`A Constant if Phantom Presence'

That Joshua Cohen, at age 26, is a reliable book reviewer and literary journalist is remarkable; that he also writes first-rate fiction is cause for envy, wonder and gratitude. Read his biweekly essays in The Jewish Daily Forward and revel in his learning and maturity. That’s what I’ve done for years, and now I’ve gotten around to ordering The Quorum, a story collection published in 2005, and his newly published novel, Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto. The Quorum is published by Twisted Spoon Press of Prague, Kafka’s birth place and Cohen’s base for several years when he worked as a journalist. Now he lives in Brooklyn.

Kafka is among the tutelary spirits of the first story in the collection, “Untitled: A Review.” A reviewer named Kline receives an unsolicited book, a “history” he calls it, consisting of “six million (6,000,000) plus pages (an estimation, an educated guess).” All are blank:

“Pure, virgin white, like the snow around Auschwitz. Six million-plus pages might as well be greater than or equal to the palest infinity.

“All of which is to write that in intent and execution this history without a title, this Untitled by Anonymous, is the best record of, and commentary on, the Holocaust this reviewer has yet encountered…”

With such a subject, tone is critical. Cohen never devolves into jokey cleverness, always maintains a Kafka-like narrative poise. Kline projects into the wordless book his own understanding of the Holocaust (“I know because I imagine.”), because it defies understanding. We learn Kline’s parents survived Auschwitz and he was born in “Amsterdam, city of Spinoza.” Of the six-million-page book he writes:

“…it is not a diary. This is not Anne being Frank. If anything, is an anti-diary, the opposite of selfish thoughts. The blankness actually discouarges writing, the pages resist filling.”

Untitled is a metaphor of infinite suggestiveness, a palpably present absence. It resonates like the Borges story, “The Aleph,” but with deeper sadness and awe:

“This is anyone and everyone’s book (drop by and pick it up, please), or no one’s book and it means everything, holds the light of the entire world like the facets of an infinite gemstone…the white pages are blinding, but I’ll never burn it, no, never, must not, would consume itself and nothingness cannot be consumed…It’s substance is Spinoza’s substance, holding in sheer attributes and modes all that was and all that will be, and it means nothing.”

In transparent fictional prose, Cohen is illuminating a point made by the philosopher Berel Lang in Holocaust Representation: Art within the Limits of History and Ethics:

“It is self-evident, at any rate, that no Holocaust writing gives preference to silence – although silence is itself, after all, a distinctive literary genre, one that Isaac Babel first named and mastered (and then fell victim to). Indeed, silence arguably remains a criterion for all discourse (Holocaust or not), a constant if phantom presence that stipulates that whatever is written ought to be justifiable as more probative, more incisive, more revealing, than its absence or, more cruelly, its erasure…the basic measure of any piece of Holocaust writing is not the possibility of alternative formulations – which may be beyond its author’s ken or will – but the erasure of what he or she has written, that is, silence.”

The final sentence of Cohen’s five-and-half-page fiction recasts the entire story, our understanding of it, and our understanding of the Holocaust. I’m reminded of a single, infinitely dense sentence from Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews:

“For the deportees one-way fare was payable; for the guards a round-trip ticket had to be purchased.”