When did the Holocaust become The Holocaust?

I had strong and contrary reactions to the opening of the novel The Street Sweeper. It’s because of how it opens with two story trajectories – of black civil rights in America and of Jews and the Holocaust. The positive reaction was to the opening scene with Lamont, the African American man who has just got out of prison and been able to find a placement in a job – against the odds. He is catching a bus to work and is full of anxiety – compounded by the fact that a Hispanic man gets on the bus angry with the driver who is apparently running late. Lamont is the only other man on the bus and feels under some pressure to try to end the argument between to two men. This is very good writing – full of tension, visually strong, interesting in its exploration of the expectations and values circulating in this busload of low-socio-economic individuals. I immediately started to care about Lamont.

The second reaction was more wary. Adam is an untenured historian at Columbia who is about to lose his job because he hasn’t published anything for a few years. A credible situation. What I initially struggled with was the idea that he would therefore want to end his long-term relationship with his girlfriend Diana. She wanted kids. He felt that he could not provide for a family in the short term and broke up with her. I didn’t quite believe it even though it seemed to connect with an old preoccupation of Perlman’s – that was initially a significant part of his novel Three Dollars – the pressure on the man to provide for the family.

Then I thought of M, a friend of mine. About 22 years ago, he announced that his then girlfriend J was pregnant, that they would get married and that he was renouncing his former life. He sold his record player and extensive record collection (and maybe lots of other things) as a symbol of this new road he was taking. It felt sacrificial (with a tinge of martyr). It seemed like he felt that he needed to be a different kind of person if he was married with a child and a mortgage. I didn’t really understand it then but the strength of the ‘fork in the road’ feeling for him was obvious. At the time I thought that maybe he hadn’t thought of J as being “the one” but they are still together.

So this was Adam – making dramatic gestures because of this sense of what men should offer. The book is only slightly about this of course – it’s about lots of things and I liked it a lot. What it is about is racism – in many forms. Perlman covers a LOT of new ground. Even though this is a book which deals with the seemingly familiar events of the Holocaust, there is a lot of new material that I was unaware of. In an interview with Jane Sullivan, Perlman said he was inspired by a number of key things:

“One was a poetry reading Perlman attended, where he heard poems from
Greetings from Sloan-Kettering, a posthumously published book by Abba Kovner, a
cancer patient who had been a Jewish partisan during World War II. Another was a
radio documentary he chanced to hear about David Boder, a Chicago psychologist
who had gone to Europe just after the war and had done something quite unheard
of at the time: he had recorded interviews with Holocaust survivors. Perlman
listened to the last interview Boder conducted. He broke off speaking in Yiddish
and the woman he was interviewing was in a flood of tears. Perlman says: ''For
the first time, he lost control of his emotions. He said to this woman, 'Who is
going to stand in judgment over all of this and who is going to judge my
work?'''That was another question the author had to answer, Perlman decided.
Only he changed the man's name to Henry Border and the question to, ''Who is
going to judge me?'' because the man's voice ''was dripping in guilt. What was
this guy so guilty about?''

The radio show was This American Life (my favourite podcast) – and the episode Before it had a name. The name of that episode is derived from the idea that the Holocaust is a term of only recent widespread usage and understanding, – before we knew the Holocaust as the Holocaust – before people realised the enormity of what had happened to the Jews (I am not sure here about when that realisation did strike the world – and to what extent people and governments buried knowledge of it – not sure when everyone knew what the Holocaust was – I have grown up with it as a concept in recent history. Wikipedia says this:

The term holocaust comes from the Greek word holókauston, an animal sacrifice
offered to a god in which the whole (holos) animal is completely burnt
(kaustos). For hundreds of years, the word "holocaust" was used in English to
denote great massacres, but since the 1960s, the term has come to be used by
scholars and popular writers to refer exclusively to the genocide of Jews. The
mini-series Holocaust is credited with introducing the term into common parlance
after 1978. The biblical word Shoah, meaning "calamity", became the standard
Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the 1940s, especially in Europe and
Israel. Shoah is preferred by many Jews for a number of reasons, including the
theologically offensive nature of the word "holocaust", which they take to refer
to the Greek pagan custom.”

I digress. It’s easy with this novel – there are lots of little bypaths that are worthy of exploration. For example, I would like to know heaps more about the civil rights history which we get a glimpse of – the de-segregation of schools, the resulting riots, the intake of African Americans into the union movement, the silence about the roles of black soldiers in WW2, the uprisings in Auschwitz etc etc. I can’t do these justice – read the book. It’s very interesting reading about a period that I know little about. This creates a strain for the writer – he needs to tell us a lot and I sometimes felt that it was a little didactic – “I’m glad you asked” was the kind of tone – especially over the pages to do with black history. Worth putting up with this though – it’s a great story – based on a degree of personal connection. Perlman had relatives who disappeared in the Holocaust – his great-uncle Rafal Gutman had a prestigious job in charge of Jewish education in Warsaw at the outbreak of war. The Nazis said he could stay as long as he provided them with a list of Jews to be transported. Gutman refused and committed suicide.

I felt that Perlman had taken some risks in writing about two uber-politically laden narratives. You can get in a lot of trouble in this terrain. However he is so clearly guided by the desire to put “Tell everybody what happened” (as the brave and doomed Auschwitz prisoners urge). I felt swept up in the merging stories. I will read more about the themes of the novel and I’m sure it will resonate for a long time.