On The Diary of Petr Ginz
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Petr Ginz's parents met at an Esperanto conference. That detail jumped out at me from the introduction to Petr's diary, written by his sister, Chava Pressburger. A failed language a bad idea born out of a good instinct Esperanto held the promise of universal communication. Everyone would understand everyone all the time: A new Eden would grow out of the rubble of Babel. Petr was, quite literally, the product of that dream.
How much suffering is due to not having the right word? Foreign words are unknown, familiar words are misunderstood or misinterpreted. Words are perverted by our histories (personal and global), by context and tone of voice. Words are bad approximations. There is evil in the world. Evil took young Petr from his parents and shuffled him into the gas chambers of Auschwitz. But evil is not the only thing to fear or struggle against.
I read Petr's diary as the grandson of survivors, as a first-generation American, as a Jew and as a writer. Unexpectedly, it was this last identity that most informed my experience. Though the diary is a resoundingly good book by just about every imaginable definition what it stands in opposition to isn't evil, but speechlessness.
Giving a word to a thing is to give it life. "Let there be light," God said, and there was light. No magic. No raised hands and thunder. The articulation made it possible. It is the most powerful of all Jewish ideas: Words are generative. Jews are people of the book: Their parents are words.
It's the same with marriage. You say "I do" and you do. What is it, really, to be married? To be married is to say you are married. To say it not only in front of your spouse, but in front of your community, and in front of God. I don't believe in God, but I believe in saying things to God. I believe in prayer. Or I believe in saying aloud what you would pray for if you believed in God. Saying it brings it into an existence that it didn't have in silence.
I once read an essay by a linguist about the continued creation of Modern Hebrew. Until the mid-1970s, he wrote, there wasn't a word for frustrated. And so until the mid-70s, no Hebrew speaker experienced frustration. Should his wife turn to him in the car and ask why he'd fallen so quiet, he would search his incomplete dictionary of emotions and say, "I'm upset." Or, "I'm annoyed." Or, "I'm irritated." This might have been, itself, merely frustrating, were it not for the problem of our words being self-fulfilling prophecies: We become what we say we are. The man in the car says he is upset, annoyed or irritated and becomes upset, annoyed or irritated.
Exactly a year ago today, my first child was born. After much debate the single word was the most difficult piece of writing I have ever done we named him Sasha, after his grandmother. He is not only identified as Sasha, he is Sasha. My son would not exist with another name.
To name the unnamed. To bring the unnamed into existence. There are writers who hold mirrors to the world. "This is what it's really like," they say. "Exactly what it's like. Down to the most exacting detail." That's fine. Such books are often nice to read, and at their best can give us clear and focused pictures of ourselves. But there's something more to which writing can aspire.
I'm not a religious person, but writing for me is religious in this sense: To write is to participate in the creation that began with that first naming, and will continue until someone or something finds an adequate word for "end." To write is to bring into being things whose existences depend on their articulation. Our emotional dictionaries are incomplete, and so are our historical dictionaries, and ideological dictionaries, and our dictionaries of physical experiences, and memories, hopes and regrets. The dictionaries of our lives are more empty than full. And so our lives are more empty than full. Until we have the words, we cannot be what we really are.
The most powerful passage of Petr's diary comes when he receives notification of his imminent transport to Theriesienstadt concentration camp. His specificity, his unwillingness to become sentimental the passage was written from memory in Theresienstadt is overwhelming. But even more powerful, to me maybe because I am a Jew, maybe because I am a novelist or new father is the simple fact of a 14-year-old writing in such a place. Surrounded by death, and facing his own, Petr put words on paper. Given his unprecedented situation, his words were unprecedented. He was creating new language. He was creating life.
It can be dangerous to treat a diary like this as literature to find beauty in it, and symbolism and structure. But how can one not? Here is the beginning of the passage in which Petr recounts learning that he would soon be parted from his family:
"Don't think that cleaning a typewriter is easy. There is cleaning and there is 'cleaning.' If you want the typewriter to shine on the inside and on the outside, you have to remove the carriage and wipe the most invisible corners with a small brush. Then you have to use a blowpipe to clear it out. The most difficult part are the spaces between the typebars."
When Theodor W. Adorno speculated about the possibility of literature after the Holocaust, he wasn't asking something about art (as is commonly misunderstood), but about language itself. What meaning can words have in the light of such destruction? Can "loss" have any use? Can "war"? Can "love," for that matter? Will we ever again be able to find the right word?
The answer is yes it was built into the question but language must be reconstructed with an energy greater than that of its destruction. This is what we as readers, writers and speakers do. We participate in tikkun olam, the repairing of the world, which began only moments after the world's creation. Adam, the first man, was given the task of gathering the divine light the goodness that escaped the vessels broken by creation. Young Petr, another first man, had a preternatural knowledge of this. Why else, in the shadow of his death, would he have crafted these words as he did? How else could such an effort have been possible? By repairing the dictionary, he was repairing the world.
The diary in your hands did not save Petr. But it did save us.
Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of the novels "Everything Is Illuminated" and "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close." This essay appears as an introduction to "The Diary of Petr Ginz, 1941-1942" edited by Chava Pressburger, published this month by Atlantic Monthly Press.
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