Magnetic mortality
Discovers high-quality material behind a dubious cover
IN 2007, Granta published Best of Young American Novelists 2, which included pieces by Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss and a story called Passover in New Orleans by Dara Horn. Horn had just completed her PhD in comparative literature (Hebrew and Yiddish) at Harvard and published her second novel. Fourteen years on, she is one of the best-known JewishAmerican writers of her generation and has published her first book of essays, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present.
Although the title sounds provocative, Horn is a smart writer and she is making a serious point. Why are so many non-Jews so interested in dead Jews? Not in the vitality of Jewish culture and the richness of Jewish history, but in Jewish suffering?
In her polemical introduction, Horn asks why is there a kind of “obsession with dead Jews” in contemporary American culture and why is the hatred of Jews something “which shapes the present moment”?
It would be a shame if the sensational title puts off some readers because this is one of the best books of essays about Jewish history and culture that I have read in years.
What is particularly impressive is the range, from antisemitism in Manchuria and the brutal suppression of Yiddish culture under Stalin to Varian Fry’s heroic mission to rescue Jewish artists and thinkers from Vichy France and antisemitism in North Africa.
Then there’s Horn’s style. In each essay, she starts with what seems a simple proposition but, as the argument unfolds, you realise the issue is much more complex, interesting and dark than you had anticipated.
The essay on Anne Frank — Everyone’s (second) Favourite Dead Jew
— addresses the popularity of Anne Frank’s diary, the huge book sales, the long queues outside the Anne Frank House.
But then Horn asks whether there is something too sentimental, too forgiving, about Frank’s diary. Why is her book so popular compared to Zalmen Gradowski’s searing account of being a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz, which offers no innocence, no redemption; just antisemitic hatred and violence? Is that the reality we cannot face?
In Manchuria and in the Soviet Union there was a glimmer of hope for Jews. They were brought to Harbin in China to help develop the economy and Stalin asked Yiddish actors to raise money in America for the war effort.
This is one of the best books of essays about Jewish history and culture that I have read in years’
But, in both cases, this led to disaster.
Jews in Manchuria were tortured and murdered, first by the Japanese and then by the Chinese Communists. And, as Dara Horn movingly describes, the fate of Yiddish actors and Jewish artists under Stalin was just as terrible.
Why did so many American Jews claim they were given ridiculous names when they arrived at Ellis Island and had to change their names later, when the reality is that they had to change their names because their Jewish names made them unemployable in a deeply antisemitic country?
Varian Fry famously rescued some of the great Jewish modern masters after the Nazi invasion of France. Why were so many of them ungrateful to Fry, some even refusing to acknowledge that he had rescued them?
These are fascinating stories about modern Jewish history, brilliantly told. Don’t be put off by that title. People Love Dead Jews is a superb book which every Jewish reader should rush to buy.