Faces Neat millions of pairs of abandoned shoes Creased with mute presence of those whose Faces both stare and vanish. Which ghetto? Warsaw, Vilna, Lodz, Riga, Kovno. Eight hundred dark-eyed girls from Salonica Bony and sag-breasted singing the Hatikvah Tread the barefoot floor to a shower-room. Friedlnder, Berenstein, Menashe, Blum. Each someone’s fondled face. A …
Higher stubbornness? I’d recast the impulse behind it this way: No, dammit, whatever I decide about the relationship to between God and evil, between God and Jewish suffering, however unsatisfied I might be by other attempts to explain it, however much I might resent God’s apparent silence or absence in the death camps, however much …
One can sense why Lanzmann finds in the impressionable plasticity of the baby pictures a fatally alluring invitation, an invitation that lures the unwary into the seductive labyrinth of ratiocination, the deceptive and dangerous promise of understanding. Dangerous perhaps because at the heart of the labyrinth the forbidden fruit on this particular tree of knowledge, …
