Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

The book has had many reviews (of which I’ve only read a sprinkling) and I don’t intend to write another one, even though there is a sense that truly good books—and this is one—can be, and in effect are, reviewed again and again. Here I merely want briefly to comment on a characteristic of The Lost that I have not seen sufficiently stressed and take up some issues raised in Ruth Franklin’s review in Slate.

The characteristic I have in mind might be called structural complexity. Above all, the book is a memoir: it’s about Daniel Mendelsohn, from childhood through the complexities of that search. But because it is a memoir-with-a-theme and not an autobiography, it is about the author’s family, particularly—or almost exclusively—how it relates to the six lost. (Since that is the family of his mother, we find out practically nothing about his father.) Then it is about his growing need to know what had happened—progressive states of mind. Further and above all, it is about Mendelsohn’s many activities to find out what did happen. This becomes the story of trips and interviews and other encounters, but most important, it has him introduce a whole roster of characters who variously become involved in that search. He is very efficient or focused about that: of his siblings only one, Matt, who accompanies him on various trips and takes photographs, makes it to the status of person. Then, of course, there are the people (whose lived before Mendelsohn was born) whose lives and deaths he seeks to resurrect (an apt word never used) and the more peripheral and shadowy ones who are neighbors or killers or both. Finally, there are Mendelsohn’s reflections about all that, culminating (in the sense of “most abstractly” in accounts of Genesis and commentaries on that book of the Old Testament, including Mendelsohn’s, meant to shed a kind of symbolic light on these 20th century events. I read all those italicized passages, though I wasn’t always sure why I did.

Ruth Franklin says that Mendelsohn uses these passages about the Bible “somewhat pretentiously,” but in spite of that and other quite negative things she says, I read her review to be enthusiastically positive—cryptically so, since that positiveness is in spite of herself. Perhaps one quotation will say it all: “. . . he manages to make this moving and insightful but also self-indulgent book something of a page-turner.” We are talking about 500 pages, big ones, that consist mostly of talk and thoughts, presented in not-always-separated layers as just described; a book the forward-motion of which could not be further removed from what usually makes a page turner, as exemplified by adventure or detective stories. (Mendelsohn carefully refrains from “building up” to the final revelation, one that came about by accident, even if it was variously prodded to happen.) I was occasionally puzzled myself as to why I kept reading on, since Mendelsohn certainly did not transfer to me, in the fashion of Agatha Christie, the utter need to know just what happened to Shmiel and his family; what kept me with the narrative was ultimately his—Mendelsohn’s—story.

Ruth Franklin has essentially two beefs. First, Mendelsohn is “self-indulgent” (see above); Franklin refers, as well, to “the self-absorption that is evident throughout this bloated [but page-turning-inducing!?] memoir.” Well, it is a memoir, which is about the writer of it. I called my monster autobiography Mostly About Me, putting the matter up front. Mendelsohn puts the six killed family members in the title. Would it have been better if he had called the book, My Search for the Fate of Six Lost of Six Million instead of putting that into the subtitle?

That takes me to Franklin’s second, more serious, objection. Mendelsohn makes some comments—I hardly paid attention to them when I read the book—about the need for his kind of specificity for dealing with the Holocaust, as distinguished from the generality or, if one prefers, universality, purveyed by art. I’m with Franklin in that art can encapsulate experiences of every kind, those pertaining to the horrible events of the Shoah included. If Mendelsohn had written a treatise denying the efficacy of art—or its morality—I would enter my objections as well. Instead, he has, on the side, defended his approach, with his mission stated in the alternate title I gave to his book at the end of the previous paragraph.

Why are these exclusive alternatives—the fleshing out of specific fates and the evocation of the fate of many? Aristotle advised to look for the general in the particular. I don’t see why that should not be a very worthwhile task and why, when you do that in the way Mendelsohn does it, it should not be art as well.

Pittsburgh Arts Indicator

For quite some time now, I have been involved in the Pittsburgh indicator project. That is a very worthwhile effort to provide accurate information about all kinds of dimensions of the Pittsburgh area, as distinguished from the usual and usually unreliable anecdotal information that is purveyed. Not enough people know about this project, so I recommend those who are happening on this blog to check out what has been done so far on the internet: www.pittsburghtoday.org.

My involvement has been with the arts indicator subdivision of this effort. We have done a study of arts participation in our region and have put quite a bit of the information that has been gathered on the indicator site. Click on the Arts moving panel and you will be regaled by some of the things we found out. But if you return to the site a bit later, more information will be posted fairly soon. Some of it—the difference between Pittsburghers’ attendance at sports and arts events will surprise those of you—of us!—who think of Pittsburgh above all as a sports city.

But now, I want to send out a call for help. If participation in arts activities measures the vitality of the arts community, determining the degree of exposure to, and education in, the arts of youngsters—say from elementary school through high school—will give an important signal as to the future vitality of the arts community.

As far as I have been able to determine, no one has ever made a study of this early stage for any particular community. At the same time, I have had numerous people tell me that it would be very valuable to make such a study—both to get information about a particular place (in this case that of the Pittsburgh area) and as a model for studies of other communities. I was even told that it would not be very difficult to raise money for such a research effort, though such optimism is often misplaced.

But so far I have not found anyone who could take the lead in designing and carrying out his potentially valuable research. If anyone who sees this blog—assuming that somebody does—has an idea as to how I can identify a person experienced in doing research with children, please let me know.

“Jewish Revival” in Poland

“In Poland, a Jewish Revival Thrives—Minus Jews” is the headline of a July 12 New York Times article. On the one hand, “More than three million Polish Jews died in the Holocaust” in which many Poles participated with enthusiasm. “Postwar pogroms and a 1968 anti-Jewish purge forced out most of those who survived.” On the other hand “‘Jewish style’ restaurants are serving up platters of pirogis, klezmer bands are playing . . . . Every June a festival of Jewish culture [in Krakow] draws thousands of people to sing Jewish songs and dance Jewish dances. The only thing missing, really, are Jews.” (All Times quotes.)

There is much more in the article along the same lines—read it; it gets quite elaborate how Poles go about infusing Jewish culture without any participation of those whose culture it is. That article really upset me; the word that came coming to my mind’s lips was “obscene.” But because I was not at all sure that this reaction is rational, I started to look for analogies.

Came to mind the “Greek Games” Barnard put on every year way back when. They were enactments of what was thought to be sporty practice in ancient Greece—without, of course, those parishioners in evidence. But the analogy is very weak. Those Barnard girls or their ancestors had nothing to do with the demise of those original Olympian athletes. More germane seemed festivals or markets featuring American Indian customs or crafts. No doubt the sponsors of those affairs are the descendents of those who done ‘em in. But there is one crucial difference. Indian culture, or a comic strip version of it, is there purveyed by actual remnants of the civilization on display.

In Poland those remnants have in effect been eliminated, so that everything that takes place is a form of play acting; all those thousands of participants in Jewish festivals are imitators of something the reality of which they never actually experienced and which was rubbed out by their forebears, including quite recent ones. It is imitation Jewishness become entertainment. No doubt these exotic insertions into conventional Polish culture constitute a spice that relieves what might well be perceived its current dullness. Invent your own spice, is my response and leave buried what you have killed.

Stanley Katz on the Condition of the Professoriate

I just came across an article, written some time ago, by my friend Stanley Katz, “What Has Happened to the Professoriate?” (The Chronicle of Higher Education, p. B8) and want to make a few comments. To begin with, I think that Katz is wise to point out how variegated the professoriate has become, consisting of quite a number of subclasses that barely resemble each other and certainly have little to do with each other. I also deplore, as he emphatically does, the much lessened stress on teaching and the much reduced loyalty of professors to their institutions. If once upon the time, being a professor was a calling, the role has largely become a job—either a very good one if you belong to the elite segment or an overworked and poorly paid one, if you are a member of the squadron of lecturers who do so much of the teaching.

In the face of this situation, Katz twice invokes John Dewey (writing in 1915), who was instrumental in the creation of the American Association of University Professors, “But have we not come to a time when more can be achieved by taking thought together?” and asking that that happen again today.

I agree it should, but how will it happen, if it happens at all? The agency will not be the AAUP, which has become a union of the “haves” professors, caring not much for the have-nots and less for the professoriate as a company that serves. Twice, Katz mildly disparages the role of deans: “Deans by themselves cannot create educational change.” Professors must become more self-reflective, but “Again, this is the business of professors, not deans.”

Taken literally, I agree with these quotes, but they do not say enough. Professors, especially now in their splintered condition, will not by themselves initiate the discussions that will lead to much needed reforms. Perhaps because I was a dean (at Northwestern, for thirteen years), I am impressed by how necessary it is for someone like a dean to press a button, to initiate. And that is not simply a matter of speaking out, but calls for the use of incentives, positive and negative, to get a train out of the station and moving toward an envisaged goal. (To shift more of the teaching burden back to what used to be the professoriate will cost money and will deprive those bonzes of some of their privileges.)

If, recently, Harvard administrators had not been so inept, they might have served as a model (for curricular reform, anyway) for the rest of the country. When Henry Rosovsky initiated such reform in the seventies, Harvard’s efforts—in my view not at all impressive, but they were efforts—made the front page of the New York Times and became an inspiration, of sorts, for other institutions.

In short (if it’s not too late for that phrase), Katz has valuable things to say concerning the diagnosis of our ailments and he is right that how faculties reform themselves and their curricula must be determined by those faculties. But whether they do any of the above will depend on forceful pushes by academic administrators.

Read Samuel G. Freedman’s column, “So Much Paperwork, So Little Time to Teach” in the New York Times of July 4 and shudder. He gives an account of several teachers in New York City schools who find themselves spending a huge fraction of their time not teaching at all, but occupied with endless administrative chores. We’re not talking hours or days, but weeks. Of one of them Freedman reports that “he was able to teach [his students] for only about 60 percent of the supposedly allotted classroom time.” The persons he interviewed are mature people who shifted careers in order to make worthwhile contributions as teachers, not people who drifted into education for want of anything else to do.

To read those mere 1000 words is to see that the kind of bureaucratization I complain about is not just a big nuisance to be gotten over like a head cold in the spring. The waste of resources is great even counting only the few teachers mentioned in the article. It is mind-boggling when multiplied by the huge numbers to be found in a system like New York’s public schools. Perhaps even worse than this squandering of the tax payer’s money is its effect on those who, with conviction, have come to do one sort of job and are then forced to do another—which they have not come to do nor, mostly, see the point of doing. Those who stay in the job are likely to become cynical; other good people will just leave.

Just as every largish institution as a Human Resources person, so they should have a Vice President for Debureaucratization——with some power, who might actually begin her work with HR. Much money would be saved; morale would be raised.