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Subject: H-Net Review [H-Judaic]: Balakirsky Katz on Baskind, 'The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture'
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Samantha Baskind. The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture.
University Park Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018.
Illustrations. xv + 309 pp. $44.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-271-07870-0.
Reviewed by Maya Balakirsky Katz (Bar-Ilan University)
Published on H-Judaic (October, 2020)
Commissioned by Barbara Krawcowicz
This book demonstrates as much as it analyzes that the Warsaw
Ghetto--established during the Holocaust and the site of the Jewish
uprising launched on April 19, 1943, that staved off two thousand
German troops for twenty-eight days--has been an enduring source of
inspiration for American writers and artists, apparently second only
to the Anne Frank story. As so many conclusions that sound almost
intuitive once they have been articulated, the work required to
arrive at it is exhaustive.
Samantha Baskind has collated a wide range of individual and
collaborative American projects and gives the representational
history of the Warsaw Ghetto shape across seventy-five years of
cultural productions. Beginning with the radio dramatization of the
ghetto narrative only two months after the tragic end of the ghetto,
the Warsaw Ghetto uprising seemed to grip American audiences as
relevant to their own survival and the survival of American freedoms
in a world threatened by evil. Corralling smaller audiences but
responding in the more long-lived mediums in pencil, ink, and oil,
graphic artists Arthur Szyk and William Gropper were among those who
represented the uprising within months of the ghetto's fall. With the
war still raging, the first anniversary of the uprising evoked
political activist projects fighting for an uncertain future for Jews
on both sides of the Atlantic. That year, the Yiddish play _The
Miracle of the Warsaw Ghetto_ opened in New York already bearing the
optimistic and heroic stamp that the uprising would acquire in the
later resistance narratives of John Hersey's _The Wall_ (1950).
The second chapter explores the efforts to challenge what was
developing into a conventional lens of "good versus evil" in Millard
Lampell's theatricalization of Hersey's _The Wall_ and Rod Serling's
teleplay _In the Presence of Mine Enemies _(1960). These projects
introduced both Jewish and gentile characters and both the desire for
and resistance to fighting, and they focused internally on the
psychological dramas within the ghetto walls. These nuanced
experiments proved short-lived as the theme of militant heroism
returned to popular acclaim with Leon Uris's _Exodus_ (1958) and
_Mila 18_ (1961), the subject of the third chapter and the one with
which most readers will be the most familiar.
The last two chapters focus on the less-known and less-studied
subject of the ghetto's children, expanding the image and narrative
of the ghetto to those who did not, could not, and were not expected
to fight. Baskind demonstrates that artists deploy the image of the
child as a symbol of innocence and all that was lost and on whose
behalf we must tolerate no naivete in the future. The attempt to
process the horrors of Holocaust realities, often recorded in
photography by the perpetrators, can be traced in the varied
appropriations of the boy with his hands in the air from the Stroop
Report by artists Samuel Bak, Judy Chicago, Audrey Flack, and Jack
Levine. The final chapter focuses on the 2003 graphic novel _Yossel:
April 19, 1943_, in which the artist Joseph Kubert fantasizes his way
out of the totality of the ghetto dust by imagining an alternative
ending for his alter-ego Yossel in a counter-history that imagines
his family not immigrating to the United States in the 1920s.
As she painstakingly draws the map of American culture produced
against the backdrop of the Warsaw Ghetto, Baskind analyzes the
broader contours that all the individual projects in various media
reveal in tandem about this corner of the American art scene. Baskind
suggests that the desire to turn to the subject of the Warsaw Ghetto
"suggests a meta-awareness on the part of the makers" not only of the
heroism that brought forth the Jewish uprising "but also the
struggles to record, preserve, and remember, which are always heroic
imperatives in their own right in the penumbra of the Holocaust" (p.
13). For the artist who has devoted his life to the struggle to
record, preserve, and remember, the act of representation is itself a
heroic imperative. In various points throughout the book, Baskind
creates symbolic links between the physical "combat" that inspired
these artists and the artistic "combat" work of the cultural
producers she has included in the book. If the analogy seems
overwrought, the fact that some of the artists and writers included
in the book, as well as Baskind in her own research, turned to the
Oneg Shabbos archive established by those sealed in the ghetto to
record their own experiences certainly speaks to the mutual drive to
survive through the historical record.
But for the scholar, the bundling of these various individual
projects as a category of cultural analysis carries different
implications. While the Polin Museum at the site of the Warsaw Ghetto
has sought to contextualize the ghetto, its uprising, and its
destruction in a thousand years of Polish Jewish history, Baskind has
chosen a single and exceptional event in Jewish history as a subject
of academic inquiry. As a result, this book asks the question: can we
discuss the Warsaw Ghetto apart from the Holocaust? To borrow a
modified version of Nathan Englander's query about that other
Holocaust icon Anne Frank: what are we talking about when we talk
about the Warsaw Ghetto?
Baskind engages with this thought experiment throughout the book,
sometimes landing on the rivaling of Frank as a tragic symbol to
manifest hope in a more heroic response and a different outcome to
tyranny. Although offering no fixed answers, Baskind has produced a
daring work of scholarship on American art in very concrete terms by
including not only voices critical of America's abuses of power but
also those promoting interventionist foreign policy, gun ownership,
and Jewish and American exceptionalism. Since Baskind's subjects
often buoy the theme of ghetto resistance with the threat of fascist
repetition, their representations of the Warsaw Ghetto often explore
extreme positions that challenge the ideological tenets that many of
the artists included in this book express in their other works. This
includes the use of the term "armed resistance" for the Warsaw Ghetto
context, as it is ubiquitously described, to promote private gun
ownership in America by imagining, as Jon Bogdanove's Superman does,
the victory over past and future Reichs. It also includes the use of
the ghetto to project revisionist Zionist perspectives and to
characterize criticism of Israeli militarism as a left-wing iteration
of fascism. Given how unpopular these perspectives are in a culture
that frowns upon gun violence and militarism, the result is a broader
spectrum of political and ideological visions than art historians
typically present.
Although Baskind does not explicitly offer this conclusion herself,
her richly illustrated book reveals that artists often reject (or
co-opt) political correctness to engage with the Warsaw Ghetto as a
historical subject that tests the premises and limitations of
universalist values.
_Maya Balakirsky Katz is associate professor of Jewish art at
Bar-Ilan University and a clinical psychoanalist._
Citation: Maya Balakirsky Katz. Review of Baskind, Samantha, _The
Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture_. H-Judaic, H-Net Reviews.
October, 2020.
URL:
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55556
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.
