Alice in Shandehland by Monda Halpern

Author:Monda Halpern
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2015-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

“A sudden silence fell”: The Legacy of the Case

In Ottawa’s old Jewish cemetery, the Edelson and Horwitz plots, just steps apart, reveal both nothing and everything about the 1931 tragedy. Jack Horwitz’s headstone refers to him only as a “dear brother,” making no mention of his roles as a husband and a father. And neither his wife Yetta nor daughter Anita rests beside him. Beneath the impressive monument that marks the Edelson plot, Alice’s modest stone declares her a “beloved wife and mother.” Of course, no one expects an epitaph to reflect the intricacies of one’s complex life on earth, but these words do more than render invisible the circumstances of 24 November 1931: many would say they distort and even mock them. These inscriptions, however, are just part of an enduring effort by the Edelson and Horwitz families to detract attention from the tragedy, and to uphold their good name. In the face of the media and gossiping frenzy that surrounded the Edelson/Horwitz murder case, a conspiracy of silence by the families and their lawyers existed almost from the very beginning. But despite everyone’s best efforts to hush up the case, the Jewish community would surreptitiously discuss and remember it for decades, especially the unsavoury role of Alice Edelson.

Attempting to obscure a tragedy and even erase it from memory is not a strategy emblematic of the Jews. They are often dubbed a “people of memory” because of their adherence to commemorative holidays and rituals, and their cultural emphasis on both joyful and bleak historical milestones, such as the birth of the state of Israel and the Holocaust, respectively.1 In fact, much of the academic scholarship that proliferated in the 1990s around issues of memory related to Jews and the Holocaust.2 These studies often asserted that survivors, unlike many amnesiac victims of childhood maltreatment, for example, suffered from an “excess of memory.” They felt compelled to share their stories (as the flood of survivor memoirs over the last five decades testifies), and to commemorate as a group their shared past.3

Studies of memory generally “give central place to trauma” as the experience “worth talking about – worth remembering,” but they necessarily identify the connected concept of “forgetting.”4 The past is a “treacherous burden,” one which “would crush us” if forgetting did not allow us to “continuously divest ourselves of its weight.”5 Accordingly, in response to being “overwhelmed by memories,” some Holocaust survivors demonstrated “numbing, detachment, or suppression.”6 The dynamic of this process is complex. As Lawrence J. Kirmayer points out, “the distinction between forget, repress, ignore and dissociate is not simply an arbitrary choice of metaphor. Each is a phenomenologically distinct form of not remembering.”7 For survivors of trauma, this “not remembering” is mired in the fear of pain, reprisal, victim-hood, survival, remaining in the past, or burdening children.

In other words, forgetting is not necessarily a fortuitous act (nor a neurological lapse), but is “as much an active process as remembering.”8 Some authors have employed the term “intentional forgetting” to indicate

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