A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [226]
MK: There are two things. As a reporter it made it easier. People ask me, “How did you find these people?” I went to places and said, “I'm a Jew. I want to talk to some Jews.” It's not very difficult. But emotionally, I think it was the hardest book I ever did. It was very hard. I would never have set out to write a book about the Holocaust. But in fact I've spent hundreds of hours talking to Holocaust survivors about their experiences, experiences that aren't in the book. But it's what they want to talk about. You can't get to 1945 until you've done the stuff before it. I remember there was one point at which I had done some work in Amsterdam. I was living in Paris and I was going to swing through Antwerp on my way back to Paris and do some research there. I started dreaming at night that I was in Auschwitz and instead I just took a couple of weeks off. It really gets to you. I never had such dreams of identification or connection with the Basques or Caribbeans. I've talked to Basque survivors of Guernica and the Civil War… and I could feel their pain but was still able to maintain my position as the objective observer. If you are Jewish you can't objectively talk—I'm not sure anybody can—to Holocaust survivors.
PG: You said you never set out to write a Holocaust book, but did you end up feeling that this is a Holocaust book?
MK: That's a tough question. Because I so wanted it not to be.
PG: But then the Holocaust permeates the territory you chose, and it comes to permeate you when you immerse yourself in that territory.
MK: It does. One of the truly horrible things about the Holocaust is that it doesn't end in 1945. It keeps affecting our lives in the way we think, and it will affect the way our children see the world. Sixty years later. And so yes, it is a Holocaust book. It is a book about survivors and how they dealt with being survivors. It taught me things that I will always remember. Listening to that CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald after the World Trade Center attack, I knew what was getting to him was the fact that he had all these people who died and he didn't. He survived. In A Chosen Few I spent hours and hours listening to the pain of people of who had survived wondering why they survived and what their life means and what right do they have to survive. Yeah, this has to be a Holocaust book, because for it not to be a Holocaust book you would have to have survivors in 1945 saying, “Oh, thank God that is over, and now onto something else.”
PG: You write that if you want to find Jews in many parts of Central and Eastern Europe you go to the graveyard, because that's where they go—the three or four surviving Jews in the town—to be with their people and meet visiting Jews from elsewhere. That is an extremely powerful image. So it's not a metaphor to call Europe a cemetery of Jews, even as Jews continue to live there. And I felt that the impetus for your book came from your desire to examine that tension: “How could any Jew want to live in Europe at this point? Let's find out. Let's see how they think about it.” I wonder how you found attitudes toward the Holocaust past—and toward its continuing presence—to differ in the communities you visited from the attitudes one finds amongst American Jews, who have become so steeped in the legacy of the Holocaust that at times you almost feel like the extermination of European Jewry has come to be one of the cornerstones of Jewish identity.
MK: My big fear is that we will become—almost in a Christian way—a culture of martyrdom.
PG: Have you ever thought about writing another book on a subject that is as deeply personal to you?
MK: Personal issues, yes, but not necessarily so personal a setting. But I am working right now on a novel that is very Jewish. It's set in New York and as I write, it keeps getting more and more Jewish. In fact, in seven books from Cod, to my books about the Basques to the Caribbean, to Salt, I have never