Читать книгу Reading (in) the Holocaust - Malgorzata Wójcik-Dudek - Страница 15

It seems that despite the recent changes in classroom approaches to teaching about and addressing the Holocaust, no corresponding literary canon has taken a recognisable shape yet. Moreover, I believe that such a canon, if too firmly structured, might in fact curtail the “freedom” of the formation of postmemory which, to repeat, is produced within a particular generation – here and now – in response to the emotional needs of contemporary people and in accord with the aesthetic frameworks which are currently valid.

I am afraid that the difficulty in addressing the Holocaust which besets Polish schools does not result from the lack of a canon or from its instability, but rather from the fact that the Holocaust has been dissociated from other issues of Jewish culture and history and turned into the only pivot for the school narrative about Jews. As a consequence of such sustained uncoupling, literature probing Jewish themes (other than the Holocaust, that is) is only poorly represented in the classroom, while texts about the Holocaust are fetishised.

The claim that the canon of readings about the Holocaust cannot be fixed in contemporary school education begs some clarification. Actually, we would be hard pressed to talk of any canon today; at best, if we want to salvage the notion in the first place, we might refer to a multiplicity of canons, which often hinge on teachers’ quite arbitrary choices. This is where both the weakness and the power of reading literature at school lie. It is the Polish teacher who becomes a depositary of texts, and his/her literary knowledge and competence determine the ways in which literature is presented. This need not be a fault, provided that the teacher receives conceptual and methodological support as regards not only perfecting the skills of reading texts about the Holocaust, but also learning about the process and the history of such readings (whereby universities that train Polish teachers have a crucial role to play). The inclusion of such competences into the teacher education curriculum is necessary to prevent classroom literary analyses from being reduced merely to the historical context or to the emotional response, and to promote interpretations of the Holocaust meta-text. The latter invites reflection not only on what is conveyed, but also on how it is conveyed. Such aesthetic explorations may crucially affect the understanding of the distinctiveness of individual codes of remembering.

However, the reading of texts about the Holocaust at school usually eschews the “dramatic” facet of their production, even though a context-embedded evocation of disputes on or historical negotiations of Holocaust representations ←26 | 27→would be extremely useful in interpreting the fortunes of postmemory.⁵¹ It will not be an exaggeration to posit that in this context postmemory is reminiscent of Derrida’s différance, for it can be defined and interpreted only in relation to prior postmemorial structures. The difference in their meanings harbours the generation’s attitude to the Event that was the Holocaust.

It is rather obvious that the texts listed in the Polish Core Curriculum (Podstawa programowa… of 23rd December, 2008)⁵² will not be enough to glean such insights from, even though the policy document is admittedly quite revolutionary as far as “Jewish issues” are concerned.

The Holocaust is first addressed in junior secondary school,⁵³ and the Core Curriculum recommends reading a selected short story by Ida Fink for this purpose. At the upper secondary education level, the Holocaust is fundamentally represented by Borowski’s selected short stories, Krall’s To Outwit God and Amiel’s Scorched.

As can be seen, the reading list has been expanded by titles which have not been discussed at school before and which effectively augment the ways of presenting the Holocaust (Scorched is obviously particularly relevant to the concept of postmemory). Nevertheless, the problem is that none of these books are obligatory reading; they are all introduced in the “recommended” category. Practically speaking, this means that they may not be studied in Polish lessons at all. Scholastic Holocaust transmission is likely to still be shaped by the canonical ←27 | 28→texts which have “always” been there, such as Krall’s reportage or Borowski’s short stories. They tend to be chosen by teachers almost without exception as the familiar and methodologically mastered ones, and as representative of the Holocaust themes. Yet, emphatically, essay topics for the 2012 (advanced) “Matura” exam⁵⁴ included an assignment based on Ida Fink’s short story; specifically, the assignment read: “Everyday life in the times of the Holocaust: Analysing and interpreting Ida Fink’s ‘In Front of the Mirror,’ discuss the construction of the protagonist figures, their situation and the meanings of the eponymous mirror.”

Still, the most interesting thing about the Core Curriculum is that it strives to place the texts about the Holocaust in a broader discourse on Jewish culture and the position of Jews in Poland. Consequently, at the basic level, the reading list has been expanded to include mandatory short stories by Bruno Schulz and optional readings, such as Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Magician of Lublin and Julian Stryjkowski’ Austeria [At a Roadside Inn]; at the advanced level, two recommended, but non-compulsory readings – a reportage by Henryk Grynberg and a selected essay by Jan Błoński – have been added to the list. In practice, authors of textbooks indeed make use of selected passages from these texts, which improves their chances of actually being discussed in classroom. In this context, Błoński’s “Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto” (“The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto”)⁵⁵ seems to enjoy the greatest popularity.

With such recommended readings, there is a considerable chance of generating a basic, tolerably coherent structure of school narrative not so much about the Holocaust alone as about Jewish tradition per se. The optional choice of these ←28 | 29→texts is certainly a downside of the curricular decisions, but at the same time, the learning outcomes defined for the advanced level of Polish instruction include the capacity to recognise literary allusions and cultural symbols (e.g. biblical, Romantic, etc.) as well as their ideological and compositional function, together with signs of traditions, including antiquity, Judaism, Christianity, Early Modern Poland, etc. This entails the expediency of selecting texts which promote meeting the requirements stipulated in the core curriculum.

Given this, it seems that the Minister’s regulation which came into effect in 2009, while altering the reading list, first and foremost modifies the ways of talking about the Holocaust. As far as the transformations of the reading canon are concerned, I can see three areas in which truly relevant changes can happen.

Firstly, texts by authors as yet not discussed in schools, such as Fink and Amiel, have been included in Jewish discourse. Such readings may foster reflection on the generation of the Scorched, i.e. on the categories of witness and second generation. Secondly, literature which addresses painful themes of the cohabitation of Poles and Jews (Błoński and Grynberg) has been introduced to schools. Thirdly, and finally, what seems to be the most radical, or even revolutionary, intervention is that while the Holocaust may not have been removed from the centre of the school’s textual world, its peripheries – which have been neglected in Polish language education so far – have been considerably bolstered. Before the new core curriculum was introduced, the Holocaust had been the overriding “Jewish theme,” which commanded, if not entirely eclipsed, all other issues related to Jewish culture, among which anti-Semitism and the assimilation of Jews had been the most pronounced, if not the only points on the agenda. Such questions had mainly been tackled “on the margins” of discussions about Adam Mickiewicz’s Master Thaddeus, Positivist short stories, Bolesław Prus’s The Doll or Stanisław Wyspiański’s The Wedding, serving primarily as an introduction to the narrative about the Holocaust.

The major thrust towards dismantling the classic arrangement of “scholastic” texts about the Holocaust for Polish instruction came not so much from an attempt to adjust literature to the emotionality and knowledge of contemporary readers as from the demands of interdisciplinary humanistic discourse, into which the core curriculum incorporated Polish instruction. When discussing writings about the Holocaust, it is difficult to ignore the historical contexts and even more difficult to fail to discern and appreciate the methodological revolution initiated by Holokaust – zrozumieć dlaczego [The Holocaust: Understanding Why?], a textbook developed by Robert Szuchta and Piotr Trojański in 2003.

The authors sought to outline an inclusive political, sociological and cultural context of the Holocaust. Though they are both historians, the textbook quickly ←29 | 30→proved not only useful in their field, but also seamlessly aligned with the interdisciplinary investment expected of schools in the wake of the reform of the core curriculum. As a result of the ministerial policy document (which invited criticism from historians for shifting Holocaust-related issues from junior secondary school to the later stage of education), the textbook became helpful to teachers of other subjects than history as well and turned out to perfectly correspond to the needs of upper secondary education.

It seems therefore that the current concept of teaching about the Holocaust in Polish lessons is geared towards constructing a narrative in which “other Jewish themes,” which have been treated merely as a functional background so far, will no longer be accessory, if not entirely subordinated, to the central issue of the Holocaust. This of course does not mean that the Holocaust is divested of its unprecedented status.⁵⁶ The Event has been embedded in a historical-cultural space and, most importantly, such emplacement does not herald the end of the Holocaust narrative, but marks an explicit change in the structure of this narrative as consciousness-raising about the irreversible loss of that world is accorded a special place in it.⁵⁷

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The experience of the present should incorporate an awareness of the lack of something that could be, but will evermore not be.⁵⁸ After all, the ethical goal of lessons about the Holocaust lies in breeding nostalgia rather than trauma through the texts read at school. Perhaps the didactic triumph, so difficult to imagine in this context, can be aptly encapsulated in the confession: I miss you, Jew.⁵⁹ Perhaps the memory frameworks of the third and fourth generations should be demarcated by the vectors of nostalgia and loss.

To remodel students’ sensitivity, which, though individual, could integrate with the communal affective framework, is certainly a formidable challenge for Polish language education.⁶⁰ One reason why it is so daunting is that navigating ←31 | 32→the textual world of the Holocaust at school requires discipline which is not simply extorted by an ideological “corset,” but is essentially an injunction of responsible reading in which students benefit from the teacher’s assistance. In the case of such texts, the freedom of reading should be abandoned for the sake of reading with the Other,⁶¹ which means that young readers’ reading is supported by an adult. For the same reasons, a Polish lesson marked by an encounter with a text about the Holocaust transfigures into an ethical event.⁶²