TO REMEMBER, TO FORGET (Lizkor lishcoah)

Novel by Dahn Ben-Amotz, 1968

In the 1990s, with the rise to prominence of the self-proclaimed New Historians in Israel, many of the country's founding myths were critically analyzed and exposed. While this debate initially was concerned primarily with the 1948 War and the plight of the Palestinian refugees, the Holocaust soon assumed a central role. From the Yishuv's actions during World War II to the treatment of survivors in the hands of the young Jewish state, the instrumetalization of the Holocaust as a means to justify the Zionist enterprise was the target of painful criticism and soul searching by a new generation of scholars.

Set in 1959 and written in 1968, Dahn Ben-Amotz's To Remember, to Forget (Lizkor lishcoah ) can be regarded as a precursor of this debate. The novel tells the story of Uri Lam, a young Israeli architect, and his journey back to Frankfurt, the city of his birth. Lam, who was sent to Italy during the war, is his family's sole survivor, and he returns to Frankfurt to collect reparations from the German government to pay for a new house and car that he purchased in Jerusalem. His trip to Germany confronts this survivor with the country that destroyed his family and forces him to come to terms with his past and with his present as an Israeli Jew visiting a country that has undergone radical changes.

Lam's world is shaped by two seemingly incommensurable poles. He is an Israeli who, like many other Israelis, struggles with the idea of returning to Europe to collect money from the Germans. Lam, born Hirsch Lampel, was recruited in Italy by Zionist emissaries after the war and underwent a typical process of Zionist indoctrination. Upon his arrival in Israel, in an attempt to blend with the local culture that despised everything associated with the Diaspora, he changed his name to Zvi (Hebrew for Hirsch) and then to Uri Lam, and like many young Israelis he went to agricultural school, an integral part of the Zionist corsus honorum. At the same time, however, he was a European Jew whose early childhood memories were shaped by the continent's geographical and cultural landscape.

Lam's original plan is to travel in Italy for a month, to rediscover Europe's grand culture, which has turned into a faint memory for him, and then go to Frankfurt to settle his legal affairs. But while in Italy, instead of high culture he is confronted by the violent side of Europe: Customs officers in the port of Genoa interrogate and search him; he spends a night with a Genoes prostitute; his goods are stolen on his way to Milan. Lam is unable to realize his romantic vision of European culture.

In Frankfurt, struggling with the idea of exchanging the death of his family into hard currency, he meets a young German woman, Barbara. Though fluent in German, Lam initially refuses to speak the language, which he considers the mechanism through which the Nazi evil manifested itself. His first encounter with Barbara, who does not speak English, is reduced to a dialogue made out of a few recognizable words and hand signals. This, for him, serves as a sign that their relationship—and the general dialogue between Jews and Germans—can transcend cultural biases. The couple's burgeoning relationship, which is described against the background of post-war Frankfurt, ends up in a wedding in Germany and with the birth of the couple's son, Jonathan, in Jerusalem.

While he did not possess the literary flare of his contemporaries (Yehuda Amichay, Aharon Applefeld ), and with a style that patches together different story lines into one less-than-cohesive narrative, Ben-Amotz was able to bring to the forefront some issues that were previously regarded as taboos in Israel. Throughout his time in Frankfurt, Lam is constantly faced with reminders of the past (his parents' home, a trip to Dachau) but also a new Germany represented by a younger generation of Germans. In Frankfurt he also contemplates the morality of Jewish nationalism; he goes so far as to wonder whether the Nazi crimes are comparable to the treatment of Palestinian Arabs in Israel—an issue that Israeli historians would only begin to discuss in the 1990s.

Despite the novel's innovative approach to the discussion of the Holocaust in Israel in the 1960s—especially its positive portrayal of German society—ultimately, like most writers of his generation, Ben-Amotz succumbs to the Zionist grand narrative of nationalistic redemption. In the conclusion of the novel, Uri and Barbara move to Israel (make aliya ), and we learn that on the day that their son is born, Adolf Eichmann is captured by the Israeli secret service. Thus, the Zionist ethos of settlement and the development of Jewish power as a negation of the Diaspora and the memory of the Holocaust prevails.

—Eran Kaplan