, Palestinians, Mormons, New Age-hippie-meditation types, second-generation Holocaust survivors and especially all those big-shot donors who paid to have their names put on plaques at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Now, back to Reich’s Holocaust survivors and one in particular: Maurice Messer.
Messer, who’s as endearing a character as you’ll find anywhere, is the wheeler-dealer chairman of the Holocaust museum who likes to boast of his connections to the White House and his days as a partisan resistance fighter. Of course, only his children and fellow survivors know Maurice never actually fought the Nazis during the war, but exposing him as a fraud would be bad for the Jews so they just think of it as a harmless inside joke.
Maurice, his hapless son, Norman, and his chief of staff, the Rabbi Dr. Monty Pincus, spend all of their time and energy soliciting large donations for the museum from wealthy Jews. As Reich makes clear, their ‘product’ is the Holocaust and Maurice is the ultimate pitch man. At the museum one day, Maurice finds spiritual solace at the Founders’ Wall:
This wall was his supreme creation. It was the monument to his greatest achievements, inscribed like a Rosetta stone with the chronicle of his triumphs, which only he could truly decipher. For a long time he gazed at the names on the wall, the roster of his precious donors of one million dollars or more, and was suffused with emotion as he recalled the details of each and every deal — how to reach this one on his private island he had retched nonstop over the side of a boat in the Bermuda Triangle, how at the second meeting in the San Francisco penthouse to extract the gift of a lifetime in the estate planning of that one, the prospect had appeared wearing a surgical mask because, as his feygele assistant nonchalantly explained, Maurice had a habit of standing too close and spitting too wildly from excitement in the climatic moments of a fund-raising pitch, and so on and so forth down the roll of his princely benefactors.
Alas, Maurice’s success on the donor circuit inspires jealousy among other victims’ groups. And here’s where trouble begins.
First, one of Maurice’s VIP donor trips to Auschwitz get interrupted by a rabble of New Age hippies who seek to include other ‘victims’ in the Holocaust genre. There’s the African-American holocaust, the Palestinian holocaust, the women’s holocaust, the American Indian holocaust, the Christian holocaust, the Muslim holocaust, the Gay and Lesbian holocaust, the Tibetan holocaust and any and all other holocausts, known or unknown.
Back in the States, the hippies go even further by occupying Maurice’s beloved museum and demanding inclusion of the ‘other’ holocausts. It’s a spectacle that draws crowds from all over to watch the tragedy unfold on 14th Street. Maurice is among the hostages stuck inside but Norman and Monty won’t let the police storm the museum because, as one of the occupiers explains, it would look bad to have “federal storm troopers come breaking into the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum of all places … and turn [it] into another Waco Holocaust.”
Nu, so what’s the point of all this?
Reich’s satire demonstrates the absurdity of the competition for victim status that appears to be vogue among liberal elites. As Cynthia Ozick points out in her praise of the book:
[I]t accuses the prevailing tone of American society, a cultish-ness 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.
Reich also succeeds in chastising the collective Jewish community for the intense fund-raising, the countless memorials and the accompanying donor-ego aggrandizement surrounding the memory of the Holocaust.
This is no simple task. When you venture into criticism of anything Holocaust-related, you risk backlash from the Jewish community. You can be seen as someone who wants to minimize the Holocaust in history. And with that being a common tactic among the Holocaust deniers, it qualifies you for an associate membership in their group. Even if you reject the deniers’ point of view, the deniers can still embrace your ideas and for many in the Jewish community that’s just as bad because you provided fodder for the enemy.
So that’s the risk Reich took. Undoubtedly, she’s already received letters from people who think Holocaust survivors are too sensitive a subject for satire. But, those readers miss Reich’s larger message about ‘victim-ness’ in American society. Of course the Holocaust is a sensitive subject but that’s precisely why something had to be said about the tainting of its legacy.
Thankfully, Reich has said it.
” is published by HarperCollins (326 pages, $24.95).Jewish Literary Review, 22 may 2007
http://www.jewishliteraryreview.com/post/Review-of-Tova-Reich-My-Holocaust.aspx