A Wide-Eyed Journey Into The Black Hole Of History

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The New York Sun

The German Marxist critic, Theodor Adorno, was once famous for having remarked that, after Auschwitz, poetry was impossible, though that is not quite what he said. Half a century later, it has turned out to be rather a good joke on him – or is it a confirmation of his view? – that poetry, like the other arts, sometimes seems as if it can hardly get along without the Holocaust.


As the cultural consensus on which the great works of the past were based has broken down over the past few decades, we are left with fewer and fewer sources of the kind of resonant imagery that the Holocaust provides. There’s almost nothing that everyone believes, particularly about good and evil, but almost everyone believes that the Nazi murder of European Jewry was evil and its victims infinitely pitiable.


The danger of using such an obvious moral truth as the raw material for art is that it encourages self-congratulation. At the end of the screening I attended of Liev Schreiber’s “Everything Is Illuminated,” the audience applauded. Neither Mr. Schreiber nor anyone else involved in the making of the movie was present. People were really applauding themselves for making the right response – that familiar combination of moral and political indignation and pity – that the cinematic Holocaust always produces in audiences, and is designed to produce.


This is unfortunate, as there is more to the movie than just another Holocaust tale. It is really about memory and the identity of a people over time. In the novel, by Jonathan Safran Foer, the Holocaust was set in a much larger historical context – going backward 150 years to life in a Ukrainian shtetl in the late 18th century and then forward another half century or more to a the American grandson of a refugee from the Holocaust and his search for his Ukrainian ancestors.


Mr. Schreiber’s adaptation, which he also directed, foreshortens this perspective, giving us only the present day and some dim but meaningfully fraught memories of 1942, when virtually all the inhabitants of the Ukranian-Jewish village of Trachimbrod were murdered by the Nazis.


Let me hasten to add that there is no mystery about why this was done. The novel’s much larger time-reach and cast of characters might conceivably have been made into a mini-series, but as even a long movie it would have been a mess. Moreover, its various bits of bizarrerie and magical realism would have worked no better on the silver screen than such things usually do.


I for one was grateful to Mr. Schreiber for radically cutting back on the acres of space the novel gives to the allegedly hilarious malapropisms in the long letters of the Ukrainian guide, Alex Perchov, to “the hero” of the novel, also called Jonathan Safran Foer. A little of Alex’s linguistic exuberance goes a long way, I find, and the movie’s version of him, played by Eugene Hutz, while entertaining, is Alex enough and plenty at that.


But something is also lost in all that has had to be excised from the novel’s sprawling canvas. Mr. Schreiber radically simplifies it by setting the efforts toward remembering of Jonathan the hero, played by Elijah Wood, against the efforts of Alex’s grandfather, also called Alex (Boris Leskin), toward forgetting a guilty secret that I will not, of course, reveal here. While this makes for a nice symmetry, it also has what I regard as the regrettable effect of making the movie, much more than the novel, about the Holocaust – that moral black hole from whose gravitational field nothing can escape. Our own cultural memories – not only of the Holocaust itself but of all the other movies about it – are thus so thoroughly present that the movie’s attempts to explore the ephemerality of individual memory are always in danger of looking trivial by comparison.


It doesn’t help, either, that the personal idiosyncrasies of Jonathan the hero are stressed to the extent they are. The boyish-looking Mr. Wood has still, perhaps, something of the hobbit about him in his dark suit and thick glasses and fanny-pack full of Ziploc bags for collecting the grubby relics from Trachimbrod. “Sometimes I’m afraid I will forget,” he says. No such luck for us, anyway.


When he and the two Alexes and old Alex’s “seeing-eye bitch,” Sammy Davis Junior Junior, meet the old lady (Laryssa Lauret) who may or may not be responsible for the escape of Jonathan’s grandfather from the Nazis, the gallery of grotesques is complete. The old lady turns out to be a collector too, and in the carefully labeled boxes that line the walls of her tumbledown cottage in the middle of a vast field of sunflowers, Trachimbrod, otherwise vanished, lives out a precarious posthumous existence – as all dead things do for a little while in the memories of the living.


Except, of course, that as an episode of the Holocaust it is an invitation for us to suppose that we remember it better than we do. At least we know that those who were once Trachimbrod are now among the approved victims of the 20th century, to be remembered whenever its history is told.


Perhaps it is just me, but I’d find the pathos of the vanished village and way of life more piquant and certainly more interesting if its loss had been less morally momentous and more reminiscent of the way of all flesh.


The New York Sun

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