Reviewed
by Patricia
Mazon, State University of New York at Buffalo.
Published by H-Women (December, 1998)
Gendering
the Holocaust
For
too long the Holocaust has been seen in male terms,
obscuring the nature of the specific roles, work, and
suffering of women. Now steps are being taken towards
correcting this in a flurry of recently published works,[1] including the
excellent volume, Women in the Holocaust. While Ofer and
Weitzman emphasize that men and women did not have
completely different experiences, the editors highlight
significant areas of divergence. First, the gender roles
of Jewish men and women of the day were obviously
distinct. This factor led many Jews to believe that their
persecution would be focused on the men and spare women
and children. Instead, the Nazis would go after the
entire Jewish population, subjecting men and women to
horrors sometimes similar, sometimes different. Second,
again because of the gender roles of the day, Jewish men
and women reacted differently to the difficulties they
faced.
The
book provides an excellent overview of the topic,
featuring twenty-one chapters by different contributors,
many of whom summarize findings from their own monographs
and research projects. Also innovative is the inclusion
of the testimony of survivors alongside scholarly
analyses. The stories of female resistance fighters are
especially unusual and thus important. The chapters
containing primary materials could be very useful in
undergraduate courses, while graduate students and
scholars will find the book valuable for its suggestions
for future research as well as its summary of the
important work done so far.
Women
in the Holocaust is divided into four parts. Part I
sketches the condition of Jewish women before the war.
Here Paula Hyman explains nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Jewish family life in both Western and
Eastern Europe. Marion Kaplan details the particulars of
German Jewish women's daily existence in the prewar Nazi
years. The pendant to Kaplan's piece is Gisela Bock's
more general overview of gentile German women in the
Third Reich. Two chapters deal with Jewish women in
interwar Poland. While Daniel Baltman explores female
members of the Bund, Gershon Bacon suggests new
directions for research on prewar Polish Jewish women.
Part
II details Jewish life in the ghettos and mixes analysis
with Holocaust testimony. Michael Unger sketches
conditions for women in the Lodz Ghetto. Dalia Ofer looks
at the use of gender in diaries and memoirs of the Warsaw
ghetto. Ida Fink has contributed her short story,
"The Key Game." The Jewish underground
resistance network in Grodno is described by Liza Chapnik,
who participated in it.
The
theme of resistance continues in Part III with a second
personal narrative by Bronka Klibanski, who was a member
of the Grodno and Bialystok undergrounds. Lenore Weitzman
has a more general article on "passing" outside
of the ghetto, while Nechama Tec and Renee Poznanski look
at women among the forest partisans in Byelorussia and
the French-Jewish underground. This section concludes
with a portrait by Yehuda Bauer of the Slovak Jewish
activist Gisi Fleischmann, one of a very few women to
have a position in a Judenrat (Nazi-mandated Jewish
Council).
Part
IV describes the concentration camps and opens with the
personal recollections of Lidia Rosenfeld Vago. The
survivor and historian Felicja Karay provides valuable
background information on women in the camps, while Ruth
Bondy, herself a survivor, takes a more specialized look
at Theresienstadt and Birkenau. Three essays by Myrna
Goldenberg, Lawrence Langer, and Sara Horowitz analyze
the role of gender in Holocaust memoirs and literature.
Finally, Joan Ringelheim asks why a gender-sensitive
analysis of the Holocaust has been so long in the making
and provides some preliminary answers.
It is
difficult to critique comprehensively such a wide-ranging
work that combines so many different kinds of
contributions, such as first-person accounts of the
Holocaust, summaries of important secondary scholarship,
historiographical critiques, literary analysis, and even
fiction. Nonetheless, a few questions touch on many of
the contributions.
The
title of the book gives no indication that its subject
matter, women in the Holocaust, is still in dispute. Yet
the very legitimacy of taking up this question is
addressed by the last two essays in the volume by
Lawrence Langer and Joan Ringelheim. Langer argues for
the "severely diminished role that gendered behavior
played during [the Holocaust] (p. 351)." Ringelheim,
however, insists that Jewish men cannot "stand in
for Jewish women as we try to understand their everyday
life during the Holocaust (p. 350)." While I agree
with Ringelheim, and with the editors of the volume, that
women have been left out of the picture for too long, I
can appreciate Langer's larger point at its most general
level, that the one-upmanship about which sex suffered
more in the Holocaust is counter-productive. Yet the
essays in this book do not aim at this sort of crass
comparison but instead aim to illuminate the fine
differences between men's and women's experiences that
made up the texture of everyday life.
While
many chapters give either first-hand accounts of
resistance or secondary analyses of it, there is not much
explicit attention to the many theoretical issues
surrounding the concept of resistance, a classic problem
in studying the Holocaust. This is clearly an area where
Holocaust scholars can engage each other as well as those
in other fields such as Native American and African
American studies.
This
book is also a valuable guide for the areas it points out
as deserving of further research. One of the most
critical needs is to fill the gaps in the empirical
information that has been available to Western scholars
about the lives of Eastern European Jewish (and for
purposes of comparison, gentile) women in the prewar
period.
In
conclusion, Women in the Holocaust is an important new
publication in the field and valuable for students and
scholars at all levels.
Note
[1]. Some of the latest
works include: Bonnie Gurewitsch, Mothers, Sisters,
Resisters: Oral Histories of Women Who Survived the
Holocaust (University of Alabama Press, forthcoming in
December); Marion Kaplan, Jewish Life in Nazi Germany:
Dignity and Despair (New York, 1998); Mary Felstiner, To
Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era (New
York, 1994); and Carol Rittner and John Roth, eds.,
Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust (New York,
1993). [Return to review]
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