What's Wrong with Martin Amis's New Holocaust Novel?

More than two decades ago, Martin Amis gave us Time’s Arrow, a novel told from the perspective of a Nazi official who served at Auschwitz. Now he has returned to the death camp with Zone of Interest, a fictional account, partly seen through the eyes of a Jewish prisoner, of a love affair involving a camp functionary and the camp commandant’s wife. The novel showcases Amis’s lavish literary talents, writes Ruth Franklin, especially for satire and parody, but fails to come to terms with the gravity of its subject matter—partly because it labors in the shadow of an entire library of previous fiction and memoirs, but partly for more telling reasons:

Amis is one of the most inventive users of language currently at work in English—his sentences cannot help crackling—as well as a uniquely talented satirist. But when it comes to the deeper problems of the Nazi pathology that gave rise to the jargon he so brilliantly parodies, he does not have much to offer. . . . A novel that raises [possibly unanswerable questions] should at least make an attempt at grappling with them.

Read more at New York Times

More about: Auschwitz, Holocaust fiction, Literature, Martin Amis

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society