'Exhausted By Their Long Dying'

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Shadows on the Hudson is a novel of endless conversation, much of it passionate and grief-stricken, spoken by well-educated, middle-class Jewish characters in New York City shortly after World War II. Chief among the title’s Shadows are the victims of the Holocaust, kept alive in the memories of guilt-ridden survivors.  Stanislaw Luria, a bitterly sarcastic attorney, early in the novel is arguing with his wife Anna and her soon-to-be lover Hertz Dovid Grein, and says: 

“’Before the war I believed that there were laws in life and that human conduct was subject to a little order. . . . But after September 1939 I became aware that there was absolutely no madness that people could not perpetrate. Now I no longer know what I might do tomorrow. A close friend of mine, practically a confidant, became a Kapo under Hitler and helped to send members of his own family to Majdanek. Another acquaintance did the same thing in Russia. I read somewhere about a son who shoved his own father into the ovens.’”

 

Edward Gibbon knew that history was “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” World War II, the Holocaust and Stalin’s crimes made it impossible for honest people to think otherwise. Is Luria merely being cynical or melodramatically pessimistic? Only those still naïve about human nature will insist on an argument.

 

In 1939, Poland’s population totaled some 35 million, of whom roughly ten percent were Jews – 3.3 million people. Poland had the largest number of Jews in Europe and the largest percentage of Jews in the larger population of any country in the world. At war's end, some 380,000 Polish Jews had survived.

 

In 1986, I saw Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour film Shoah when it was shown in two parts at a theater in downtown Schenectady, N.Y., where I was living. Outside the theater, Polish-Americans picketed the film, objecting to Lanzmann documenting the collaboration of some Poles with the Germans in the slaughter of Jews. My paternal grandparents were born in Poland and the protesters seemed life a family embarrassment. I parked at the rear of the theater so I wouldn’t have to see them. The late Adam Zagajewski writes in “Watching Shoah in a Hotel Room in America”:

 

“Polish peasants engage with a Jesuitical zest

in theological disputes: only the Jews are silent,

exhausted by their long dying.”

 

No, Jews were not the only people who died during World War II but they were noncombatants singled out for their ethnicity and religion. Victor Davis Hanson reminds us that some 60 million people died, most of them now nameless and forgotten. He writes:

 

“On average, twenty-seven thousand people perished on each day between the invasion of Poland (September 1, 1939) and the formal surrender of Japan (September 2, 1945)—bombed, shot, stabbed, blown apart, incinerated, gassed, starved, or infected. The Axis losers killed or starved to death about 80 percent of all those who died during the war. The Allied victors largely killed Axis soldiers; the defeated Axis, mostly civilians.”

 

[Shadows on the Hudson was originally published in Yiddish in 1957 and translated into English in 1997 by Joseph Sherman. Singer was a Jew who emigrated from Poland to the United States in 1935. Zagajewski’s poem, translated by Renata Gorczynski, Benjamin Ivry and C.K. Williams, is collected in Canvas (1991). The Hanson passage is taken from The Second World Wars (2017).]