Holocaust Humor

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Finally, "Holocausted out," Lipkin was angry. "Do I need to know the color of the barracks? Do I need to know the smell of the gas in the showers? Why do I need to know these things? It's a morbid obsession that is completely counterproductive."

Lipkin found a kindred spirit in Waldoks. Their meeting became one of the show's scenes: "I hoped she was a child of survivors," Waldoks says. "They always make me hot. I hoped I could drink kiddush wine from her navel soon. Ach, how do you pick up a woman at a Holocaust museum?"

Sacrilegious? No. Reality, Waldoks insists. "There are Holocaust museums and there are people with hormones. So, it's bound to happen. We have so disengaged the Holocaust from lifeóit is so anti-life that we can never think about the fact that the people who were killed were human beings."

Before the Holocaust, the question was how to be Jewish: Reform, Orthodox, or Conservative? Since the war, the question has become why be Jewish? "The answer has to be better than ëbecause they burned up a million-and-a-half babies.' It wouldn't make a good bumper sticker."

"I just don't think that the systematic murder of 6 million people is funny," says writer Thane Rosenbaum, as he thumps the table. Rosenbaum writes about inherited trauma: "the psychological impacts, the dysfunction, the scarringññthis idea that the enormity of Auschwitz was so great that it can't be canceled out in one generation. It lives, it breeds, it carries on. It has its own life and it's living it through children," he says.

He insists that his novel, Elijah Visible (St. Martin's, 1996)ññdedicated to his parents, "whose lives and nightmares" inspired himññisn't funny. But at a New York bookstore reading, he chose an excerpt about the survivor's son, who realizes at midnight he has no yahrzeit candle to commemorate his mother's death: "But where could he find [one] at this late hour? Regrettably, even in New York, there are no all-night Judaica convenience shops for the modern Jew on the run. Perhaps a convenience store that housed all that emergency juice, milk, and eggs might also carry the essentials for the neglectful Jew."

The audience doubled over laughing. Rosenbaum was confused.

Like many others, Rosenbaum lives with incessant emptiness and pain. What he wants most is for the suffering to end with him, sparing his daughter. But already the third generation has started to speak, in Internet chat rooms, group therapy, and scholarly conferences. The trauma stands to claim yet another generation. And in dealing with that legacy, some people will use humor.

Laughter is a healing tool that helped Eisinger endure misery and Waldoks deal with his mother's tears. But humor does more: In every joke is the hint of the hidden horror. This is not laughter through tears, it is laughter despite tears. Humor also punctures, wounds, shocks, and reveals. If they're doing the job right, the prophet and the jester have similar roles, Waldoks says: "Both are making the comfortable uncomfortable."

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print