Doing Posthumous Justice: The Voices of the Dead in Rosenbaum’s The Golems of Gotham

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Doing Posthumous Justice: The Voices of the Dead in Rosenbaum’s The Golems of Gotham Craig Smith (bio) I want to begin my discussion here by reflecting briefly on this year’s conference theme. Justice is a concept perennially relevant yet always elusive; as such, it is unsurprisingly the condition to which many literary works aspire. Nevertheless, even if literature invests itself in this most abstract of nouns, what verb does (or can) the literary text pair with justice? Is it possible for literature to enact or achieve justice? Does it make more sense to conceive of the literary text seeking to prevent injustice before it happens or halt injustice that is underway? When the literary text comes after the fact of injustice, what is its capacity to repair and restore justice? Idiomatically, of course, authors attempt to “do justice” to the subjects of their writings, whatever those subjects may be, but there is a definite semantic slipperiness attendant to that word do. When the subject(s) of a work of art are themselves victims of as profound an injustice as the Holocaust, the idiomatic sense of doing justice undergoes a necessary degree of literalization. With this in mind, I contend that Thane Rosenbaum’s The Golems of Gotham, a novel that imagines the return to ghostly life of six Holocaust survivor authors in late-twentieth-century New York, invests itself in justice in the concept’s most expansive sense by intervening in a world of globally resurgent neo-Nazism, defending the memory of the Holocaust against what Gavriel Rosenfeld calls its ongoing “normalization,” and, perhaps most importantly, restoring justice to Holocaust authors whose contemporary marginalization and neglect only compounds the injustices of their Holocaust experiences. My primary focus here will be on the novel’s investment in post-humously restoring a form of justice to the dead authors it re-animates within its pages and to whom it offers an earnest homage. In a wider sense, the need for some sort of post-Holocaust restoration of justice is not simply something speculatively intuited and explored by an author like Rosenbaum: it is something survivors have spoken about. For instance, in The Measure of Our Days, the final book in Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After, the words of a French survivor exemplify Delbo’s repeated claim that “it is hard to come back” (256). In her testimony, Poupette speaks of her recent separation from her husband and contrasts her expectations of cosmic reparations for her suffering at the hands of the Nazis with the unfulfilling and dispiriting realities of her return: [End Page 253] I believe there lies within each one of us a deposit of ideas received since childhood, a kind of faith in the immanence of justice. Within each of us there is a double-columned register wherein a balance must exist between debits and credits. In the debit column we list the total of our misfortunes from which no one escapes, the sum total of our whole life. In the credit column, we have that part of happiness to which every human being is entitled, one that serves as a counterbalance. The returnee tells himself that he’s had his entire quota of misfortune at a stroke. And that’s where he’s caught off guard. As for myself, when I returned I got married and was happy. My happiness was due me, I had earned it. And so, when my marriage soured, I was filled with the spirit of revolt. It was unfair. (307) Poupette’s words give voice to the disappointments of justice unrealized— of the profoundest injustices not only not made right but also compounded by post-war existence. While Rosenbaum’s concerns are of a somewhat different nature than the crumbling domestic life that is the wellspring of Poupette’s post-war discontentment, The Golems of Gotham nevertheless shares a similar spirit of revolt at the compounding of injustices endured by Holocaust survivors (and writers). Written by the child of survivors and thoroughly informed by the debates about Holocaust representation extant since Adorno’s famous dictum about writing poetry after Auschwitz, Golems is a complex novel of literary detection that, among other...