Of Other People's Holocaust: Trauma Empathy and Film

8/10/2019 Of Other People's Holocaust: Trauma Empathy and Film

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G R E G O R Y J A Y

Other Peoples Holocausts: Trauma, Empathy,and Justice in Anna Deavere Smiths Fires

in the Mirror

he one-woman shows of Anna Deavere Smith combine

journalism and performance art to explore the often-

violent misunderstandings among different cultural

communities. For both Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights,

Brooklyn, and Other Identities (1993) and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992

(1994), Smith interviewed many of the actual protagonists in two

traumatic urban conflicts that had riveted the nation. By deft

editing, she then turned their words into a series of dramatic mono-

logues and by imitation transformed their language, vocal manner-

isms, gestures, and clothes into theatrical experiences that test the

audiences social conscience. As Anne Anlin Cheng observes, On

Smiths multiethnic stage, it is precisely the ethical question of point

of view that is being explored, as diverse characters move back and

forth between grief and grievance, or between a mourning for loss

and a demand for justice (171). In Fires in the Mirror, the ensuing

cacophony grows most heated when speakers invoke the rhetoric of

holocaust, including the Jewish Holocaust and the black experienceof enslavement.1 There is something both illuminating and limiting

Contemporary Literature XLVIII, 1 0010-7484; E-ISSN 1548-9949/07/0001-0119

2007 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

T

1. I will use Holocaust to refer to the historically specific attempt by the Nazi

government to exterminate the Jewish people; I will use holocaust to refer more

generically to experiences of horrific suffering by groups persecuted on the basis of

ethno-racial difference. Thus my capitalizing of Holocaust does not assert the

uniqueness of the Jewish experience but rather its historical status as an event (the way a

proper name designates an individual person as distinct). I use Holocaust rather than

Shoah in keeping with the language of Smiths interviewees, while acknowledging that

many in and out of the Jewish community prefer Shoah precisely because it connotes


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about this rhetoric, as Smiths performance demonstrates. In Crown

Heights, each group has experienced a terrible lossthe accidentaldeath of a young boy, the stabbing death of a rabbinical studentthat

becomes rhetorically attached to foundational historical traumas

that lie at the center of that groups cultural identity. In figuratively

swearing to never forget these losses, each community both endures a

kind of melancholy of unresolved grief and, at the same time,

strengthens its identity by keeping alive the memory of what has

been lost. As their speeches incite our empathy, however, they also

create competing and contradictory narratives that make it difficult

for the audience to take sides or to form a united community sure ofwhere justice lies.

In the introduction to their anthology Loss: The Politics of Mourning,

David L. Eng and David Kazanjian call for a politics of mourning

that might be active rather than reactive, and they suggest that a

better understanding of melancholic attachments to loss might

depathologize those attachments, making visible not only their

social bases but also their creative, unpredictable, political aspects

(23).2 In Fires in the Mirror, Smith enacts such a politics of mourning,

taking it across ethno-racial and religious boundaries. By identifying

with, acting out, and working through multiple points of view oncross-cultural conflicts, she endeavors to represent and depatholo-

gize the attachments that fuel them.3 Smiths impersonations do jus-

tice to each characters interpretation of events by grounding that

individuals world view in exquisitely rendered details of locality

and personality. Smith arranges the order of her monologues to

120 C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E

the specificity of this catastrophe as a Jewish one. See The Holocaust: Definition and

Preliminary Discussion.

2. On depathologizing melancholia, see Eng and Han 36367.

3. Dominick LaCapra discusses acting out and working through in reaction to

Holocaust trauma in Representing the Holocaust (20524) and Writing History, Writing

Trauma (14153), as well as throughoutHistory and Memory after Auschwitz. For a diverse

and helpful anthology of critical approaches to Holocaust representation, see Berel Langs

Writing and the Holocaust. In Spectacular Suffering, Vivian M. Patraka explores theatrical

texts on the Holocaust which, like Smiths Fires, move somewhat uneasily between

reverence and playfulness: it is postmodernism that sees the deadness of that reverential

gesture toward the Holocaust, but it is the Holocaust (and its goneness) that marks the

point at which discursive play becomes a screen to keep the dead at a distance (8).


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highlight how they dialogue with and contradict one another; in so

doing, her performances make reconciliation into a problem at onceemotional, epistemological, social, and political. Smith intends audi-

ences and readers to engage in the same labor of unsettling cross-

cultural empathy with loss that she herself performs on stage; if we

do, the result complicates our commitments by challenging the iden-

tity politics that influence them. In the process we become more

accountable to each others griefs and grievances and thus enter into

a difficult negotiation of ethical, social, and political demands.

Reconciling the competing claims of different stories, however,

becomes especially problematic when each side invokes the rhetoricof holocaust to frame its tale, not least because the effort to work

through trauma toward personal or social reconciliation runs head-

long into the imperative to remain true to the lost.

Surprisingly, commentaries on Smiths work pay little attention to

how black and Jewish holocaust discourse shapes the language and

perspective of her characters. While my analysis belongs to the general

effort to connect Holocaust studies and cultural studies, it specifically

answers Paul Gilroys injunction to set the histories of blacks and

Jews within modernity in some sort of mutual relation. Aware of the

dangers involved in comparing slavery and the Holocaust, Gilroynonetheless contends that the issues of tradition and memory provide

a key to bringing them together in ways that do not invite a pointless

and utterly immoral wrangle over which communities have experi-

enced the most ineffable forms of degradation (212). Following recent

theorists such as Dominick LaCapra, Saul Friedlander, Shoshana

Felman and Dori Laub, Cathy Caruth, and Michael Rothberg, we can

read Smiths testimonial performance through the problematics of

holocaust trauma, both black and Jewish. As Eng and Kazanjians

anthology shows, such problematics are not limited solely to blacksand Jews but may be discerned across a spectrum of texts by diverse

social or ethno-racial groups wherein the politics of loss, mourning,

empathy, and justice is central.

As we listen to the words of Smiths African American speakers, we

hear the echoes of a rich literature of terrors survivors, from slave nar-

ratives and songs to the major stories and novels of the African

American tradition, including Toni Morrisons Beloved, which reminds

us how we may become possessed by the re-memory of slavery and

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racial violence. Historical traumas are like the ghosts of experiences

that gain a substantial presence, demanding to be remembered, and toreceive some just account. The need to negotiate the performance of

that trauma in the practice of everyday life and everyday violence is

now recognized by the growing body of scholarship on black popular

culture, such as Eric Lotts work on minstrelsy and Saidiya V.

Hartmans keen analysis of performative resistance. As Cheng writes

in her chapter on Twilight, Smiths characters are caught between

grief and grievance, unable to resolve their psychological pain in

part because the social system offers no curative justice: Since there is

no external structure to house the painful effects of racism, its complexlegacies of anger, shame, and guilt can only be internalized (172). Or, I

would add, they may find expression in competing acts of re-memory

that cry out for justice.

LaCapra notes that trauma brings about a lapse or rupture in

memory that breaks continuity with the past, thereby placing iden-

tity in question to the point of shattering it (History and Memory 9).

Acting out repeats the trauma without achieving comprehension

or reconciliation, while working through allows the subject to

attain some degree of understanding and control, find a just account

of the past, and thus move forward into the future (thus the past,and acting out, are incorporated rather than denied or left behind).

This may well be what Morrison means by re-memory, when his-

torical traumas come to occupy social space irrespective of our indi-

vidual experiences (3637). Judith Butler argues, however, that there

can be something else that one cannot get over, cannot work

through, which is the deliberate act of violence against a collectiv-

ity, humans who have been rendered anonymous for violence

and whose death recapitulates an anonymity for memory (468).

Slavery and the Holocaust thus may be seen as two historical trau-mas of personal as well as group cultural identity, horrors that

simultaneously undermine efforts at group identity and function as

founding traumas for a collective history. Moreover, the larger

sociocultural failure to work through these traumas leaves many

with the feeling that their injustice has yet to be addressed.

Participants and commentators interpret and articulate the events

of Crown Heights through a traumatic discourse that references

these two foundational horrors. While the discourse that compre-



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hends Crown Heights by reference to slavery and the Holocaust

reveals much, these references can also cause historical mispercep-tions and create obstacles to cross-cultural empathy.

In Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, Martha

Nussbaum delineates the connections among literary experience,

empathy, justice, and the building of a democratic society. Her

books central subject is the ability to imagine what it is like to

live the life of another person who might, given changes in circum-

stance, be oneself or one of ones loved ones (5). Nussbaum breaks

this sympathetic identification down into two components, empa-

thy and compassion (or pity). Empathy entails identificationwith the feelings of the character (rage, love, hunger, jealousy) and

so involves us in their values and beliefs, since these determine

what they perceive. Thus empathy has an essential cognitive di-

mension, capable of teaching us what the other knows, believes,

and feelsthough we retain our critical distance. We may em-

pathize with a characters emotion even though, as a judicious

spectator, we also understand that he or she is mistaken (take the

case of Othellos jealousy, for example). In feeling compassion (or

pity), however, we make a specific judgment: As Aristotle long ago

argued, this emotion requires the belief that another person is suf-fering in a serious way through no fault of her own, or beyond her

fault (65). Justice, then, requires that we imagine the particular cir-

cumstances that determine an individuals actions, empathize with

what it feels like to pursue common human aspirations in such cir-

cumstances, and judge whether what happens to that individual is

deserved. Moreover, justice provides a judgment about the past that

leads to a compensatory, and resolving, future action. Justice both

understands and heals. To do justice involves more than mimesis or

the repeated representation of past traumas (which could still beonly acting out), and so judgment requires a working through

using complex tools of historical knowledge, critical argument, or

performative irony to supplement and correct memory or testi-

mony. But if we perceive the chasm between ethno-racial groups as

unbridgeable, or if we assert the impossibility of empathizing across

such divides, how can we do justice to one another?

Much of the tension in Smiths work comes from dramatizing this

contradiction between a humanist vision of commonality and a

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postmodernist commitment to an identity politics that rejects identifi-

cation with or by others.4 Black and Jewish holocaust discourseexplores the limits of empathy and questions the ethics, as well as

the possibilities, of understanding what the other has suffered.

Such conflicts over memory, trauma, testimony, and historical

representation characterize, for example, the commentaries on

Claude Lanzmanns 1985 testimonial documentary, Shoah. Shoshana

Felmans description of it sounds almost like an analysis of Smiths

drama: Because the testimony is unique and irreplaceable, the film

is an exploration of the differences between heterogeneous points

of view, between testimonial stances which can neither be assimi-lated into, nor subsumed by, one another (207). Felman, citing Elie

Wiesels statement, our generation invented a new literature, that of

testimony, asks, Why has testimony in effect become at once so cen-

tral and so omnipresent in our recent cultural accounts of ourselves?

(6). Smiths Fires in the Mirrorbelongs to this genre of the testimonial

andalong with the transcripts of the Anita Hill, Rodney King, and

William Jefferson Clinton casesdocuments how the literature of tes-

timony accumulates in proportion to our inability to arrive at a

widely accepted verdict. Truth remains on trial even after the official

judgment is in, so we continue to return to the witnesses for reenact-ments of their tales, as if one more replay might expose the hidden

truth. And mourning continues as long as justice is deferred.

Smiths testimonial monologues practice what I call performa-

tive empathy. For Smith,

[e]mpathy and the ability to identify with the other is proof that our color,

our gender, our height, our weight is only a frame of something else called

the soul. And politically, of course, that proof is the very ingredient we

need to get to we, to get to move from me to us.

(Talk to Me 7172)

Education gives us more facts, more evidence, but it does not give

us empathy, she declares (Talk to Me 160).5 Yet the testimonies in


4. Dorinne Kondo argues persuasively that Smith does not embrace a liberal humanist

critique of identity politics or a utopianism beyond race; for a similar position see Debby

Thompsons essay on the complexity of Smiths performative approach to racial identity.

5. In his foreword to Fires in the Mirror, Cornel West argues that Smiths sensitive

renderings of the tragic and comic aspects of the reactions and responses of Blacks and Jews


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Fires in the Mirror do not move easily from me to us, since we

witness how the facts are understood so differently by the blackand Jewish communities of Brooklyn. Thus the work of identifi-

cation does not produce a universal perspective (or humanist

commonality) that makes us all one; instead, it delineates how con-

flicting points of view arise, dramatizes the virtues and vices of

each perspective, and refuses to offer any easy reconciliations.

Performative empathy is an acting out that includes the cogni-

tive dimension inherent to all emotions, but it is also a working

through that challenges us to understand the other through a

radical crossing of identity boundaries. Performative empathyhelps us see the gaps between our own understanding and the

perceptions of the subject whom we reenact. Smiths method of

connecting to but not appropriating the other recalls LaCapras

insistence that empathy should not be conflated with unchecked

identification, vicarious experience, and surrogate victimage; we

learn best through an empathic unsettlement that questions iden-

tities rather than providing them with prepackaged symbolic, nar-

rative, or ideological resolutions (Writing History 4041). Megan

Boler similarly argues for a pedagogy of discomfort in which an

ethical relation to the others trauma becomes a disturbing lesson inhow to bear witness to the unspeakable and the unimaginable

(15561). Though Smith mimics her protagonists words and ges-

tures with uncanny accuracy, the difference she also produces

through her inflections, staging, editing, and juxtapositions among

characters opens up an interpretive space between herself and her

subjects. As audience, we in turn enter that space complexly, on the

one hand identifying with the character through Smiths empathic

performance and, on the other hand, feeling unsettled as we think

J A Y 125

to the Crown Heights crisis give our universal moral principles a particular heartfelt

empathy (xvii). According to West, this empathy, combined with the plays exposure of

what he calls the ordinary foibles of human responses (xviii), provides the foundation

for a humanistic vision of how to forge bonds of trust (xxii). Tania Modleski challenges

such humanistic readings of Smith in arguing that there is something sexist about seeing

women, especially black women, as vessels of empathy (60). Debby Thompson goes

even further, seeing Smiths performances as poststructuralist exercises exposing the

radically constructed character of subjectivities and racial categories, a stance that

questions whether there are fixed identities out there with which to empathize.


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through the differences among the subjects, the actress, and our-

selves. Performative irony supplements or corrects performativeempathy and so helps us work through what is being acted out.

Smith explains this approach in her introduction to Fires in the

Mirror. As a teacher of acting, she had come to reject the notion that

you create a character through a process of realizing your own sim-

ilarity to the character. She continues: I began to become more and

more troubled by the self-oriented method. I began to look for ways

to engage my students in putting themselves in other peoples

shoes. . . . I became increasingly convinced that the activity of reen-

actment could tell us as much, if not more, about another individualthan the process of learning about the other by using the self as a

frame of reference. The frame of reference for the other would be the

other (xxvixxvii). Smiths curriculum mixes the ethical imperative

to respect the other as other with the pedagogical imperative of

learning about the other through a displacement of self. The empa-

thy of her method combines the traditional humanistic goal of

learningputting ourselves in other peoples shoeswith a stric-

ture against imperialism and colonialism, against knowledge that

begins with the selfs presumption of its centrality and privilege. In

Talk to Me she writes: Im not the other and can never be the other. . . .I can only try to bridge the gap. Traditional acting technique, she

asserts, is based on a very humanitarian assumption that we are all

the same underneath. I dont believe that. Im interested in difference.

I want to know who the character is, not who I am (53). In the play,

the characters are all the same underneath in the sense that they are

all played by Anna Deavere Smith; yet, ironically, the effect of her ven-

triloquial identification is to accentuate who the character is, and

their difference, not their sameness and not what they may have in

common with Smith.To produce this effect, Fires in the Mirror presents over twenty-five

individual monologues created out of dozens of interviews with

people involved in the bitter violence between African Americans

and Lubavitcher Hasidic Jews that broke out in the Crown Heights

section of New York in August 1991. A car traveling in the motorcade

of the Lubavitcher spiritual leader ran a red light, hit another car, and

swerved onto a sidewalk, killing seven-year-old Gavin Cato, a black

boy from Guyana. That night, a group of young African American



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men surrounded Yankel Rosenbaum, a twenty-nine-year-old

Hasidic scholar of the Holocaust from Australia.6 Rosenbaum wasstabbed by Lemrick Nelson Jr. during the melee and later died at a

hospital.7 Three days of protests and street violence followed. In

Fires, Smith plays all the partsmen and women, blacks and Jews,

Rabbi Joseph Spielman and the Reverend Al Sharptoninhabiting

their words, speech rhythms, and body movements. Smiths per-

formances capture the emotional investment of her characters in

what they think they know, dramatizing the burning attachments

that determine their perceptions. Smith began the interviews for

Fires shortly after the riots, presented a first workshop production inDecember at George Wolfes Festival of New Voices, and premiered

the fuller stage version in May 1992 at the New York Public Theater.

Smith recollects that April 30, 1992, was the scheduled first per-

formance of my play [Fires]. On April 29, a jury of all whites in Simi

Valley, California, came back with a verdict of not guilty on four

police officers who had beaten a black man [Rodney King]. The the-

ater, like other buildings in New York, was closed for fear of new

riots, and the premiere postponed. Smith went home to watch Los

Angeles burn in the mirror of her TV: Flames exploded across the

screen (Talk to Me 9697). The published script is that of the stageplay, while the version filmed in 1993 for television (and directed by

Wolfe) differs somewhat in both the selection and sequencing of the

interviews.8

As her title suggests, then, Smiths Fires in the Mirror also mirrors

other, previous holocausts. The word holocaust, meaning burnt

offering, entered English in the fourteenth century, later becoming

used to name destruction by fire, a meaning taken up in the late

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6. Rosenbaum had written his 1988 M.A. thesis at the University of Melbourne on

the Yizkor books of the Holocaust. Yizkor, or memorial books, outline the history of

Jewish communities in Eastern Europe and their destruction during the Holocaust.

Rosenbaum was in the United States doing research for a Ph.D. dissertation on

representations of the Eastern European Jewish village (shtetl).

7. Nelson eventually confessed to attacking Rosenbaum, but in a May 2003 retrial on

allegations that he violated Rosenbaums civil rights, a jury found that although Nelson

stabbed Rosenbaum, he was not the immediate cause of his death, since questions

remained about negligence by hospital staff that night.

8. For more information on the plays development and versions, see the section on

production history in Fires (lixlx), and Capo.


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1950s when its application to the Nazi murder and burning of the

Jewish people became widespread. During the black holocaust oflynching from 1865 into the late twentieth century, the mob murders

of thousands of African Americans often featured the public per-

formance of the burning alive of the victim or the incineration of the

corpse, flaming spectacles echoed by the cross-burnings of the Ku

Klux Klan.9 Gavin Cato and Yankel Rosenbaum thus figuratively,

and problematically, become holocaust sacrifices, their remembrance

offered up to us in verbal rituals that, though mourning the lack

of justice, may inflame further misunderstandings. This mourning

for justice, moreover, focuses on the meaning of an accident, or two.The accident of Gavins death and the accidental meeting precipitat-

ing Yankels killing were senseless encounters, but these are precisely

the events that testimony longs to make into meaning. Invested with

so much significance, these events appear overdetermined rather

than accidentalfated as well as fatalas each community devises

an interpretation rooted in its own historical memory and contempo-

rary needs. Each side reads each accident as a symptom of its own

traumatic case history and so finds a talking cure in the discourses

Smith reiterates. But one sides medicine is the others poison.

As black and Jewish speakers invoke their respective histories ofhorrific suffering, the question arises, Can empathy extend to other

peoples holocausts? Or does the discourse of holocaust tend to limit

empathy by claiming a special status for ones own trauma? These

questions recur throughout Firesbut dominate the opening section,

where Smith juxtaposes the conflicting narratives of the minister

Conrad Mohammed and the author Letty Cottin Pogrebin. These two

performances spell trouble for Smiths theory of empathy. Claims for

the uniqueness of ones holocaust, be it an African American or a

Jewish claim, tend to deny the capacity for, or effectiveness of, cross-cultural empathy. Such claims may suggest that only one group of

people has suffered this fate, and thus that efforts to understand that

fate by means of identification must necessarily fail, and may even

be unethical. Performative empathy assumes the possibility that the

unique can be re-presented, or dramatized, whereas claims for the

uniqueness of a holocaust often lead to iconoclastic claims that such a


9. For a thorough recent history of lynching, see Dray.


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holocaust cannot be represented.10 Holocaust controversy gives us,

from Smiths perspective, a case of what she calls house arrest, aspeople take up residence in the identity secured by the special claims

holocaust discourses make for them.11

Smith first presents Mohammedat that time New York leader of

the Nation of Islamlecturing her over breakfast, followed imme-

diately by a scene in which Pogrebin reads to Smith, over the phone,

a passage from one of her books. The dialogue between these mono-

logues is a kind of found poetry, or an accident that Smiths canny

editing turns into a trial of contrasting witnesses. Although Smiths

mimicry of these idiosyncratic voices and gestures suggests theirutter uniqueness, their carefully designed place in the text sets them

up as representative types, or as testimonial voices embodying two

different collective memories. The Mohammed-Pogrebin sequence

exposes the arrested emotions of both sides by articulating their

competing claims side by side. Smiths performance holds up a mir-

ror in which each side is asked to witness the holocaust of the other;

more importantly, that witnessing prompts us to question the uses

of holocaust rhetoric that preclude rather than enable empathy.

To understand what happened in Crown Heights, says

Mohammed, one must know that [t]he condition of the Black man

in America today is part and parcel, through the devilishment that

permitted Caucasian people to rob us of our humanity, and put us

in the throes of slavery (Fires 52). In fashioning a narrative that

makes him a witness to the memory of the black holocaust,

Mohammed draws on the strong literary tradition that begins in the

slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs and

continues through to modern historical novels of testimony such

as Margaret Walkers Jubilee , Gayl Joness Corregidora, Charles

JohnsonsMiddle Passage, and Morrisons Beloved. As in such texts,Mohammed graphically recounts the horrors of the Middle Passage

and slavery as he contends: [N]o crime in the history of humanity

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10. The issue of whether holocausts render art and representation untenable was most

famously raised by Theodor Adornos comments about poetry after Auschwitz,

analyzed, for example, in Rothberg, Traumatic Realism 2558.

11. House Arrest is the title Smith used on a number of occasions for her

performance piece on American politics and the 1996 race for the White House. On our

need for safe houses of identity, see Talk to Me 2324.


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has before or since equaled that crime. The Holocaust did not equal

it. Oh, absolutely not (Fires 5254). Though acknowledging that theHolocaust was a horrible crime, a disgrace in the eyes of civi-

lized people, and a crime that also stinks in the nostrils of God,

Mohammeds numerical comparison of the two holocausts calcu-

lates two hundred fifty million lost versus six million murdered.

The ethos that Mohammed has developed combines anger, wit,

logic, historical argument, and showmanship in teaching Smith a

lesson about the imperative of cultural survival. The Black man in

America today is an amnesia victim who has lost knowledge of

himself because he has no contextual understanding of whatidentity is (Fires 5556):

So this proves that it was the greatest crime.

Because we were cut off from our past.

Not only were we killed and murdered,

not only were our women raped

in front of their own children.

Not only did the slave master stick

(The spoon drops onto saucer)

at times,daggers into a pregnant womans stomach,

slice the stomach open

push the baby out on the ground and crush the head of the baby

to instill fear in the Massas of the plantation.

(Stirring again)

Not only were these things done,

not only were our thumbs

(Spoon drops)

put in, in devices

that would justslowly torture the slave

and tear the thumb off from the root.

Not only were we sold on the auction block

like cattle,

not permitted to marry.

See these are the crimes

of slavery that nobody wants to talk about.

(5657)



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As Mohammed sternly lectures his listener, repeatedly slapping his

sugar packets against the table for emphasis, Smiths performanceunsettles empathy and identification, forces us to recognize the

others point of view as other, both objectively compelling and per-

sonally idiosyncratic. At the same time, Mohammeds we enacts a

sympathetic identification between himself and his slave ancestors

that heightens his moral authority and solicits the audiences empa-

thy. The mournful details he provides are crucial, since their

empathic power provides testimonial witness to a crime that the

dominant culture has yet to bring to justice.

Concluding that the most significant crime was that they cutoff all knowledge from us . . . took from us our names, gave us

names like Smith (Fires 57), Mohammed casts Smith herself as a

lost child of rape and miscegenation. The greatest violence of the

African American holocaust lay in its separation of the enslaved

from their ancestral African cultures. Mohammed even implies that

if Smith wants to join the we of African American kinship, she

will have to stop empathizing with the Jewish people. His voice

mounting in didactic superiority and sarcasm, Mohammed says to

Smith, So this kind of thing, Sister, is what qualifies slavery as the

greatest crime ever committed (emphasis added). In Mohammedsaccount, the claim of the Jewish people to be the chosen people once

more cuts the African off from his ancestors: They have stolen our

garment. Stolen our identity (57). The monologue ends by invok-

ing Louis Farrakhans teaching that we are the chosen of God, that

the Jewish people are masquerading in our garment, and with

Mohammeds disparaging assertion that only seven verses in the

Bible support the Jews claim to be the descendants of Abraham

(58). In the video of the performance, this last speech occurs in melo-

dramatic close-up, so that whatever moral authority and personalcredibility Mohammed earlier gained crumbles in the bright light of

his extremism. This sensationalized ending goes well beyond the

verbatim performance of the interviewees words as Smith gives

us her subversive interpretation of Mohammeds excess.12 This

J A Y 131

12. Janelle Reinelt argues that Smiths mimicry of Mohammeds gestures undercuts

his sincerity by foregrounding his own performance (615). I am grateful to Professor

Jos Esteban Muoz of New York University for pointing outin response to a conference


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scene demonstrates Smiths intention to expose the relation of lan-

guage to cultural identity through studying speech as betrayalbetrayal of an individuals character, but betrayal too of the larger

cause of human justice for which an individual may be striving (Talk

to Me 50). Mohammeds perception of a Jewish claim to unbroken

descent, and thus to cultural continuity, may be what angers him

the most, given his emphasis on the discontinuity of the African

diaspora. Chosen by history, he in turn chooses not to be the sacrifi-

cial Isaac, not to accept the position assigned to him in the others

the white manshistory. Yet in teaching this lesson, he appears to

sacrifice his own capacity for getting outside himself. The satire inSmiths physical portrait supplies what Mohammed seems to lack

the ability to laugh at himself, or to see himself as the other sees him,

including those who have seen him as an anti-Semite. That he is in

part justified in taking this stance and deserves respect for it only

deepens the tragedy.

The found poetry of Smiths work shows in her transition to the

Pogrebin segment, titled simply Isaac, which capitalizes on the

accident that links Mohammeds dismissal of the Jewish peoples

claim to be the sons of Abraham to the actual name of Pogrebins

mothers cousin. Pogrebins story must now be made accountable toMohammads lecture, and vice versa. The dialogue between them

dramatizes the problem of mutual accountability that lies at the

heart of how Fires in the Mirror approaches the subject of black-

Jewish relations. The monologue about Isaac comes from Pogrebins

1991 book Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America,

which opens by explaining Pogrebins sense of doubleness, her

hyphenated life as both Jew and feminist. This double identity cre-

ates conflicts for her, though it also produces perspectives that allow

her to uncover meanings and decode power relations in society(xiii). Pogrebin frames her notion of doubleness by way of W.E.B. Du

Boiss famous formulation of double consciousness in The Souls of

Black Folk, thus starting a thread of black-Jewish comparison taken

up in later chapters. We who have a double identity will not deny

one part of ourselves to serve the interests of another, Pogrebin


presentation of an earlier version of this essayhow the music and lighting alienate us

from Mohammed at the end of the piece.


16/32

declares (xix).13 Her critique of identity politics makes her place in

Smiths cast of characters a fitting one, as Pogrebin seeks to do justiceboth to the group affinities that shape us as well as to the idiosyn-

cratic individual histories that make each identity incommensurable

with others.

Pogrebins insistence on her own double identity prompts us to see

Smiths work more autobiographically. The diverse personae Smith

impersonates also represent the mixture of her own multifaceted

character: black, white, female, feminist, artist, professional, American.

Minister Mohammed pointedly reminds Smith of her own Caucasian

features and interracial origins when he says, regarding the treatmentof Africans under slavery: Our women, raped before our own eyes,

so that today some look like you, some look like me. . . . This is a

crime of tremendous proportion (Fires 54). Mohammed represents

Smiths multiracial identity not as an accident (much less a beneficial

perspective for an expanded awareness) but solely as the result of a

criminal violence integral to the black holocaust. His characterization

of Smith makes it more difficult to enact Pogrebins mandate that

those who have a double identity will not deny one part of our-

selves, for the white part of the mixed race African American is,

according to Mohammeds account, the bastard legacy of a genocidal

rapacity. Mohammed seems to say that building bridges to whites,

including Jews, would be a betrayal of Smiths raped foremothers.

His gesture suggests that there is something monstrous about Smiths

appearance, which is indeed quite European in facial features (else-

where Smith recalls the trouble she had getting acting parts because

she was neither black enough nor white enough for casting directors)

(Talk to Me 26). Why did Smith include this characterization of herself

in the script? Was it to capture the legitimate force of Mohammeds

argument about the scale and horror of the black holocaust? Does italso signal a challenge to Smiths project of performative empathy,

since Mohammed implies that Smith will not understand her own

double consciousness until she learns to repudiate its white strains?

Or is Smith showing us how Mohammeds language betrays his iden-

tity politics? As Paul Gilroy has argued, such a politics shapes the

J A Y 133

13. For a discussion of how double consciousness may help define the relation of

black and Jewish experience dialectically, see Gilroy; and Rothberg, W. E. B. Du Bois.


17/32

Afrocentric discourse on slavery and modernity. By concentrating on

the supposedly unique experience of only one group, this discourseslights the actual transcultural reality of the encounter between

blacks and Jews. Gilroys study of the Black Atlantic emphasizes

how the black and Jewish diasporas flow through and illuminate one

another as they interact. These diasporas belong to a common history

of Western racism, technological capitalism, and colonial imperialism

that encompasses both slavery and the Holocaust.

By staging her telephone exchange with Pogrebin directly after

Mohammeds monologue, Smith may be seen to be answering him,

affirming double consciousness and the crossing of racial bound-aries through performative empathy and historical memory.

Moreover, Isaacs story points to a moral about working through

traumatic horrors rather than repeating them over and over in ways

that reinforce identity boundaries. In this scene, Pogrebin reluc-

tantly agrees to read Isaacs story to Smith:

Because he was blond and blue-eyed he had been

chosen as the designated survivor of his town.

That is the Jewish councils had instructed him to do anything

to stay alive and tell the story.For Isaac

anything turned out to mean this.

The Germans suspected his forged Aryan papers and decided that he

would have to prove by his actions that he was not a Jew.

They put him on a transport train with the Jews of his town

and then gave him the task of herding into the gas chambers

everyone in his train load.

After he had fulfilled that assignment

with patriotic

German efficiency,the Nazis accepted the authenticity of his identity papers

and let him go.

Among those whom Isaac packed in the gas chambers that day

dispassionately as if shoving a few more items into an overstuffed

closet

were his wife

and

two children.

(6162)



18/32

Whatever justice lies in this particular Isaacs claim to Abrahams

ancestry, he is one of the chosen ones of the Jewish Holocaust, inmore than one sense. Because of his Aryan features, he is chosen by

his community elders to survive, to witness, to endure to tell the

story, though to become a witness he must also become a sacrificial

victim and pay a terrible price. This passing episode exposes the

absurdity of establishing identity based on physical features and

exposes the contingency of the relation of appearance to race (as

had Mohammeds remark about Smiths Caucasian features).

Though Yankel Rosenbaums selection that night in Crown Heights

is never explicitly mentioned here, it nevertheless becomes a refer-ent of Isaacs tale, both as a repetition of anti-Semitism and as

another instance of how the accident of appearance becomes the jus-

tification for a life-and-death decision. Smith performs Pogrebins

narrative with tremendous vocal pathos, imitating the tonal varia-

tions of syntactic emphasis characteristic of American Jewish speech

influenced by Yiddish patterns. Mohammads statistical argument

about the magnitude of the black holocaust now appears in dia-

logue with the individual tale of horror lived by Isaac and relived by

Pogrebin in telling it, by Smith in reenacting it, and by the audience

to the degree that we join the theater of cross-cultural empathy.The episode continues, however, to a conclusion that underscores

the cost of accountability. As promised, Isaac, the designated

survivor, arrived in America, with prematurely white hair and a

dead gaze within the sky blue eyes thatd helped save his life. Isaac

told his story to dozens of Jewish agencies and community leaders

and to groups of families and friends. . . . For months he talked,

speaking the unspeakable:

And as he talkedIsaac seemed to grow older and older

until one night

a few months later

when he finished telling everything he knew

he died.

(62)

Smith/Pogrebins vocal inflection of the final two words renders

them in a high-pitched, ironic tone, one that mixes resignation,

J A Y 135


19/32

sadness, poignancy, and a tragic feeling of fatality. But to what

exactly does Pogrebins monologue testifyto the facts of Isaacsexperience, or to the trauma of his own fatal testimonial perform-

ances? In LaCapras terms, Isaac repeats his trauma but cannot

work it throughthat is left to us. Arguably, Isaac becomes too

intensely identified with witnessing the Holocaust, as indeed did

other survivors, some of whom eventually committed suicide. In

different terms, he cannot pass from melancholia to mourning or to

the creation of new attachments. His story is an enigma that leaves

us with many questions. Does Pogrebins monologue mean to tes-

tify once more to the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust, by imply-ing that it has the special power to kill those who give witness to it,

or that it occupies a place of unrepresentability unique among his-

torical events? Is the loss so great, so pathological, that no process of

mourning can put away its ghosts? Does Isaacs sacrifice redeem

meaning for the horror of the Holocaust, or is the narrative of sacri-

ficialism an empty literary trope when applied to events such as

this? Was Isaacs death after his storytelling an accident or a family

legend, or does it mean something about Holocaust testimony?14

Pogrebins story of Isaac at first appears to present a neat answer

to Minister Mohammed. She begins by warily telling Smith of herreluctance to retail the Jewish Holocaust story again: Im beginning

to worry that were trotting out our Holocaust stories too regularly

and that were going to inure each other to the truth of them (Fires

59). But which holocaust? Pogrebin refers to our Holocaust sto-

ries, and the published script indeed capitalizes Holocaust as if it

refers to a singular, presumably Jewish, event. Why then our? Is

this plural possessive an accident? Or does Smiths pronunciation of

it mean that our Holocaust stories refers to both the black and

Jewish holocausts? Does the line mean, were going to inure eachotherthat is, blacks and Jewsto the truth of each others

holocaust narratives with too much telling? The indeterminacy of

this our articulates the problems of holocaust representation and


14. Isaacs narrative appears to differ from what Lawrence Langer describes as the

typical pattern of much written survivor testimony, with its trajectory from the rounding

up to the camps to liberation, and so seems closer to the oral testimonies in which Langer

finds a resistance to narratives of redemptive closure.


20/32

holocaust empathy: to whom does a holocaust belong, properly?

Given the importance of holocaust memory to a groups culturalidentity, can one possess someone elses holocaust? Or are holo-

causts by definition improper properties, only proper to those, like

Isaac, that they destroy by virtue of possessing them?

My reading of this section as one that asks us to look critically at

both black and Jewish holocaust rhetoric is supported by the origi-

nal context of the Holocaust story Pogrebin reads to Smith. Neither

in Smiths performance nor in the script does she tell us that Isaacs

story comes from chapter 14 of Deborah, Golda, and Me, titled Aint

We Both Women? Blacks, Jews, and Gender, and specifically fromthe chapter section Slavery and the Holocaust.15 Presumably

Smith knew this when she called Pogrebin and asked her to read

this passage from the book. Isaacs story originally appears as part

of Pogrebins complaint that both sides have used the comparison

of slavery and the Holocaust to create division rather than solidar-

ity: Competitive suffering. Comparative victimology. Some blacks

seem to see our two horrors as part of a zero-sum game: if the

Holocaust wins, slavery loses. And some Jews seem more concerned

with staying number one in the catastrophe ratings than with the feel-

ings of other human beings (302). Though Pogrebins tale containsheartbreaking details about the inhuman cruelty of Nazi methods,

including the intimate revelation of Isaac shepherding his own family

into the gas chambers, the excerpt puts its emphasis on how telling

Holocaust stories may have eventually killed Isaac. Pogrebin links

the survivors testimony with the subsequent growth of a Holocaust

industry that automates and choreographs remembrance: We must

use our nightmare for something more constructive than the reifica-

tion of nightmares (305). We are brought back, then, to Pogrebins

initial words of reluctance about telling too many Holocaust stories.For Pogrebin, the growing rift between Jews and blacks in America

(275) is a wound that invocations of holocaust discourse can exacer-

bate rather than heal.

At first, it appears that Mohammeds dismissal of the Jewish

Holocaust is checkmated by Pogrebins tragic anecdote of Isaacs

J A Y 137

15. Pogrebins title alludes to the famous question posed in an oration by ex-slave

Sojourner Truth: aint I a woman?


21/32

sacrifice. But what would be the lesson of that contradiction? Only the

banal maxim that both holocausts deserve our empathy? Is that a les-son we really need? Or is this counterpoint of stories a warning about

the overrepresentation of holocausts, which is obviously much different

than the claim that we need more and better holocaust representa-

tions? Isaacs story suggests that he did not survive the Holocaust,

except as a witness, and that what he testifies to is an unredeemable

horror. Commenting on survivor testimony such as that analyzed by

Lawrence Langer, Saul Friedlander observes that the catastrophe and

redemption narratives traditional in Jewish historiography fail in the

face of the Holocaust: no mythical framework seems to be takinghold of the Jewish imagination, nor does the best of literature and art

dealing with the Shoah offer any redemptive stance (121). Now,

doubtless we can interpret Isaacs death as the result of his experience

in the camps, or of the trauma of living when so many others died. It is

also possible, however, to understand Isaacs death as taking place on

the sacrificial altar of representation. The Holocaust comes to possess

Isaac until, once the story is finished, he is finished too.

In an interview, Smith says that her intention in juxtaposing

Mohammed and Pogrebin was to have the audience experience the

length of the differences of our perspectives. But it makes a hugedifference who is in the audience for such a site-specific perform-

ance installation. In New York, she recalls, it would be rare when

we did not succeed in diversifying the audience, where there would

be very ethnocentric people who would say, Uh-huh! Yeah! Right!

Teach! during Mohammeds monologue; But what theyre say-

ing yeah to is what other people in the audience think of as horri-

bly anti-Semitic stuff (Media Killers 5). (As Friedlander remarks

in another context, what was traumatic for one group was obvi-

ously not traumatic for the other [124].) Smith notes the contrastbetween Mohammeds energetic recollection of slaverys horrors,

which her performance exaggerates, and Pogrebins reluctance,

which she also highlights dramatically. Smith acknowledges,

Theres a degree to which there could be some people who say, if

you continue to trot the images of slavery out, we will . . . become

obsessed with our own meaning (Media Killers 5). Yet she

includes Mohammeds monologue, despite Pogrebins warning and

knowing how many will find Mohammeds words anti-Semitic.



22/32

Here is her rationale: I think Conrad Mohammed carries a lot of

pain in terms of how much he is willing to have such specific andvivid images of slavery, and thats why I chose to do him, because I

didnt carry with me before I met Conrad any image of somebody

putting something around somebodys thumb. You know, that

particular, and in fact, many of us probably need more specifics,

right? (5). Specifics are what cause traumas. As we empathize

with the speakers, Pogrebins pain and her specifics about how

Isaac ushers his own wife and children into the gas chamber meet

up with Mohammeds specifics about gashed wombs and torn-out

thumbs. For Smith, doing justice to Mohammed means givingcompassionate witness not to anti-Semitism but to a traumatic

pain without which his speech is inexplicable. Which is not to say

that anti-Semitism then becomes acceptable, only thatfor the judi-

cious spectatorcharges of anti-Semitism become an incomplete

response that short-circuits understanding.

The closing episodes of Fires in the Mirror explicitly invoke the

Jewish Holocaust in ways that further complicate the relations

among empathy, witnessing, and justice. The third to the last mono-

logue, titled The Coup, features Roslyn Malamud, a Lubavitcher

woman whose insistence on establishing the truth tends to exacer-bate our sense of her unreliability. Despite her avowed ignorance

(I dont know my Black neighbors) and patronizing tokenism

(Theres one lady on President StreetClaireI adore her),

Malamud voices a universalizing humanistic vision of sameness:

the people in this community want exactly what I want out of life

(123). Malamuds humanism is belied by her failure to achieve com-

passionate judgment, to grasp the impact of poverty, discrimina-

tion, and oppression experienced by her black neighbors and

leading many of them to express their despair in violence. An asser-tion of common values sits uneasily with an othering of the

protesters as manipulated outsiders. She claims, The people who

came to riot here were brought here by this famous Reverend

Al Sharpton, which Id like to know who ordained him? (124).

Malamud quickly descends into racist stereotypes and sexual sensa-

tionalism in her disparaging account of jobless kids and pregnant

black girls. Malamuds most dramatic moment comes when she

protests the injustice of Yankel Rosenbaums killing:

J A Y 139


23/32

this kid who came from Australia . . .

(She sucks her teeth)You know,

his parents were Holocaust survivors, he didnt have to die.

He worked,

did a lot of research in Holocaust studies.

He didnt have to die.

What happened on Utica Avenue

was an accident.

(12526)

This stunning revelation about Rosenbaums parents appears to

bring the entire network of Holocaust references in Fires to a climax,providing a searing irony that greatly deepens our feeling for the

tragedy of his death.

Except that this claim is apparently not true.

Admittedly, James Barrons story in The New York Times two days

after Rosenbaums death reported that Yankel was the son of Jews

who survived the Holocaust in Poland, and perhaps this was the

source of Malamuds misinformation. But in Patricia Hurtados arti-

cle in New Yorks Newsday on February 11, 1997, Yankels brother

Norman states that all four of his grandparents immigrated toAustralia in the early part of the century and settled on a citrus

orchard in Shepperton, about 120 miles from Melbourne.16 Yankel

was indeed a scholar of the Jewish Holocaust and by one report had

interviewed survivors in Poland, and these facts may have some-

how contributed to Barrons and Malamuds stories.

Does it make a difference whether or not Malamuds claim is

true? After all, in most of the monologues in Fires in the Mirror, the

speakers utter some assertions whose truth is questionable. As a

work of art, the play intends not to document the facts surroundingthe Crown Heights conflict but to represent the way cultural and

personal identities determine how each character views the events.

Malamuds passing reference to Rosenbaums parents as Holocaust


16. My search of articles mentioning Rosenbaums parents did not turn up a single

reference to them as Holocaust survivors, other than Barrons. Joseph P. Frieds interview

with the Rosenbaums during their New York visit in 1996 would seem to be an obvious

place to expect such a reference, but none is made.


24/32

survivors is just one of a series of debatable statements she makes.

Yet nothing in the text or performance calls attention to the possibleuntruth of this claim, which thus gathers to itself a tremendous

potential for moral authority and interpretive power. In all likeli-

hood Smith did not know that Malamuds statement was not true

(after all, the information appeared in The New York Times). Most

spectators witnessing Fires would never question Malamuds state-

ment. It does not belong to the limited universe of claims and coun-

terclaims about what actually happened in Crown Heights but

rather takes us again into the rhetorical politics of interpreting it

through holocaust analogies. Dramatically, this revelation aboutRosenbaums parents works well to reinforce the plays concern

with the terrible consequences of injustice. Though the murder of

anyone because of hatred for some aspect of that persons identity is

a terrible thing, the killing of the child of Holocaust survivors

plunges us into a special hell of moral nihilism, for it suggests the

ultimate futility of their triumph over evil and echoes the death of

another Holocaust witness, Pogrebins Uncle Isaac. Such a murder,

in Malamuds eyes, makes Rosenbaums black attackers allies of the

Nazis who had tried to kill all the Jews in the first place. Though

Smiths exaggerated performance of the Malamud character under-cuts this womans authority by demonstrating how unconscious

she is of the biases in her account, the historical irony of this fact

about Yankels parents seems to bolster Malamuds otherwise ques-

tionable equation between Yankels killing and the Nazi Holocaust.

What I am suggesting is that Smiths inclusion of Malamuds

revelationtrue or notis in keeping with her journalistic uncover-

ing of the rhetorical pattern that came out in the interviews.

Reductively, one might say that Malamud is allowed here by Smith

to play the Holocaust card, though only within a context of skepti-cism toward such rhetoric that the entire play leading up to this

moment has helped to create.

The comparison of blacks to Nazis appears earlier in the play as

well, during Michael Miller s monologue, titled Heil Hitler, about

alleged anti-Semitic comments during Gavin Catos funeral:

I am not going to participate in verbal acrimony,

not only

J A Y 141


25/32

were there cries of, Kill the Jews . . .

there were cries of, Heil Hitler.There were cries of, Hitler didnt finish the job.

There were cries of,

Throw them back into the ovens again.

(86)

In using Holocaust paradigms to interpret the events of 1991, both

Miller and Malamud misrepresent the complexity of the situation in

Crown Heights. If what happened on Utica Avenue was an acci-

dent, as Malamud, echoing many others in the play, insists, then

was not what happened down the street a few hours later also insome way accidental? That is, even if Rosenbaums parents had

been Holocaust survivors, that fact would have been an accident of

the occasion, not part of its precipitating motive. Malamuds refer-

ence to the Rosenbaums as Holocaust survivors, however, has the

effect of turning that accident into a fate determined by virulent

black anti-Semitism. Norman Rosenbaum, in a speech not part of

Smiths play, said: To equate the accidental death of a child in an

automobile accident with the murder of my brother is intolerable

and disgusting. Its a perversion associated with the Holocaust

(qtd. in Jamieson and Parente 7). I take this statement to mean thatblack accusations that the Jews were responsible for the death of

Gavin Cato are parallel to Nazi accusations of Christ-killing and the

like against Jews.

Granted, the crowd attacked Yankel Rosenbaum precisely be-

cause he was obviously Jewish. In calling the death of Gavin Cato

merely an accident, however, Rosenbaum dismisses the context of

life within Crown Heights without which the black-Jewish conflict

cannot be understood. The language of accident incorrectly

frames the question as an either/or, as if there is nothing in betweena senseless act and a completely intentional or determined action.

What happened to Gavin and to Yankel fell somewhere in the mid-

dle of a spectrum between accident and fate, which makes doing

justice to what happened all the more difficultand necessary.

From the black perspective, it was no accident that Gavin and his

seven-year-old cousin were playing on the streets of Crown Heights

while their mothers still lived in Guyana, having yet to emigrate.

These two children belong to a long history of slavery, racism, and



26/32

colonial oppression that eventually landed them on that sidewalk

and in the way of an out-of-control car driven by privileged whitepeople. From the black perspective, it was no accident that

the Lubavitcher Rebbe could afford a motorcade or that this motor-

cade could regularly speed through their neighborhood without

concern for the residents. From the black perspective, it was no acci-

dent that young people in Crown Heights felt anger and despair,

and that they directed those emotions at their white, Jewish neigh-

bors. Accidents are in the eye of the beholder, and many a witness

has trouble determining how to apportion blame in an accident.

Whatever Norman Rosenbaum sees, he does not give witness to thelives of his brothers black neighbors. His invoking of the Jewish

Holocaust appears to pointedly give privilege to the sufferings of

his own cultural group at the expense of doing justice to the history

that brought Gavin into harms way.

Similar errors of judgment occur in two monologues that follow

Rosyln Malamuds. In Pogroms, Reuven Ostrov tells Smith about

a man whose mother emigrated from Russia eleven years before,

only to find herself amid the upheaval in Crown Heights: Its like

youre trapped, everywhere you go theres Jew haters. And then he

told me she commit suicide (131):

because of the hardships that they had over there,

and when they came to America

and when this thing started to happen in Crown Heights.

It became painful

and it felt like, like there was no place to go.

Reminding us of Pogrebins tale of Isaac, who dies in America from

the aftershock of anti-Semitism, this narrative resonates with

Malamuds just-performed revelation of Rosenbaums Holocaustancestry. The choice and arrangement of these three cases in the play

apparently shows how the shadow of European anti-Semitism fol-

lows the Jew to America and kills him or her. We have already had

occasion, however, to doubt that interpretation as a full account of

Yankels killing. If we view Ostrovs story as judicious spectators, we

can again detect the fallibility of the Holocaust hermeneutic. The emi-

grant woman mistakes the truth not because she has forgotten to bear

witness, but because she remembers too much. She misinterprets

J A Y 143


27/32

Crown Heights by conflating it with Russia. Her statement every-

where you go theres Jew haters universalizes anti-Semitism into asingle monotonous and ahistorical force, whereas in truth the differ-

ences among Crown Heights, Nazi Germany, and Russia deserve

close analysis if we are to accurately judge the local causes of ethno-

racial conflict instead of seeing it as the inevitable effect of fundamen-

tal and unchangeable animosities. The womans suicide is tragic in

the classic sensethat is, self-inflicted out of a misunderstanding of

her world.

Smith gives the final word of Fires in the Mirror to Gavins father,

Carmel Cato. He has some very tough acts to follow after Malamudsand Ostrovs monologues, which so effectively dramatize Holocaust

hermeneutics and Jewish fears. If Fires has ever been in danger

of taking sides, these monologues prior to Catos are the place,

for the judicious spectator must read against their grain to decon-

struct the claims made by their Jewish speakers. Smith presumably

saves the father for last not only out of respect for his loss, and out of

admiration for his dignity, but because she needs every ounce of the

empathy we feel toward his grief to undercut the contentions of

the Jewish speakers preceding him. The previous monologues

must now be made accountable to Catos story. As Cato was oneof the more infamously common slave names, Carmel Cato comes

into the drama symbolically carrying the memory of slavery

and white domination. His attempt to move from grief, to grievance,

to justice mirrors the historical experience of African Americans

struggling with the losses which slavery entails and the melancholy

of race it instills. Anne Anlin Cheng, David L. Eng, David Kazanjian,

and other theorists have argued that a psychoanalysis of mourn-

ing and melancholia helps delineate the experience of racialized

minorities in America. The effects of racism and the demand forassimilation to the dominant white culture often mean a series of

losses both psychic and cultural, often accompanied by physical and

material losses and griefs, including mourning for a lost homeland.

If melancholia is defined as an inability to incorporate loss and to

move on to new attachments, then melancholia might well be

thought of as underpinning our everyday conflicts and struggles

with experiences of immigration, assimilation, and racialization

(Eng and Han 344).



28/32

Cato meets Smith one evening at the corner where the car struck

Gavin. He recounts that night and its aftermath in a thick WestIndian accent: I saw everything, everything, he says, detailing the

scene and how a lot of sarcastic words were passed towards me

from the police while I was trying to explain: It was my kid! (Fires

135). If we expected that this father would be a saint who does not

share the suspicion of Jews expressed by the plays previous black

characters, then we are in for a surprise:

Sometime it make me feel like its no justice,

like, uh,

the Jewish people,

they are very high up,

its a very big thing,

they runnin the whole show

from the judge right down.

(138)

Catos monologue continues with more about how the Jewish peo-

ple make me say things I dont wanna say and make me do things

I dont wanna do (Fires 139). So though Jewish people can make

mistakes when too closely interpreting Crown Heights through

analogies to the Holocaust, blacks too can err when looking through

the traumatic lens of slavery and its legacy. But substitute the word

white for the word Jewish, and Catos statement stands as a

fairly accurate description of the world that blacks face. If Cato has

picked up anti-Semitism in coming to America, the effect is to dis-

tract him from the larger structure of white supremacy. To Jews who

have had six million relatives murdered because the Nazis judged

them racially impure, insufficiently Aryan, this conflation of Jews

with whites must seem a terrible injustice. Yet unless Jews also seeCatos speech from the standpoint of the others holocaust, they will

not be able to do justice to Catos grief.

Catos pride, his refusal to go to them [the Jewish people] with

pity, governs his persona: I am a special person. I was born differ-

ent. Im a man born by my foot (139). Cato distinguishes between a

degrading pity distorted by unequal relations of power and an

empathic compassion that does justice to the particulars of each per-

sons condition: Theres no way they can overpower me. No theres

J A Y 145


29/32

nothing to hide, you can repeat every word I say. By the accident of

a different birth, Cato is fated, unlike Isaac, to survive as a testimo-nial witness. He speaks his last line, which is also the plays last line,

from a position of strength, granting us the privilege to repeat his

words. Theres no telling what such a rearticulation will give testi-

mony to, or betray, but surely our judgment of the events will be

challenged if we witness the Crown Heights crossroads through

Catos eyes.

Catos mournful speech, however, also prompts us to ask, again,

Why should an accidentindeed, in some sense two accidents

call up slavery and the Holocaust as primary interpretive frame-works? Analyzing Freuds writing on the subject, Cathy Caruth

observes that in Freuds interpretation, the recurring image of the

accident . . . becomes the exemplary scene of traumapar excellence

because it does not simply represent the violence of a collision but

also conveys the impact of its very incomprehensibility and a vio-

lence which has not yet been fully known (6 ). The accidents in

Crown Heights awaken a return of primal traumas because these

historical wounds have never been fully comprehended or worked

through, which is why Catos state of grief is so fitting as the plays

closing emotion. These founding traumas have yet to be compre-hended and so are awakened again by apparently inexplicable trau-

mas in the present. Racism and anti-Semitism remain powerful

traumatizing forces in history, having never been subjected to a

healing justice. They are open wounds in our world. The analogies

to slavery and the Holocaust satisfy the desire of contemporary wit-

nesses to find a meaning for these events, which it is difficult to

accept as accidents without explanation. Though Gavins death is

not a direct result of slavery, and Yankels death is not a direct result

of Nazi-like anti-Semitism, these errant interpretations nonethelesstake us back to facing traumas that, as open wounds, did contribute

to the conditions that helped cause the accidents. The link among

these four eventsslavery, the Holocaust, Gavins death, Yankels

killingcannot be described as either purely accidental or strictly

determined. Rather, the link is fatal, we might say, the result of his-

tories to which we have yet to make ourselves fully accountable and

that therefore go on killing us. The pathos of Carmel Catos closing

monologue deepens when we realize that, like Pogrebins Isaac



30/32

before him, Cato is the traumatized father who grieves because he

has survived his own child. Perhaps in ending the play in this way,Smith intends to suggest that blacks and Jews should empathize as

survivors, seeing the connections between their stories rather than

using those stories to scapegoat one another and thus feed the

flames that have already consumed too many in untimely death.

Whether in relation to slavery or the six million, the injunction

never forget can create a powerful trap through its very incitement

to traumatic speech. Insisting on the uniqueness or incomprehensibil-

ity of ones own holocaust may end up being an acting out that never

includes a working through, thus blocking rather than enablingempathy and justice. Moreover, in positing that no outsider can

really understand, the rhetoric of uniqueness undermines our ethi-

cal responsibility to be accountable to one another. In this reading of

Fires in the Mirror, the issue ceases to be the ridiculous one of judging

whose holocaust was worse, an exercise that can never produce jus-

tice for anyone. In teaching us to be compassionate but critical wit-

nesses, the play enables us to think warily about what happens to

identity, community, and historical understanding when we depend

too much, epistemologically and politically, on holocaust rhetorics.

Invocations of trauma and holocaust can shape our interpretations ofthe present in a manner both revelatory and distorting, becoming a

framework for insight that can also be a frame-up. These episodes in

Firesthe Mohammed-Pogrebin section, and the later dialogue

among Malamud, Ostrov, and Catoalso have a special claim in the

interpretation of Smiths work as a whole because they are keys to

theorizing the problems when traumatic storytelling underpins cul-

tural identity. As we have seen, such scenes unsettle the humanistic

project of putting ourselves in other peoples shoes. Smiths perfor-

mative empathy, then, goes beyond demanding that each side wit-ness the others holocaust. As each of Smiths speakers delivers

passionately felt, closely reasoned, and utterly contradictory accounts

of what happened in Crown Heights, we both empathize and judge,

and thus see more clearly, what inflames their understanding. In

dramatizing the uses and misuses of holocaust discourse, including

its various psychological and political deployments, Fires in the Mirror

makes the audience undergo the trial of judicious spectatorship. The

play mirrors back to us the way our history and feelings inform our

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31/32

judgments, sometimes to the benefit of truth, but sometimes at its

expense. Recalling one of Smiths ambiguous axioms, we might saythat holocaust rhetorics betray the truth.

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Of Other People's Holocaust: Trauma Empathy and Film

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