Literary Sampler

The “Black Milk” of Historical Consciousness: Thinking about the Nanjing Massacre in Light of Jewish Memory (2002)

Author Information

Writer: Vera Schwarcz (1947 - )
Writer's Country: Romania
Original Language: English
Genre: Essays
Event: Chinese History

Jewish tradition, on one hand, places great value on historical meaning. The current slogan "Never Again" seems well rooted in a religious commitment that goes back to the Passover ritual, which commemorates our exodus from Egypt. Each year, Jews are called upon to recall their redemption from slavery as if it were a personal experience. The Passover Hagaddah (a story we retell each spring) insists on this immediate identification with the past. At the same time, there are Jewish prophets like Isaiah who speak about forgetting as a blessing from God precisely because it helps one get over the pain and rancor of history. Similarly, in Chinese tradition there is a tension between the Confucian commitment to historical memory and the Daoist concern with troublesome emotions aroused by painful remembrances. For those who would inscribe the Nanjing Massacre in the consciousness of the Chinese people (and of the world) there is no better place to start than the Analects' own tribute to recollection which is found in Book II Chapter 11. Here, the Master is quoted as saying: Wengu er zhixin, ke yi wei shi ye - "One who remembers history" (literally warms up the embers of the past) can be truly considered a Teacher."

To blow new life into the ashes of the past is a difficult task shared by Chinese and Jews alike. In the wake of historical trauma, it is not surprising that both cultures turned away from suffocating images. Daoists in China understood and warned about the dangers of historical memory as early as the Han dynasty: "Qing you yi sheng, bu yi ze wu qing" - "Feelings rise out of memory. If there is no memory, feelings dissolve as well." This passage from the Jin Shu is still relevant today. It reminds one that the sense-defying brutality of the Holocaust as well as of the Nanjing Massacre are inherently disturbing, distressing events. The same obsession with memory and feeling led the German-Jewish poet Paul Celan to speak about the "black milk" of historical consciousness. This is what we must turn to in looking at the connections and differences between the Jewish and Chinese "Holocausts".

Biography:

Poet and non-fiction writer Vera Schwarcz was born in 1947 in Romania. She received a B.A. from Vassar in 1969, an MA from Yale in 1971, and a Ph. D. from Stanford in 1977.Vera Schwarcz is currently the Freeman Professor of East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University. She is the author of seven books and over fifty articles on Chinese intellectual history and comparative memory studies, including Time for Telling Truth Is Running Out: Conversations with Zhang Shenfu, published by Yale University Press. Vera Schwarcz has held several fellowships including an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (Summer 1996), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1989-1990) and a Great River Arts Institute Poetry Fellowship (January 2000).

Bibliography:

Bridge Across Broken Time, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Time for Telling Truth is Running Out: Conversations with Zhang Shenfu, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

Long Road Home: China Journal, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.

The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919, Berkley: University of California Press, 1985.

Exerpted from a New York Times Review of Bridge Across Broken Time, Sept. 27 1998:

''My focus,'' [Vera Schwarcz] writes, ''is upon a shared commitment to the transmission of remembrance.'' Where Chinese poets call for a revival of lost connections through fu gu, or returning to the ancients, the Jewish ethical imperative is zakhor, ''to recall and relive'' the Exodus and the Sabbath. Despite their differences, both the Talmudic and the Confucian traditions emphasize an active quest for the wisdom of the ancients through the study of texts. In her creative exploration of these distinctive cultures, Schwarcz relies heavily on metaphoric bridges thrown across time. She quotes much poetry, including her own, and draws on many sources, from ancient records of Chinese Jews to the archives of the Holocaust Museum in Washington. She also travels to Jerusalem to search for a record of Agnes, a lost half sister from her mother's first marriage....

For Schwarcz, memory does not heal, nor does history retrieve satisfying stories that allow us to get on with the present. Rather, acknowledgment of the past involves a process of loss that cuts wounds open but allows us to become more fully human. ''I no longer avoid looking into the black hole of my birth town,'' she writes, although ''to remember is not to become well or whole again.'' Yet if Schwarcz's journey did not bring comfort, it surely involved a certain triumph -- the recovery of a personal heritage obscured by family secrets.

Search this web site: