The German Marxist critic, Theodor Adorno, was once famous for
having remarked that, after Auschwitz, poetry was impossible,
though that is not quite what he did say. Half a century later, it
has turned out to be rather a good joke on him — or is it a
confirmation of his view? — that poetry, like the other arts,
sometimes seems as if it can hardly get along without the
Holocaust. As the cultural consensus on which the great works of
the past were based has broken down over the past few decades, we
are left with fewer and fewer sources of the kind of resonant
imagery that the Holocaust provides. There’s almost nothing that
everyone believes, particularly about good and evil, but almost
everyone believes that the Nazi murder of European Jewry was evil
and its victims infinitely pitiable.
The danger of using such an obvious moral truth as the raw
material for art is that it encourages not self-identification with
suffering but self-congratulation that we have made the right
response to it. Thus, at the end of the screening I attended of
Liev Schreiber’s adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel,
Everything Is Illuminated, the audience applauded. Neither
Mr. Schreiber nor Mr. Foer nor anyone else involved in the making
of the movie was present to receive their kudos, and I believe that
they were really applauding themselves for the familiar and
reassuring feelings — a combination of moral and political
indignation and pity — that the cinematic Holocaust always
produces in audiences, and is designed to produce. This is
unfortunate, as there was more to this movie than just another
Holocaust tale.
Like the novel, that is, it really wants to be about memory and
the identity of a people over time. In the novel, the Holocaust is
set in a much larger historical context — going backwards 150
years to life in a Ukrainian shtetl in the late 18th century and
then forwards another half century or more to a search for his
Ukrainian ancestors by the American grandson of a refugee from the
Holocaust. Mr. Schreiber’s adaptation, which he also directed,
foreshortens this perspective, giving us only the present day and
some dim but meaningfully fraught memories of 1942 when virtually
all the inhabitants of the Ukrainian-Jewish village of Trachimbrod
were murdered by the Nazis.
Let me hasten to add that there is no mystery about why
Schreiber did what he did to the novel, which, though its much
larger time-reach and cast of characters might conceivably have
been made into a mini-series, would have made even a long movie
into an incomprehensible mess. Moreover, its various bits of
bizarrerie and magical realism would have worked no better on the
silver screen than such things usually do. Above all, I for one was
grateful to Mr. Schreiber for radically cutting back on the acres
of space the novel gives to the allegedly hilarious malapropisms in
the long letters of the Ukrainian guide, Alex Perchov, to “the
hero” of the novel, also called Jonathan Safran Foer. A little of
Alex’s linguistic exuberance goes a long way, I find, and the
movie’s version of him, played by Eugene Hutz, though entertaining
is Alex enough and plenty at that.
But something is also lost in all that has had to be excised
from the novel’s sprawling canvas. Mr. Schreiber radically
simplifies it by setting the efforts to remember of Jonathan the
hero, played by Elijah Wood, against the efforts to forget of
Alex’s grandfather, also called Alex (Boris Leskin), who has a
guilty secret that I will not, of course, reveal here. While this
makes for a nice symmetry, it also has what I regard as the
regrettable effect of making the movie, much more than the novel,
about the Holocaust — that moral black hole from whose
gravitational field nothing can escape. Our own cultural memories
— not only of the Holocaust itself but of all the other movies
about it — are thus so thoroughly present in what we bring to this
movie that its attempts to explore the ephemerality and lightness
of what we are trying not to forget are always in danger of looking
merely trivial by comparison to the weightiness of what we can’t
help remembering.
It doesn’t help, either, that the personal idiosyncrasies of
Jonathan the hero are stressed to the extent they are. The
boyish-looking Mr. Wood has still, perhaps, something of the hobbit
about him in his dark suit and thick glasses and fanny-pack full of
ziplock plastic bags for collecting the grubby relics of his family
and of Trachimbrod — and of anything else that takes his fancy.
“Sometimes I’m afraid I will forget,” he says. No such luck for us,
anyway. When he and the two Alexes and old Alex’s “seeing eye
bitch,” Sammy Davis Junior Junior, meet the old lady (Laryssa
Lauret) who may or may not be responsible for the escape of
Jonathan’s grandfather from the Nazis, the gallery of grotesques is
complete. The old lady turns out to be a collector too, and in the
carefully labeled boxes that line the walls of her tumbledown
cottage in the middle of a vast field of sunflowers, Trachimbrod,
otherwise vanished, lives out a precarious posthumous existence —
as all dead things do for a little while in the memories of the
living.
Except, of course, that its being an episode of the Holocaust is
an invitation to us to suppose that we remember it better than we
do. At least we know that those who were once Trachimbrod are now
among the approved victims of the 20th century, to be remembered
whenever its history is told. The title is, among other things,
shorthand for “everything in the present is illuminated in the
light of the past,” but here the past is not used to illuminate but
to obscure. All of our perceptions of it are wrapped in the
remoteness not only of the past events themselves but of the habits
of mind which produced them and therefore are swaddled in the warm
glow of self-approval. Perhaps it is just me, but I’d find the
pathos of the vanished village of Trachimbrod and the people and
the way of life it represents more piquant and certainly more
interesting if its loss had been less morally momentous and more
reminiscent of the way of all flesh.
James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and
Public Policy Center, media essayist for the New
Criterion, and The American Spectator’s movie
critic.
