Kluger and Death

When reading the first few pages of this book, my first impression of Kluger is that she is not afraid of death and the idea of dying. I was surprised and impressed at her thoughts as a young girl because she was curious to know about things that girls at that age are usually afraid of knowing.
One of the things that caught my attention was her vews on religion. On page 30, she says "the dead set us certain tasks, dont they? They want to be remembered and revered, they want to be resurrected and buried at the same time. I want to say kaddish becuase I live with the dead. If I can't do that, forget about religion. Poetry is more helpful." This passage shows the defiant nature that she has. She has strong opinions about certain issues and likes to do what she believes is right. To her, it is important to honor the dead regardless of your gender because they deserve that respect. This reminded me of Antigone, as she also defied the law in burying her brother in order to honor his death. She says that she lives with the dead because they are forever in her memory. She thinks about her father at random times in her daily life, so to pray for him and give him respect is something that she feels is necessary. She then says that if she can't pray for who the dead, then poetry is more helpful. In poetry, she is able to honor them by writing about their life and how she feels about them. There are no restrictions in poetry.

Kluger on Cowardice

I would have to say that this book is one of the most interesting Holocaust memoirs that I have ever come across. It seems to me that Kluger, instead of focusing only on her victimization, decided to learn from it. It is obvious that she has become very opinionated, but I truly value her discretion. My favorite part about her persona expressed through this narrative is her ability to see reality and act accordingly. She understands human nature on an extensive level and knows how to manipulate it or act so that the results are desirable. This understanding is a huge part of her statements about courage and cowardice on page 156. It is frustrating when people attempt to place themselves, theoretically, in a morally problematic situation and presume that they would act perfectly. Not only do I admire her "Tom Sawyer" with the wooden cross character's admittance of his true character, but I look up to Kluger's understanding that cowardice is not necessarily bad; its judgment is subject to the situation. The following is what I picked out of the passage as the most interesting parts:

COURAGE
normal behavior = self-preservation, foresight -> conscientious objector
COWARDICE
active participation in EVIL.

I think that it is a good question to ask ourselves, what can we expect of ourselves? For the sake of self or family preservation, would we participate in the evil that caused the Holocaust, of would we die for a higher cause? be courageous? Where is the line?

But I do believe that we can never truly answer those questions unless we are placed in that moral predicament and hopefully we will never have to make that decision...

But as I write this I realize that on a different plane, we are at that place where we must make a decision. To participate in the chosen American ignorance or to learn about what is going on in our world and even if it is only education we participate in, to do at least that.

still alive

I think that one of the most important themes in Still Alive is the double standard of being a Jewish immigrant in a society that is predominantly German as well as (in this case) a child who is trying to live the life of a normal girl. Both of these ideas collide, in that given this time period, being a Jewish girl was not considered normal. Consider the instance where the reader is introduced to Klugers’ life before the working camps, where she is given a basic elementary education, here the reader is able to see the satisfaction of the need to grow and be a child. As the novel progresses, the lessons that Kluger learned in the working camp were lessons necessary to survive for her life as a Jew. Here, the reader can see how when one world is evolving, sometimes personal beliefs that make an individual different become increasingly significant because of societies views upon the issue, that it creates another world that interferes with the primary world. Children in this era may forget that they’re children learning about the world and how it works because they are forced to grow up to early and defend for themselves, therefore this idea of double worlds may collide, or one world may overpower the other.

Kluger Reading

When doing a close reading on Klugers ideas about memory and perception she uses an example of a kaleidoscope and an optical illusion involving a duck and a rabbit. She references these objects in order to prove that ones memory is unable to to remember and have two different perspectives at once. She begins speaking about the way she sees her father when she thinks about him. She goes into detail and explains what he is doing and how he is doing it. She has two distinct ideas of her father. One is when he is greeting and being kind the other is when he is being tortured and put to his death. These memories are cemented into her brain but will never appear simultaneously. This is why she references the optical illusion. within the optical illusion you either see a duck or a rabbit. It is impossible to see the two images at the same time. This refers back to her memory of her father because she will be unable to see both situations happening at the same time. She refers to the kaleidoscope because she states that memories will be changing patterns such as the mirrors and glass within a kaleidoscope.

Still Alive

I just wanted to start off by saying that this required my full attention when reading. Last week when we did a passage ananlysis, we read a part of the text and it made no sense. But after reading it from the beginning everything comes together.

I was reading through the reading questions and number 3 (How does she describe torture (18)? Does her definition differ from your own understanding?) seemed interesting, it was something I noted when I was reading. She describes torture not being so much about how much pain the person feels, but how the pain is being put upon the person that is more important. Kluger gives the experience of childbirth for an example. Childbirth is all about pain as is any other kind of torture, however childbirth can be a lot more tolerable because the mother is looking forward to time with her child, it is a "wanted" pain because it comes with a significant outcome.

The line that sums up Kluger's idea of torture is: "What matters is not just what we endure, but also what kind of misery it is, where it comes from." (18) This is a lot different than my understanding of torture because I never thought to compare childbirth to torture. She makes a good argument and her examples help me see her point of view. Kluger also states that the worse kind of torture is "the kind that's imposed by others with malicious intent" because it's the most traumatic.

Kluger

As I was reading Still Alive, a section in Part III seems to deviate from the whole feel of the book, and it stood out to me. In contrast to the title of “Still Alive” and the appearance of a Holocaust survivor, Kluger says “By virtue of survival, we belong with you, who weren’t exposed to the genocidal danger, and we know that there is a black river between us and the true victims. Therefore this is not the story of a Holocaust victim and becomes less and less so as it nears the end” (Kluger 138). Further on she ads, “yes, we laughed a lot, for humor thrives on danger, for whatever reason” (138). To me, I can never think of the Holocaust and humor in the as ever having any relation. In contrast to headings such as “Death Camp” and “Forced Labor Camps,” such passages don’t seem to enhance the impact of the survivor story, instead it kind of negates the reality of her story and her position within the Holocaust. Much of how Part III begins seems to feel more like a tale as if she had simply run away from home, rather than a flee for her life.

Kluger

Reading Kluger’s Still Alive, I grew to enjoy her style of writing. While it seemed random for some people, it felt like something I would write – a random assortment of thoughts of my past and the life behind me. Also, there were a lot of quotes that just struck me as comedic, like the time when she is talking about the “fat man” she encountered and that she “didn’t want to be friends with the fat man, [she] wanted his food” (125), or truly insightful – when Kluger was talking about her mother and how her delusions had finally caught up with her once the two were in Auschwitz, Kluger poses the question, “If you think that your mind Is the most precious thing you own, you are right, because what have we got that defines us other than reason and love?” (104). All these quotes, among others, along with Kluger’s story is what I truly enjoyed. But on to a literary connection I found one quote.

Here, Kluger is talking of her brother Schorschi, and how she has missed him from her life ever since he left her as a teen to return back to his blood father – “One of my brother’s nephews in my poem, my older son, has George for a middle name-but that didn’t help. People aren’t reborn. They live, or they don’t live, their one inalienable life. Schorschi’s had been taken, and there is no substitute such “living on in memory”. We don’t want to be pious thoughts in the mind of others; we want the robust substance of our own lives” (83). I thought this was interesting because as soon as I read this quote, I thought of Professor Chaturvedi and his writings on the name “Vinayak”. The doctor who had named Chaturvedi as Vinayak, hoped to instill the same revolutionary ways of the Vinayak Savarkar that he had known in his lifetime. However contrary to this lies Kluger’s take. Kluger does not believe in “living on in memory” and that naming someone the name of someone else you once loved would not bring them back. Kluger feels that those given the same name of those who passed before them, is not a way of bringing back the dead. Once they have passed and their bodies have perished, they are not “reborn”. For Kluger, there would never be another Schorschi.

Still Alive Response

Ruth Kluger’s memoir was a fascinating read, to say the least. She’s a witty, snide woman who “tells it like it is”. For me, her autobiography was the most fun to read this quarter. After reading the entire memoir, I wanted to revisit one of the passages we explored during class. My group tried to decipher the passage where Kluger states, “as Bertolt Brecht was fond of saying, the truth is concrete, meaning specific” (p. 66). Now, thinking about why she mentioned this line about truth. It was a quest, much like in Henreich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, for the truth. But for Kluger, the truth was enough specificity. In her half-brother’s death and especially her father’s, she was never able to know the details of their fates. She finds remnants and hears bits about what may have happened, but she will never know exactly what occurred or the product of the events (i.e. a burial ceremony). And this indefinite history of her brother and father is what haunts her with “what if” memories. For Kluger, the truth is something you can examine and pick apart, make sense of. It is also something devoid of sentimentality, because evoking the emotional part to memories makes it unreal and selfish saying, “It means looking into a mirror instead of reality” (p. 66). Thus, this outlook on life is appropriate to her character as being brutally honest.

Memories and Truth

One of the passages that stuck out to me was Kluger’s view on memories: “The most precise memories are thus the ones that seduce us into lies, because they won’t be budged by anything outside ourselves” (34). Following a passage we discussed in lecture about her father being a “divided person,” this quote describes how important it is understand the connection between memory and truth, (or at least that’s what I got out of it). Because her story is unlike other Holocaust biographies and does not play off of sentimentality to gain sympathy, she focuses more on elaborating on the truth, however blunt it may be. Her interest in exposing the truth rather than just emotion relates back to the quote. She states that the most accurate memories manipulate people into building up a false memory of “what should have been” or “could have been;” these memories cannot be affected by outside influence. These memories fester in the mind and the lure of creating “could be” memories or rationalizing why they happened haunt through the form of constant replay.
Also, Kluger elaborates on the kaddish (prayer for the dead). Because Judaism only allows men to say them, she dissociates herself with the religion: “I want to say kaddish because I live with the dead. If I can’t do that, forget about religion. Poetry is more helpful” (31). In a sense, Kluger’s entire novel is a “kaddish;” although not entirely a prayer for the dead, but more of a medium to document her memory of the dead, and her life's memories in general. She is aware of the religion’s constraints on females, and thus carries out her desire to expres the truth and say what she wants through that “poetry.”