Holocaust Tale Contains Truths in Its Fiction

Holocaust studies have long recognized that literary and historical truths of the Holocaust may not be entirely separable. In fact, the need to invoke witness or testimony as the basis of authority in a text is as old as the Bible itself. Coming from within the Jewish tradition, testimony as literary form sanctifies the account and lends it a certain scriptural authority. Moreover, literary testimony followed by its own exegesis carries the full weight and authority of biblical status.

Consider “Yosl Rakover Talks to God,” a grim and yet beautiful story that first appeared in 1946. It is a not terribly complicated tale that is a mere 22 pages and appears to be a document found in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto dated April 28, 1943. Like a biblical account in which the narrator both bears witness to and then self-interprets events, the 43-year-old narrator of the testimonial, Yosl Rakover, certain that he has only a few hours of life remaining, details the horrors of his life and his acts of resistance. At times comparing himself to Job, he describes the gruesome deaths of his wife and six children, and the deaths of his 11 comrades (including several small children) in the house in which he is hiding, and then examines his relationship to God.

The most remarkable aspect of this story is Rakover’s deep and abiding faith in God in the face of such horrible circumstances. God has not abandoned the world, Rakover believes; instead he feels God has simply turned his face from his creation. “I believe in the God of Israel, even when he has done everything to make me cease to believe in him. I believe in his laws even when I cannot justify his deeds.”

As a Jew, his questioning is evidence of his belief. It also reveals, however, a quest for understanding that attempts to find meaning where meaninglessness and godlessness seem to abound. Perhaps the most profound point in the narrative comes as Yosl Rakover talks to God, questioning the limits of his patience as he watches his people suffer, admonishing him for not intervening.

When “Yosl Rakover Talks to God” was first published in a Jewish newspaper in Buenos Aires in 1946, it was presented as a first-person account of a victim of the Holocaust, much like Emmanuel Ringelblum’s “Notes From the Warsaw Ghetto,” an equally searing chronicle of life in the Warsaw ghetto found after the war, buried in bottles and milk cans. Following its appearance, “Rakover” was embraced as nonfiction. In 1953 it appeared in a Yiddish literary journal in Tel Aviv as “an authentic document.” In 1954 it was translated (without authorship) into German and broadcast from the Free Berlin station. It was next translated into French with numerous reverberations. Thomas Mann praised the story as a holy text.

Rakover’s fate (he apparently dies in the burning ghetto) added to the majesty of the document. So when Zvi Kolitz claimed to be the author of the story, he was ignored. In 1963 Levinas published the essay in this volume, citing its “anonymous author.”

It appeared in 1965 for the first time in a Hebrew translation identified simply as a “testament.” In 1968 it appeared in an anthology with Kolitz’s name attached to it, but with a postscript: The story is not authentic but Yosl Rakover is. In Israel in the 1970s the story, as an anonymous document, became the founding text of a radical settler movement. In America it is found in Orthodox and Reform prayer books, again as an authentic text from the Warsaw ghetto.

Of course, Rakover’s story, while utterly credible, is not true, but is it so hard to explain why the public embraced it as an authentic document over the authored fiction? As truth, the story starkly presents the quarrel at the heart of post-Holocaust spirituality: Did the God of Israel abandon his people? As fiction, the quarrel is not less real but the accessibility and coherence of the violent events as they are mediated through the imagination distance it from the real. When the rabbi of a Conservative synagogue in New York used “Rakover” on Yom Kippur as a factual testimony from the Warsaw ghetto, the rabbi conceded: “I know there’s an author. But this way it is much more moving.”

Perhaps the rabbi understands, with Theodore Adorno, that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz. Or perhaps he believes, with others, that to use the imagination to create images of the Holocaust adds horribly to the sum of real images we already have. The truth may lie somewhere in between; that is, however we grapple with putting into words the feeling of annihilation, the battle between the inexpressible and the must-be-expressed transcends authorship even as it speaks to us all.