I would have reformulated Adorno's remark like this: After Auschwitz, there can be no more poetry, except about Auschwitz.
         (Primo Levi)

Cynthia Ozick reviewed The Drowned and the Saved as if it were a suicide note. He had at last let loose his rage. She was proud of him for finally giving in to hate. So what if it cost him his life? She only wished that all his books "had been as vehement." And there's the ugly rub. In order to approve of his farewell testament she needed somehow to trash everything else he'd written. Ladling on such inverted comma words and phrases as "curious peacefulness," "famous 'detachment,'" "so transparent, so untainted," "pure spirit," "vessel of clear water," "well-mannered cicerone of hell," "Darwin of the death camps," and (worst of all) purveyor of "uplift," she actually seemed to sneer.

At the time I thought Ozick's essay impudent and maybe even ulterior. Imagine blaming a writer for his blurbs and a witness for his reasonableness. Why not come right out and complain that he was a Sephardic Jew instead of an Ashkenazi, an assimilated Italian instead of a lacerated Pole, a socialist instead of a Zionist, a nonbeliever going into the camps and a nonbeliever coming out, pro-Diaspora and anti-Eretz Israel, who didn't even speak Yiddish?

I'm older now, and ulterior on my own time. And while it still seems that anyone unmoved to tears and scruple by a brilliant book like The Reawakening has become sadly coarsened, somehow tone-deaf, I am also aware of our desperate need to cling to whatever purchase we think we have on the sudden edge and the bloody sleeve and the fiery sign. Reading mirrors, we are horrified by what we see. We abduct and torment our heroes of consciousness as if we were Giacomettis torturing metals and ideas.

"We hate in itself our masters' insane dream of greatness, and their contempt for God and men, and for ourselves, as men," wrote Levi. And: "It is naive, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism was, sanctifies its victims; on the contrary, it degrades them, it makes them similar to itself, and this all the more when they are available, blank, and lack a political or moral armature." Where to find such armature? To this bonfire, he can't be said to have brought a sword: "We must be democrats first, and Jews or Italians, or anything else, second." But that is who he was, and it would kill him. "I tell you they are just like other people," he said of the Sonderkommandos, "only a lot more unhappy."

He had never wanted to be a writer, or an intellectual, or a victim, or a witness. He had troubles of his own, ordinary spiders, before he met Kafka in the gray zone. And now that we know all about them, there still remains the mystery of his transcendence. For a while, only for a while, but all the more astonishing--water tasted like the sky.

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