Shoes

There's nothing great or particularly dignified about being a survivor of the shoah. Most survivors are eeking out a quiet life, in some corner of the globe, trying to forget what happened to them, while attempting to evade the curse, the knives in their hearts when remembering those they loved. The Shoah Foundation has given stage to these scratchy little voices, as though they were the most important document; in the end, a minor testament to the suffering of humankind. It's as though millions of dollars in resources, people, offices, and time (oh the time) were set aside to preserve such details as what a person ate on shabbat in Piotrkow Poland between the wars. Does anyone really give a monkey's _ _ _?

There is a movement afoot to relegate Judaism to yet another of the world religions, to place it in the category of other faiths; to deconstruct the faith of Abraham in some fashion so as to distill it to a collection of fads, peculiar traditions born of idiosyncracy or obsession, the footsteps of some people we've heard about, but otherwise really shouldn't consider all that important.

A survivor's voice breaks as he holds up an enlarged sepia-tone of his mother who happened to die on this date in 1944, "burned in Auschwitz." He wishes to begin his testimony this way, in abrupt opposition to the routine which the interviewer and the videographer are about to fall into. Our little white-haired man donning a black kippa, lost in his short-sleeved button down shirt, defiantly holds up the photo - with apparent great awareness that the camera is rolling - that this is his great opportunity to memorialize his mother. But is he also somehow paying tribute to something else? Or is it just what my emotions and experiences impose upon this? I know it sounds lofty, and I think secretly to myself; he's lighting a candle in memory of the Jewish People of Europe.

The testimony is full with asides, irrelevant to the history, and yet central to the picture of history; that which is through the *prism of personal experience. The inventor of television set out to create a new device which would excite and change the way we communicate, educate and entertain, though his life ended in near despair due to the fallen nature of his revolutionary toy. But in this case, I believe that Philo T. Farnsworth would be proud. The pause, the deep breath, the change in smile - visual history. It is the timing, the micro-expressions, the story which can function on so many levels - it has made every last dollar spent on this project a huge bargain.

I have a dear friend who takes pleasure in making sport of any and all institutional memory of the Holocaust - and it is my cultural prerogative to both agree with him, and to simultaneously fetch his comments upon the heap of denial and flotsam that make up some growing component of modern Judaism. And yet the reason he is on the money with his ascerbic remarks is because he knows that what was destroyed - the diaspora civilization centered upon study, the pursuit of justice, and the fetishization of the search for meaning, and all the flawed realities of a civilization insulated (unsuccessfully) by a millenium of coexistense, headed for the flames - none of this is the focus of mass and public preservation, by and large. At least that is what I glean from his ire. My friend likes to make fun, because he's painfully aware that subjects such as this taste better when marinated in sarcasm.

In his short story "A Friend of Kafka," Isaac Bashevis Singer states that those who walk into history often do so in clumsy boots. I'm not sure how tight or form fitting Mr. Spielberg's actual footwear is (though I suspect it's a perfect fit). Regardless however, the scholars, cataloguers, resentful mobs, neo-nazis, and the other would-be candidates in the mass hierarchies of suffering - all undoubtedly wish they had even a pair of forgotten galoshes to carry them to their sofas where they might take a moment to perhaps recall their mother's stew recipe or ruminate over a fateful trip to the market. Steven has given back to each of his interviewees a set of wooden clogs - these are lined with velvet.

*Immanuel Ringleblum - on" The Oneg Shabbat Archive," created in the Warsaw Ghetto