Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana.

Whitfield, Stephen J.

Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana. By Lawrence N. Powell. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xvii + 593 PP.

All personal testimonies of the Holocaust rip the heart. They expose how terrifyingly thin are the membranes of civilization, and show the appalling ease with which barbarism can devastate everything that is precious about life itself. Troubled Memory fulfills that mandate of revelation. Lawrence N. Powell's book about what a family--and a people--suffered is so ferociously unsparing in detailing the systematic torment as well as wanton cruelty of the Shoah that this reconstruction of the past is often unbearable. This volume is also a formidable scholarly and narrative achievement, but what also makes it distinctive is its effort to make some connection between German Nazism and American racism. At the center is a "hidden child" who managed to survive the Warsaw ghetto and, half a century later, found a public voice when a neo-Nazi ran for governor of Louisiana. By telling the extraordinary story of an ordinary Jew named Anne Skorecki Levy, and of her intrepid parents and of other relatives, the author has not only traced the traumatic genesis of her 1989 challenge to the candidacy of David Duke. Powell has also preserved the names and struggles of the doomed. He has thus extracted a sliver of meaning from the catastrophe that befell European Jewry.

The protagonist's parents were middle-class Polish Jews; and when the Wehrmacht invaded their country, Mark Skorecki (1900-1991) and Ruth Tempelhof Skorecki (1905-1973) and their young daughters Anne and Lila were living in Lodz. The bulk of Troubled Memory recounts the descent into hell--how the noose got tighter and tighter, how the torment and depravity which the Nazis inflicted had become so inconceivably awful that conditions could not possibly have gotten worse. And then the evil did get worse, and then worse again and again. Only one Polish Jew in ten survived the Holocaust; and of that tiny remnant, almost no families remained intact. Indeed, when Ruth Skorecki staggered back to Lodz in 1945 and reported at the Jewish communal office that her husband and daughters were also still alive, she was assumed to be mad.

So statistically freakish was such survival that not even a recourse to "miracles" suffices. Indeed, Mark Skorecki's adroitness as a craftsman and repairman, plus the self-discipline of his daughters in spending hours in pitch-black and cramped confinement without betraying themselves through whimpering or crying, plus the fluent Polish which the parents spoke so that they could pass on the "Aryan" side, were indispensable. Mark and Ruth had to look and laugh and walk and talk like gentiles. Timing mattered as well; the family decided to try to escape from the Warsaw ghetto just before nearly everyone trapped within it was murdered. But without luck (or, as Ruth preferred to believe, divine intercession), even the versatility of a fixer and the resourcefulness of his family would not have saved them. Even readers who are generally familiar with the operations of the Final Solution will learn much from Troubled Memory, which embeds the fate of the Skoreckis within the larger context of extermination.

When they realized that their own past had been obliterated, and that they faced not only a virulent Polish anti-Semitism but also the imposition of Communism in their native land, the Skoreckis fled to Bavaria. In 1949 they came as displaced persons to New Orleans, where these New Americans sank new roots, and were gingerly welcomed into the established Jewish community. How they readjusted--and how Anne S. Levy in particular grew up--makes this book more than a narrative of the Holocaust. There is a sequel. The memories were revived in 1991, when Duke, a legislator from the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, defeated an incumbent governor in the Republican primary and threatened to take power in Baton Rouge. The director of the state's Christian Coalition, Rev. Billy McCormack, assured voters that Duke posed less of a peril to Christianity than did the Jewish lawyers who were working for the ACLU.

Maybe so, but the threat to democracy was countered in no small measure by the energy of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, of which Powell--a specialist in Southern history teaching at Tulane University--was a founding member. The effectiveness of the Coalition was enhanced by the public role which Levy assumed, even though the horrifying memories which defined her childhood were stirred up and had to be mastered. No disparagement of that political and moral opposition to Duke's candidacy is intended in noting that the fear that the Shoah could happen again--and especially here--was utterly unwarranted. The historical analogy to European anti- Semitism makes no sense in a democracy whose minuscule neo-Nazi movement has craved the oxygen of publicity more than the exercise of power, and whose own racist ideology has been so incoherent that Duke's role model, George Lincoln Rockwell, was assassinated in 1967 by a disgruntled follower who raged against "blue-eyed devils."

Troubled Memory nevertheless serves as wondrous proof of the transferability of historical skills. Neither a Europeanist nor a Jew, Powell has not only drawn upon the testimony of nearly a hundred interviewees but has also exploited archives and manuscript collections in Lodz, Warsaw, Jerusalem and the United States. Especially important was an unpublished memoir which Ruth Skorecki dictated in 1963. Many readers will undoubtedly find this book overly long, and some of its stretches are not strictly necessary. (One example is a set-piece of bravery and desperation: the uprising of the partisans of the Jewish Fighting Organizations in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943. The author's retelling is brilliant.) However thickly textured, Troubled Memory pivots on the harrowing distinction which Shakespeare compressed into monosyllables: to be or not to be. Powell has learned the knack of describing the indescribable without emotional embellishment. The facts are grisly enough, even if he has to adjudicate occasionally between conflicting recollections and to plug some gaps with speculation. This book honors the obligation which the Baal Shem Tov proclaimed and which is emblazoned as its epigraph: "in remembrance resides the secret of redemption." But from the slaughterhouse which the Nazis made of the continent they occupied, nothing whatsoever can be redeemed, when measured against what was so senselessly eradicated. That is why even readers who are knowledgeable about the Holocaust should be warned: Troubled Memory has the power to sting.

Stephen J. Whitfield Brandeis University