Scarification (part two)
Post #21: Alice Herscovitch, Michael Marrus, Rabbi Daniel Friedman, Nina Libeskind
Alice Herscovitch. Holocaust Educator. (February 2012, Montreal.) “One of the lessons of Auschwitz,” writes Giorgio Agamben, “that it is infinitely harder to grasp the mind of an ordinary person than to understand the mind of a Spinoza or Dante.” It is a wintry morning at Montreal’s Holocaust Memorial Centre, here to meet Alice Herscovitch, its director. Phyllis Lambert’s sleek Segal Centre catches the eye of those who wish to notice it. In one of antisemitism’s ironies, Parc Mackenzie-King lies across Chemin de-la-côte-Sainte-Catherine, though Lambert’s facade turns away.
Behind Alice’s glasses, inquisitive melancholy. She wonders: will fundraising for the National Holocaust Monument tap out precious benefactors of Holocaust education? Of four centres across the country Montreal’s is the most active, with 14,000 visits annually. We discuss Montreal’s dwindling community of survivors. I look at their unpretentious artifacts in glass cases—a dire message encoded in a commensurate ‘ordinariness’.
“You must go out to their organizations,” she murmurs, “and always remember that these are human stories.”
Michael Marrus. Historian. (16 May 2012, Ottawa.) Today’s National Holocaust Monument visioning session includes Irving Abella, Michael Marrus, Mira Golfarb, Alice Herscovitch and Yaron Ashkenazy, as well as Holocaust survivors Ursula Feist and Sidney Zoltek, both from Montreal.
Ursula was one of the few to escape Germany to London on the Kindertransport. Valiantly, foolishly, she had gone to demand the release of her father. The sentry at the detention centre hissed, “flee!”, and didn’t arrest the distraught teenager. Sidney, for his part, experienced hardship, witnessing unspeakable antisemitic brutality as a boy in a Polish ghetto.
The bureaucrats hear lively exchanges, especially an incisive dialogue between Abella and Marrus. Who knew that these two historians have been debating opposing views on Holocaust memory almost since childhood? For Michael, it is an event so singular in human history that it is in fact universal. As such, it is distracting and diminishing to foreground the Holocaust’s Canadian context.
To the contrary, Irving argues, having a local and national context—i.e. Canada’s “none-is-too-many” prejudice—is indeed crucial to the commemoration’s purpose of averting future genocides.
Daniel Friedman. Rabbi. (November 2010, Paris.) In London in the early 1990s fellow graduate student Clarence Epstein showed me the extent of English antisemitism during the interwar period. His research traced the architecture of London’s synagogues as they receded behind undifferentiated street fronts. As mobs took to the streets. Later, back in Montreal, he’d trace artworks looted by the Nazis.
Today, in the library at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris, I’ve taken down a large folio archiving the Jewish history of London. It depicts the fascist marches at the peak of Oswald Mosely’s popularity, just as Clarence had once described to me. Grainy photos flatten London’s contrast with Berlin between the wars, attesting to an ideological flux that might have gone a different way.
… (May 2014, Ottawa.) The National Holocaust Monument design competition winner (the Gail Lord/Daniel Libeskind team) will be named today at the Canadian War Museum by Ministers John Baird and Shirley Glover. Sunbeams slice diagonally across the outer wall of the chapel. NHM Council Chair Rabbi Friedman praises the government for having taken this initiative; his focused intensity instils a moral imperative to get it right.
… (September 2016, Ottawa.) My site tour of the monument for PM Trudeau is scrapped for today—too little time between QP and the arrival of the Chinese Premier. Instead, I guide Council members and donors across Booth St. from the War Museum to view the work-in-progress. Afterwards we wait in the LeBreton Hall for the PM and Minister Melanie Joly to arrive.
A high official moves ahead to sit beside me for the announcement. I introduce him to Rabbi Friedman, who wonders if Canadian Heritage might consider prolonging the council’s existence once the monument is completed next year, with a mandate to raise awareness.
Detaching himself, my colleague mutters, “I have to go greet the PM,” leaving the Rabbi unanswered.
“It seems I didn’t make much of an impression,” Daniel smiles, ruefully.
Embarrassed, I remark that the OED describes a ‘bureaucrat’ as someone interested in the centralization of power. Indeed, Reich officials would freely “move towards the Fuhrer” with policies and programs, not awaiting specific direction. Of course, I don’t mean this literally of Canadian bureaucrats, but Rabbi Friedman understands. His brief, jagged address renders the calamity immediate and present.
Nina Libeskind. Diviner. (28 September 2017, Ottawa.) For today’s inauguration Margi Oksner had organized a donor reception in the Barney Danson Theatre at which Daniel Libeskind spoke with force and acumen about how Canada’s National Holocaust Monument has arrived on the scene at a critical moment when its need is especially acute.
Luckily, I had noticed that the iconic view-line framing the Peace Tower from the ‘staircase of hope’ was obstructed by high foliage. The City of Ottawa removed branches from four trees. Libeskind discussed the symbolism of this direct visual connection to Parliament in his address today.
The main ceremony took place in the LeBreton Hall where the assembly waited patiently for the Prime Minister and Minister Joly to arrive. Staffers reprioritized the seating order up until the last moment. The speech written for Melanie Joly lacked emotional heft. The PM’s was better, spoken in sotto voice. It was the words of two survivors that brought home the anguish, and the cantor broke our hearts with his rendering of “Ghetto” in Yiddish and English.
An intense squall—an unprecedented ‘microburst’ that felled hundreds of nearby trees—struck immediately before the official ceremony. That held us inside, thus avoiding the splitting of the assembly between the VIPs who were go to into the monument and the rest who would watch on video screens inside the museum. After the storm, it was inspiring to see the site filling up with people, Claude Cormier delighting in their reactions to his sparse plantings.
We left quickly to get him to the Urbanism Lab where he gave an impressive overview of his oeuvre. The principals attended a dinner with the design and construction teams at the NAC Café: Gail Lord, Daniel Libeskind, Edward Burtynsky, Cormier, Mr. Di Paolo the concrete expert, Irving and Rosie Abella, Vera Schiff, and design staff, friends, and family. In all, twenty-four people inscribed the distinguished commemorative volume produced by Margi, and Daniel donated his initial hand sketch to the Crown Collection.
It was nearly midnight when the architect suggested revisiting the monument, so we piled into cars and cabs to wander the haunting beauty of its illuminated space. Afterwards, we offered to drive him and Nina back to the hotel in our station wagon. Alas, while shifting our sailing gear into the back compartment, I had misplaced the keys, now hidden in a tangle of rigging and canvas.
While I searched, Daniel explained why his monument opens to the sky: because ashes of the Holocaust still float there in the particulate, omnipresent. The chill of night settled on us. Nina, he assures me, has the gift of locating missing objects.
“Step back,” he advises. “Let her find them.”
Indeed, in one motion, Nina calmly reaches through sails and sheets and lifejackets to extract the keys fallen inside a Kleenex box.
Such a good essay. Illuminating.