Henryk Grynberg

Continuation

Excerpt

Grynberg’s new book consists of a dozen items that cover such a wide range and are so highly varied that they could form two or three separate smaller books. The main element in the book is autobiography made into epic narrative. Grynberg recalls various episodes from his life: his time at a care centre for Jewish children just after the war, the 1950s and his student days, when the secret services tried to persuade him to be an informer, his first love, which conflicted with his sense of identity and memory of the Holocaust, his work at Voice of America (in the 1970s) and his first clashes over political correctness that edited out Polish and Jewish issues, arguments with a German publisher over translation quality, and his efforts at the start of the twenty-first century to obtain his personal file from the archives of the Institute for National Memory, in order to clear his name of a charge of collaboration with the intelligence agency.
Most of the pieces in the book are memoirs, but there are also some digressions: summaries of the papers read at a conference on Jewish culture after the Second World War; the reprint of a lengthy debate in the press that Grynberg initiated, opposing Eli Wiesel’s universalization of the Holocaust; and an interview Grynberg did with Susan Sontag.
And finally, as if to add a dash more spice to the existing variety, there’s also a short story here, "The Volunteer", about how at the age of forty, just after getting divorced, the narrator goes to Israel to enlist in the army and take part in a war.
Memoirs, documentary, polemic, summaries of papers, a story… Despite the extravagant range of genres, this book is essentially a response to one particular myth: the one that questions the unique nature of the Holocaust and the resulting consequences. It is the myth of ostensible universalism, within whose vast recesses anti-Semitism lies hidden. And so the title of the book announces that Grynberg is going to tell us how the anti-Semites continue to try and share responsibility for the Holocaust with the Jews, and how the Jews continue to try and disarm anti-Semitism with moderation and compliance.
In response, Henryk Grynberg continues to write about the same thing: he adds details, fills in dates and explains obscure matters to show that the Holocaust cannot be made universal, anti-Semitism should not be mollified with compliance, and that we owe the dead loyalty and accuracy. If the past is not the past, the present is not just the day today. If the past contains death, the present has to absorb this death, and die on a daily basis along with the past.

Przemysław Czapliński