People Love Dead Jews: Reports From a Haunted Present by Dara Horn

People Love Dead Jews: Reports From a Haunted Present by Dara Horn

Author:Dara Horn [Horn, Dara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, human rights, Violence in Society, Genocide & War Crimes, political science, Epub3, Jewish Studies
ISBN: 9780393531572
Google: OD4fEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2021-09-07T00:21:13.564524+00:00


In our current century, it is difficult to appreciate the vast renown of many of the people on Varian Fry’s lists, only a few of whom are still household names. Today, for instance, few readers outside of Germany have heard of the German Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger. But by 1940 he was the most widely read German-language writer in the world and, in translation, one of the most widely read writers in the world, period—a fact especially noteworthy because nearly all of his pre-1940 novels deal with explicitly Jewish themes. The book that catapulted him to fame was Jew Süss, published in the United States as Power, a fictionalized biography of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, a Jewish financier for Prussian royalty in the eighteenth century. Oppenheimer’s sentencing on fraudulent antisemitic charges included hanging and “gibbeting,” or the public display of his hanged corpse in a suspended human-size birdcage for six years. Refusing a last-minute conversion that would have averted his death sentence, Oppenheimer died al kiddush hashem, in sanctification of God’s name, reciting the Sh’ma, Judaism’s central statement of faith in one God. Oppenheimer’s story had been fictionalized before and was later the subject of a Nazi film, but Feuchtwanger’s 1925 version, in which Oppenheimer is a complex figure forced to choose between power and dignity, became an international bestseller. When Feuchtwanger’s close friend Sinclair Lewis won the 1930 Nobel Prize for Literature, Lewis declared in his acceptance speech that Feuchtwanger should have received the prize instead.

Having never heard of Feuchtwanger before, I read The Oppermanns, one of the few contemporary novels he ever wrote. Set in 1932 and 1933, The Oppermanns is the story of four Jewish siblings in Berlin, scions to a successful furniture business founded by their grandfather in the nineteenth century. As the Nazi influence grows, each family member’s sense of self-worth is degraded or destroyed in a dramatic way—from the elder brother, who is forced to surrender the family’s firm to a competitor, to the teenage son, who resorts to suicide to end his humiliation at the hands of his high school teacher, to a younger brother, who signs a petition and ends up in a concentration camp, where he is tortured into madness. Ultimately, the close-knit family is scattered across the world as they flee the country they had always considered home. The novel’s events are described as taking place at the end of “fourteen years of antisemitic incitement” in Germany, tracing back to Germany’s devastating defeat in the first World War. The book is full of references to Judaism, including quotations from the Talmud, yet Feuchtwanger’s writing is conventional, engaging but not artistic. Today, the story feels familiar, even trite—until one remembers that it was first published, in German, in November of 1933.

In my own novels, I often struggle with the desire to write current events into fiction. Usually I chicken out, too nervous about branding myself politically or making statements I might later regret. If this is how a writer feels in peacetime



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