What did it mean for survivors of the concentration camps to fast during the first Yom Kippur after the war - September '45? Some reporter for the Jerusalem Post in 2006 went around to survivors to interview them about that first post-genocide fast. "Edith Cohen recalls her hunger pangs in a sealed cattle car on the way to Auschwitz from her home in Hungary. When her food ran out she chewed on one piece of chicken skin for four days just to keep something in her mouth." So fasting a few months after liberation was easy. The article that resulted from this investigation is no great shakes (and indeed full of stupid puns - one survivor faster found fasting "easy as pie") but I find it fascinating nonetheless. If going without food was still the norm, what did fasting seem to mean to them? Did they momentarily thrive on the company of sufferers? Otherwise--as nearly every account and testimony suggests--these people felt extraordinarily alone.
Thursday, October 09, 2008
Yom Kippur 1945
What did it mean for survivors of the concentration camps to fast during the first Yom Kippur after the war - September '45? Some reporter for the Jerusalem Post in 2006 went around to survivors to interview them about that first post-genocide fast. "Edith Cohen recalls her hunger pangs in a sealed cattle car on the way to Auschwitz from her home in Hungary. When her food ran out she chewed on one piece of chicken skin for four days just to keep something in her mouth." So fasting a few months after liberation was easy. The article that resulted from this investigation is no great shakes (and indeed full of stupid puns - one survivor faster found fasting "easy as pie") but I find it fascinating nonetheless. If going without food was still the norm, what did fasting seem to mean to them? Did they momentarily thrive on the company of sufferers? Otherwise--as nearly every account and testimony suggests--these people felt extraordinarily alone.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
