Abstract
‘Do not judge a book by it’s cover’, and this is a warning for anyone picking up Sue Lieberman’s well researched, scholarly and extremely readable book.
Karnak’s have chosen to package the book in an unassuming brown cover rather like a secret parcel wrapped in brown paper. It is not immediately appealing, you would not be drawn to it in any bookshop display or casually want to pull it from a shelf, and why do this? I came up with—is it because the writer is a woman?
I was excited to be reviewing a book by a woman. Many of the men in our group analytic tribe write books, the women keep a low profile in producing books relevant to group analysis, and here is a book by an integrative and group analytic psychotherapist, who also happens to be a woman. So let us not market it with a striking and attractive cover.
Or is it because Lieberman mainly focuses on ordinary Jews, the Jews of the diaspora who have come to the UK and elsewhere from the shtetls of Russia and eastern Europe? These are people who have survived by keeping a low profile.
In the siddur, the prayer book of the United (orthodox) synagogue there used to be a prayer to bless the Queen and government in thanks for their generosity in accepting the Jews as refugees. These are people who did not want to make trouble. Or in the case of some of my family—coming from Romania to Berlin and then to London in 1933, not wanting to be connected to a religion they did not believe in or recognize as a race.
So the book is keeping a low profile, but I have come out as one of the ordinary Jews who have faced or failed to face the Holocaust. I could have been one of Lieberman’s subjects, for as well as her extensive academic and clinical research she has interviewed many Jews across the generations to inform her subject matter. As she quotes in her introduction:
‘How could this have happened?’
‘What is it about us that led to this?’ (p. xiv, xxivxiv)
And from the Israeli film maker, Ari Folman ‘ . . . the Holocaust is in the DNA of Israel’ (2008).
Because she is not afraid to go where it is hottest, to paraphrase Earl Hopper (2003), and examine the tricky area of Israel’s connection to the Holocaust and the feelings of Israelis toward their fellow Jews in the diaspora, as well as the complicated feelings of diaspora Jews towards Israel. She is also clear that her book has wider implications than its title: ‘I hope that in its telling of this distinct story that we might realize more of the psychological complexity involved in our—or any other community’s—on-going relationship with historic disasters’. (p. xv)
So, it is very relevant to the present situation in Syria and Iraq and further, and to the recent history of Rwanda and Bosnia and further.
But it is also a very particular story, the tale of people like my grandparents who came to London in the late 19th-century following pogroms in Russia. One of Lieberman’s hypotheses is that this story of terror, escape, hazardous journeys, separation from family, land and language and re-settlement in a strange new society is one that is never spoken about. It seems to have been expunged from Jewish history. All the more reason for a double helping of grief about the Holocaust when mourning for a previous exodus has not been done, leaving a group of people with inter-generational trauma.
She carefully examines this trauma resulting from the failure to mourn and referencing Levy and Lemma’s Perversion of Loss (2004) looks at the effect of envy, shame and guilt arising from this situation.
Her chapters range from an examination of trauma, loss, anger, fear, guilt, the complex relationship with Israel and the necessary adoption of the heroic Israeli male persona which sees the diaspora Jews as weak for staying where they are and constructing a life there. And finally she focuses on collective trauma: As with the working through of personal trauma, developing ways to speak authentically about the traumatising impact of the history is critical to our capacity to face ourselves from its terrible legacy of victimhood and otherness (p. xxix)
and: The journey into the sometimes desolate, sometimes turbulent emotional world of our post-Holocaust reactions has still to be mapped: but challenging as they may be to be to find, we do have words. (p. 206)
Because of the subject matter this is not an easy read, but it is easy to read because of the clarity of the writing. And it is very interesting to read because of the depth of its research, the width of its focus and the passion of the author for her subject.
I hope on its re-print the book can have a bright, bold new cover design that can celebrate the author and her work.