Israeli writer Savyon Liebrecht jumped right into the topic of her speech, the same topic on which most of her writings focus - the Holocaust. "In my home, as in many others, there was a complete, total silence on the subject."
Liebrecht spoke Monday night to around 50 people at the Granoff Family Hillel Center, discussing both the Holocaust and her writing - two subjects that are inextricably linked for her. Hebrew Professor Rahel Meshoulam introduced Liebrecht, who was born in Munich, Germany to Holocaust survivors and moved to Israel as a young child.
After studying philosophy and English literature at Tel Aviv University, Liebrecht went on to become a writer in a wide variety of genres, including stories, television scripts and plays. Meshoulam called her a "major voice in contemporary Israeli literature."
Liebrecht used the connection between two of her own stories, "Excision" and "Chayuta's Engagement Party," to provide her listeners with several lessons in relation to the Holocaust. She first provided brief summaries of each of the stories.
"Excision," one of her shortest stories, centers on a grandmother who survived the Holocaust. When she picks up her granddaughter from kindergarten, her granddaughter has a note affixed to her forehead saying she has lice.
This note reminds the grandmother of the ghetto and the concentration camp she experienced. She proceeds to cut off her granddaughter's hair violently, ruining her relationships with her family.
"Chayuta's Engagement Party" also focuses on a grandparent Holocaust-survivor. As the grandfather in the story ages, he loses his drive or ability to remain silent on his past. When he starts to speak out, each family member reacts differently.
His granddaughter asks him not to tell any of his stories at her engagement party. He starts to gather a crowd, and when she reminds him of his promise, he dies because he can neither refrain from telling his stories nor break his promise to his granddaughter.
Liebrecht outlined the common themes in the two stories, emphasizing the issue of silence. "As we know today, most of the homes of survivors were silent, silent in the sense that they did not talk about these experiences."
She cited various reasons for these silences, including the "incapacity of people to deal with a traumatic past and a demanding present at the same time." Liebrecht said many Holocaust survivors who came to Israel subconsciously chose to focus their energies on the present.
"The second reason for the silence is the very unique relationships between the survivors and their children," Liebrecht said. "They protected us by not telling, and we protected them by not asking."
The third source of silence Liebrecht mentioned was the Zionist movement. Liebrecht described the image of a "new man" that Zionism tried to construct, a picture of a man who was "the antithesis of a survivor" and who did not know how to interact with survivors.
Liebrecht also discussed silence as a result of "the feelings of guilt that every survivor feels." Survivors did not want to discuss their experiences because of the stigma associated with having survived, Liebrecht said.
"The hidden question was what immoral act did you do to survive, an act that others who were more moral than you did not do and so did not survive." She said "the incapacity of the language" was another reason for silence.
In addition to these two stories' common theme of silence, Liebrecht mentioned the connections of the grandparent-grandchild relationship and the "state of mind that the survivor finds himself in within family gatherings," causing him or her to act differently than in other circumstances.
Liebrecht answered various questions from the audience, mostly focusing on her personal beliefs about writing. "If there is a duty for literature, then it is to smash stereotypes," she said. "The things that keep haunting me - this is what I find myself writing."
In her speech, Liebrecht did not explicitly delineate what college-age students can take away from either her Holocaust themes or her beliefs about writing. After the speech, she said when she writes a story, "I don't think about the readers' ages. What I'm interested in is getting the story right."
Her advice to writers was "not to let these sorts of calculations enter their work; it might be harmful" and "not to try to please anyone or to explain things."
Liebrecht used two more of her stories to make additional points in her speech. "Morning in the Park Among the Nannies" touched upon the "reduction of human experience to that genderless place."
"The Strawberry Girl" allowed Liebrecht to look at the Holocaust from a different point of view that she usually does in her writing, telling of a "humane" German soldier and his "innocent" German wife in a concentration camp where a young Jewish girl grew strawberries.
Liebrecht used the story to impart the lesson that "no matter what I'm going to write about, no matter how far-fetched it seems, when the story gets published, someone is going to call me and say, 'That's my story.'"
A woman who read "The Strawberry Girl" had actually been in a concentration camp where strawberries were grown.
"The imagination is much, much shorter than whatever happened there," Liebrecht said.
