Judith E. Berman
Holocaust Remembrance in Australian Jewish Communities, 1945_2000
UWA Press, $34.95pb, 276pp, 1 876268 59 X

Ruth Wajnryb
The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk
Allen & Unwin, $24.95pb, 356pp, 1 86508 512 X

BOTH OF THESE books tackle one of our most significant moral and intellectual questions: how should we remember the Holocaust? It is, as Inga Clendinnen so eloquently showed in Reading the Holocaust (1998), a matter of confronting 'bafflement', and insisting that history plays a crucial role in revealing the meanings and implications of almost impossibly horrific experiences. In a way, it might seem that we already know everything about the Holocaust; yet, as Ruth Wajnryb reminds us, the legacy of the Holocaust is at once a 'narrative avalanche' and a particular form of silence, an 'unspeakability'. We know everything and yet we know very little. The most crucial issues remain those of remembering and representing, of how to truthfully communicate and interpret these or other traumatic events, all the while recognising how trauma makes ruins of memory and seems to render incommunicable what we are nonetheless driven to tell.

It is possible to interpret the desire to know about trauma and misery in voyeuristic terms. The urge to see ourselves in such stories can mean recovering the redemptive best so as to silence the horrifying worst. Yet it is also possible to see that desire as an urge to recognise what ordinary human beings did in a certain time and place, as a wish to understand what was in order to comprehend what might or should have been, and as a means of knowing what happened so that it shall not happen again. The challenge for any writer concerned with terrible suffering is to move readers not to pity or facile appropriation, but to an empathetic conviction for change, a desire to do justice, if only by faithful and unrelenting remembering. It is a very difficult task, not least because it means both hearing and trying to shape into new words what Wajnryb describes as 'uncomfortable communications': stories and secrets that are confronting, fragmented and scarred, things that are unbearably sad, even things that are impossibly untrue.

While Judith Berman focuses on the question of how to tell, through institutions and words for expressing memory, Ruth Wajnryb takes on the even more compelling issue of how to listen. Both, though, are interested in how ways of knowing about the Holocaust can and should deliver more generalised lessons about prejudice, racism and suffering. Berman tackles the memorialisation and interpretation of the Holocaust within, as well as outside, the Jewish community. She traces the struggle to find meaningful institutional and instructional forms for remembering, focusing on Yom haShoah ceremonies, Holocaust education in Jewish schools, and museums. In all three, she uncovers a shift from an earlier preoccupation with inward-looking rituals for survivors towards a focus on 'lessons' and a desire to incorporate others — survivors' children and grandchildren, the larger Jewish community and, eventually, Gentiles — into acts of commemoration. She makes a careful assessment of the tensions within and between community organisations, especially between liberal and orthodox Jews, and of the struggle over symbols and stories, including the very significant question of choosing between Yiddish and English as the language of commemoration.

Berman concludes that ways of remembering the Holocaust in Australia have generally downplayed more universal meanings. While they have not always insisted on the untranslatability of Jewish experience, they are, she says, more ambivalent and less generalised than the more 'Americanised' versions of the Holocaust being developed in the USA. She argues that 'Australian Jewry, increasingly self-confident and relatively free from anti-Semitism in multicultural Australian society, did not perceive a need to universalise or "Australianise" the Holocaust to make it relevant to the non-Jewish public'. Yet she clearly remains concerned about the absence of a 'genuine universalist outlook', and she concludes with the hope that educators and commemorators — in Israel as well as the Diaspora — will recognise 'that the wider lessons of the Holocaust need to be conveyed to Jews as well'. It is a fittingly challenging coda for a careful and illuminating argument.

The Silence is a more intellectually ambitious book, taking as its subject the complicated ways in which the children of Holocaust survivors come to know and not know the past. Wajnryb's aim is to write a 'polyphonic ethnography': to describe a particular view of the world among people traumatised by past tragedies. As a scholar of linguistics, she is especially concerned with 'the pragmatics of uncomfortable communications' and the inadequacies of words and their speakers. Most of all, she is fascinated by what is not said, by strategies of silence and omission. Her ability to convey that fascination and to interrogate 'how tragedy shapes talk', ranging across her own interviews with the second generation, novels, and other testimonies, makes this a deeply moving and compelling book. Wajnryb beautifully captures the almost unbearable tension between remembering and trying to forget, telling and refusing to tell; as she says, it is terribly important to ask 'how to tell the story when the story is wracked by trauma', how to tell what you cannot bear others to have to hear, or how to hear what you cannot bear others to have to tell.

It is difficult to convey the warmth and wisdom of The Silence, or to capture its importance, beyond recommending it as something everyone should read. It has a delicate rigour, probing with compassion in order to build our understanding of the 'oblique vernaculars' of silence. From those who have suffered, she asks for words:

If it's impossible for anyone else to understand, if I tell people that it is impossible, I will so deter them that they won't press and probe in all the places that resonate in pain and grief. 'You can't understand' extinguishes questions before they are even thought of ... It is a pre-emptive strike that creates the very conditions of its own failure.

Wajnryb also makes demands of others. I came to this book with a particular interest in the complicated stories told by people living in poverty, and in how to build arguments for justice out of the often fragmented narratives of those who suffer injustice. The Silence is especially important because of its careful exploration not so much of how to tell as of how to listen: what is it that we, as listeners, can do to create a means for the communication of suffering and trauma and to help construct coherence, without either denying its possibility or moving too quickly to the safer ground of generalities.

Wajnryb included in her interviews a number of people who had suffered other kinds of tragedies and losses, and found in their testimonies similar forms of traumatic aftermath, similar fears of the self and others being overwhelmed by what might be unleashed by remembering. Certainly, many of the spoken and unspoken messages between survivors and their families, the iconic tales and the things that cannot be said, and the strange combination of 'narrative richness and emotional emptiness' in stories of war, grief and loss will be familiar to people outside of this particular group. It was, I think, beyond the scope of this book to fully explore those connections and potential generalisations, and I can only hope that Wajnryb will continue their development. This book speaks powerfully to some fundamental premises, which must anchor Australians' political and intellectual discussion of the sufferings and injustices, past and present, that continue to be carried out or defended in our name.

It demands that we overcome our reluctance to hear, and shows that we begin to do justice not by defining (nor, of course, denying) the sufferings of others, but by listening to what they have to tell us and, having listened, asking them how it is to be healed. For that alone, this is a book I was grateful to read.