Oral Pleasure by Jerzy Kosinski

Author:Jerzy Kosinski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2012-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

Mind Polish

In this lecture (an early version of his essay “The Second Holocaust,” which appeared in the Boston Globe in 1990), Kosinski suggested that the Jewish preoccupation with extermination and annihilation during the Holocaust creates a kind of “Second Holocaust.” He urged Jews to define themselves not by wartime deaths and losses but rather through celebrations of life, including Jewish accomplishment and achievement, and to focus not on Jewish absence but rather on Jewish presence throughout history.

The twentieth century enters its last decade to the march of newly forged national freedom. Among the many losses, wounds, and still-opened graves that have marked its passage—all of which are immune to this march—one loss remains higher than all others. To this loss, the Jews have given the irrevocable name of the Holocaust.

But the Holocaust must also be seen as the loss of memory, the loss of mind—a loss far greater than that of life, the primary and most dramatic measure we attach to it. This dimension both adds to and transcends the numerical-historical record—the record of who and why, the record of how and where.

In “Concerning the Jews,” Mark Twain noted that the Jew’s contribution to “the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning [is] also way out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers.” In spite of this contribution, which has continued at an accelerated rate, the trauma of the physical loss of the Holocaust has now virtually paralyzed the Jewish psyche and soul for nearly half a century. This paralysis is so far-reaching that it has brought almost to a standstill preocccupation with life, once the most formidable characteristic of the Jewish presence worldwide. In his fondest dreams, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, who dreamt of a Jew-free world, could not have dreamt up a period in the Jewish chain of tradition in which Jews themselves would insist en masse on defining themselves as being cursed by history to an everlasting damnation. These definitions have fixed upon the nonstop wallowing in every exile, every eviction, every mass slaying, every butchery, every carnage, every bloodbath, every pogrom, every concentration camp, every gas oven—a veritable fixation upon every conceivable form of Jewish death as caused by non-Jews. Fixed upon death, instead of being fixed upon what the Jews have always been known for: the celebration of life.

This Jewish self-excommunication—this turning away from Jewishness perceived as a perpetual source of life, to insistence by so many Jews themselves on Jewishness understood to be an unending state of death dealing—has consequences for Jews and non-Jews alike. Those consequences are far more deadly than all the decimation inflicted upon the Jews throughout history, not excluding the Holocaust, the greatest pogrom in history symbolized by Auschwitz. A Nazi-erected state-of-the-art monument to human annihilation, to human absence, Auschwitz has become for many Jews synonymous with Jewish fate.

Paradoxically, the preocccupation with absence, with asphyxiation, and with the fear of being extinguished continues to be shared by millions of Jews, so many

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