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WORK TITLE: Hell’s Traces
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE: NJ
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://us.macmillan.com/author/victorripp/ * http://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/hells-traces
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer; former professor or Russian literature at Cornell University and University of Virginia.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Ontario Review and Antioch Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Victor Ripp is a retired professor of Russian literature who has taught at Cornell University and the University of Virginia. His fiction has been published in literary journals such as Ontario Review and Antioch Review. In addition, he is the author of four nonfiction books, including a study of Russian writer Ivan Turgenev.
From Moscow to Main Street and Pizza in Pushkin Square
In From Moscow to Main Street: Among the Russian Emigrés, Victor Ripp discusses the particularities of the third wave or Russian emigrés, who entered the United States from the mid-1970s to about 1986. Ripp’s aim in the book is to identify and understand differences in attitudes between this group and Russians who had migrated immediately after the 1917 Revolution or after World War II. The author, himself the son of first-wave emigrants, finds that this third wave can be characterized by materialistic desires and ambitions; a habit of disregarding authority and exploiting every available loophole; and an absence of any sincere identity (e.g., as political dissidents or as Jews). Living in tightly cohesive communities, they embrace a nostalgic version of Russian life based largely on food, drink, and mischief-making, which they hold in contrast to the perceived soullessness and amorality of American culture. Noting the interest of Ripp’s subject matter, a writer for Kirkus Reviews found the book weakened by the author’s blunt and self-conscious manner of interviewing and by the obviousness of his analysis.
Ripp takes a different perspective in Pizza in Pushkin Square: What Russians Think about Americans and the American Way of Life. In this book he examines the ways in which Russians in Russia perceive Americans and American society. “Though most Russians rarely see an American, and never talk to one, they have managed to devise a balance sheet of our flaws and virtues,” he writes. “It’s an odd perspective, and like creatures in fairy tales we seem distanced and vivid at the same time.” Russians believe that Russia and the United States have much in common, and are deeply disappointed and insulted that Americans do not share this view. They are also disappointed when real Americans do not conform to stereotypes. Ripp writes that Russians generally feel themselves to be more serious, refined, and morally deep than rough American cowboy types, and are surprised to encounter actual Americans who are complex individuals. Reviewing Pizza in Pushkin Square in Washington Monthly, James Fallows hailed the book as “delightfully written and revealing.”
Hell's Traces
Ripp’s memoir Hell’s Traces: One Murder, Two Families, Thirty-Five Holocaust Memorials traces the fate of his extended family during the Holocaust, focusing in particular on the murder of his three-year-old cousin Alexandre, arrested in Paris in 1942 and killed at Auschwitz. He writes of the profound arbitrariness of fate: his mother’s branch of the family had all fled the Nazis and found safety, while ten members of his father’s family had been killed. Hoping to find a way to make sense of these events, he traveled through six countries in Europe and visited thirty-five Holocaust memorial sites, finding subtle differences in context among them.
Warsaw’s memorial to the heroes of the Ghetto Uprising, in Ripp’s view, is overly grand; by contrast, the monument in the Belarus town of Shchedrin, where his maternal grandmother had lived, does not even mention the extermination of Jews and simply honors “peace-loving victims of Nazi aggression.” Julia M. Klein, writing in Forward, appreciated Ripp’s sophisticated understanding of the ways in which memorials convey meaning. But though it is “an interesting idea” to have structured the book around various Holocaust memorials, said Klein, this idea “can seem forced in the execution.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor found Hell’s Traces to be “prickly and selective” and “occasionally haphazard,” but emotionally honest.
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Ripp, Victor, Hell’s Traces: One Murder, Two Families, Thirty-five Holocaust Memorials, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York, NY), 2017.
Ripp, Victor, From Moscow to Main Street: Among the Russian Emigrés, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1984.
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2017, review of Hell’s Traces.
Library Journal, December 1, 2016, David Keymer, review of Hell’s Traces, p. 106.
Publishers Weekly, August 10, 1990, Genevieve Stuttaford, review of Pizza in Pushkin Square: What Russians Think About Americans and the American Way of Life, p. 429.
Publishers Weekly, December 12, 2016, review of Hell’s Traces, p. 135.
Washington Monthly, September, 1990. James Fallows, review of Pizza in Pushkin’s Square, p. 58.
ONLINE
Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb, http://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/ (November 9, 2017), Deborah Kalb, interview with Ripp.
Forward, http://forward.com/ (November 9, 2017), Julia M. Klein, review of Hell’s Traces.
Jewish Book Council, http://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/ (November 9, 2017), Linda F. Burghardt, review of Hell’s Traces.
Kirkus Reviews Online, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/ (November 9, 2017), review of From Moscow to Main Street.
VICTOR RIPP
Victor Ripp
Charles Read
Victor Ripp is the author of Moscow to Main Street, Pizza in Pushkin Square, and Turgenev’s Russia. His fiction has appeared in Ontario Review and Antioch Review. He has taught at Cornell University and the University of Virginia. He lives in New Jersey.
Saturday, May 20, 2017
Q&A with Victor Ripp
Victor Ripp, photo by Charles Read
Victor Ripp is the author of the new book Hell's Traces: One Murder, Two Families, Thirty-Five Holocaust Memorials. His other books include Moscow to Main Street and Pizza in Pushkin Square. His work has appeared in the Ontario Review and The Antioch Review. He taught at Cornell University and the University of Virginia, and he lives in New Jersey.
Q: How did your own family story, particularly that of your 3-year-old cousin who died in the Holocaust, lead you to write this book?
A: I was aware that there were already many books about the Holocaust, so many that people talk about a “Holocaust industry.” I wanted to find a way to say something different.
Several years back, walking through Berlin’s Jewish Museum, I came to an intersection of two corridors – one labeled the Axis of Exile, the other, the Axis of the Holocaust.
That Jews had few options as the Nazis took control was old news, but the corridors had a personal meaning for me. My family on my mother’s side, several generations worth including some 30 members, all emigrated and escaped the Final Solution – the Axis of Exile. On my father’s side of the family, eleven members, including my 3-year old cousin, were murdered by the Nazis – the Axis of the Holocaust.
Q: You decided to visit Holocaust memorials as a way to understand your family’s history. What did you learn that was particularly revealing or surprising?
A: The memorials of course honored the six million Jews who were victims of the Final Solution but they also served to show me how my family fit into that moment of history.
For example, in the Bayerische Viertel, the Bavarian Quarter in Berlin, there are a series of signs affixed to lampposts at irregular intervals. On one surface there is a pictogram – pair of swimming trunks, in one case, a cat on another. And on the reverse side there is a reference to Nazi laws that progressively constrained Jewish life – Jews cannot swim in public pools, Jews cannot keep pets.
Walking through Bayerische Viertel showed me the Nazis moved step-by-step to a policy of extermination of the Jews. But it also made me consider why did some see catastrophe coming and others did not – why did one side of my family escape and the other get caught in the Nazi trap.
Q: What did you learn about Holocaust memorials?
A: I saw numerous memorials in six European countries. Some of them were just plaques or inscribed pillars. But many of them were highly original – attempts to represent a catastrophe that some have said defies human comprehension.
A particularly interesting memorial is in Harburg, a suburb of Hamburg. The artist had built a 40-foot-high column that gradually disappeared into the ground. The inscription read: “In the end it is only we ourselves that can stand up against injustice.”
Several memorials I saw confronted the problem of how to represent the disappearance of whole Jewish communities – how do you show an absence? In Budapest, on the banks of the Danube, some 60 pairs of cast iron shoes are lined up. They are in various style – workers’ boots, high heels, children slippers: lives that had been cut short but whose spirit remains.
The memorial with the greatest personal meaning for me was one I saw in a small park in Paris’ Sixteenth Arrondissement. It honors 15 young children who were deported by the Nazis, including my cousin.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what did it signify for you?
A: The main title, "Hell’s Traces," was my effort to suggest how difficult it is to get back to the past, especially with an event as traumatic as the Holocaust.
We can locate the machinery of the Final Solution, where it operated, on what dates, the hard facts. But the experience of the victims, how it felt on the ground, escapes full understanding. All we can see are the traces, the fragments of individual histories. Memorials are the tool I used to discover the past as much as is possible.
Q: In the process of writing the book, what do you feel you learned about your family?
A: I already knew a lot, from table talk over the years and also from some recorded memoirs. But writing the book, things crystallized. I don’t believe I learned more, but I learned in a different way.
Q: Is there anything else we should know about the book?
A: The Holocaust was a singular event in human history but it is also one that is susceptible to different political interpretations, and this is reflected in some of the memorials I saw.
Hungary was part of the Axis alliance and the site of some of the most extreme anti-Jewish actions, but the memorial recently built in Budapest by the Orban right-wing government makes the country appear a victim rather than a supporter of Nazi policies.
But Holocaust memorials can also serve a national mythology in countries that fought the Nazis. The memorial in New Jersey’s Liberty State Park has a helmeted American soldier carrying an emaciated concentration camp survivor in his arms.
The inscription reads, “Dedicated to America’s Role of Preserving Freedom and Rescuing the Oppressed.” This makes it seem the Holocaust was mainly an opportunity for Pax Americana to show its stuff.
But my main impression is how successfully many memorials engage the problem that is the Holocaust – even if it is impossible to fully explain that tragic event, the best memorials make us think about it in new ways.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
Pizza in Pushkin's Square
James Fallows
Washington Monthly. 22.8 (Sept. 1990): p58.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1990 Washington Monthly Company
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/
Listen
Full Text:
Pizza in Pushkin's Square Pizza in Pushkin's Square. Victor Ripp. Simon and Schuster, $18.95. This short, wry book is delightfully written and revealing about both the United States and the Soviet Union. The author is a professor of Russian literature whose parents came from Russia and who has returned there himself many times before and during the Gorbachev era. For 200 years, he says, Russians have been far more interested in figuring out the American character than Americans have been in understanding Russians. "Though most Russians rarely see an American, and never talk to one, they have managed to devise a balance sheet of our flaws and virtues.... It's an odd perspective, and like creatues in fairy tales we seem distanced and vivid at the same time."
One strong theme in Russia's contradictory view of America is that the two national cultures really have a tremendous amount in common. A team of writers, reporting on a cost-to-coast drive across the United States, excitedly told their readers about a man they had met in Dearborn, Michigan: "His eyes are set close together, the prickly eyes of a peasant. As a matter of fact, he looks very much like a sharp-nosed Russian peasant, a self-made inventor who suddenly shaved off his beard and put on an English suit of clothes." As Ripp points out, the subject of this description was none other than the original Henry Ford--"American to the bone, almost primordially native in occupation and in apperance."
America's failure to reciprocate the respect, attention, and sense of comradeship is the Russians' fundamental grievance. Ripp says that he has been continually lectured about America's refusal to appreciate Soviet sacrifices in World War II. "The truth of these assertions aside--and most rang more or less true--the querulous tone was remarkable. It suggested a boxer who won't stop throwing punches long after the final bell has sounded, the fans departed, and the stadium locked shut." Russia has made special room in its heart for the few Americans who have paid the country proper respect--John Reed, Van Cliburn, the inescapable Armand Hammer.
Similar complaints--"the Americans don't care as much about us as we do about them"--are usually heard in the Philippines, Mexico, or other countries that see themselves as distinctly weaker than the U.S. and therefore the victims of its uninformed whims. Ripp says that to some extent Russia is the same: "Always lagging in material goods, almost always a bit backward culturally, Russia has a longstanding inferiority complex." But he says that most Russians also feel that their values and sensitivities are deeper, more refined, more serious than their cowboy image of American life. They are especially annoyed when America, or the real Americans they now encounter in greater numbers, fail to conform to Soviet expectations. James Fenimore Cooper is revered in Russia for expressing "authentic" American values. A Pravda correspondent visited Cooper's grave in Cooperstown and was heartbroken to see Americans flooding into the Baseball Hall of Fame, totally ignoring his beloved Cooper.
Ripp says that under Gorbachev Russians at last are able to admit something they've obviously believed for many years: that Americans can somehow do things that are simply beyond Russia's organizational grasp. The film director Sergei Eisenstein was boggled by the skyscrapers of New York. Anastas Mikoyan once filed a detailed, envy-filled report on American burger-frying techniques. Even now, Ripp says, Russians see American quality and American technology as symbols of the best that can be done. Without driving the point into the ground, he suggests that this attitude may reveal how backward Russia really is.
Ripp, Victor: HELL'S TRACES
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Ripp, Victor HELL'S TRACES Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Nonfiction) $25.00 3, 21 ISBN: 978-0-86547-833-6
A personal attempt to tackle emotionally the Nazi roundup of a 3-year-old relative to the concentration camps.An
American Jew whose family escaped the Nazi death machine when another branch of the family did not, Ripp (Pizza in
Pushkin Square: What Russians Think About Americans and the American Way of Life, 1990, etc.) resolved to visit
European Holocaust memorials in order to garner a visceral sense of what they expressed--and what they were unable
to express. The death of his young cousin Alexandre Ripp, in Auschwitz in 1942, followed his "arrest" with his
grandmother in Paris in July 1942 ("arrested suggests more force than needed to take a three-year-old into custody").
This served as a poignant reminder that the branch of the family in Berlin with money, the Kahans, was able to
emigrate before the Nazis got them, while the working-class Ripps, namely Alexandre's father, Aron, born in Grodno,
Poland, and relocated to Paris, were relegated to hiding and eventual execution. The author visited many Holocaust
memorials in Europe--35, he claims--many off the beaten path in Poland and Austria, and he is not easily impressed by
the good intentions of famous artists. Above all, the author craved a "personal connection" to the memorials, a sense of
being moved intimately and outside the institutional setting. "You have to find your proper place in the particular
stretch of history that the memorial invokes," writes Ripp. "Tenuously connected or deeply involved, it doesn't matter
which, as long as you are honest." His father had come from Grodno, and his memories of the Poles were not generous;
the author often scrutinizes and suspects his handlers and translators along the route for being emotionally expedient.
Overall, his memoir is prickly and selective, occasionally haphazard, yet he maintains an emotional honestly above all.
An idiosyncratic work striving for sense and meaning from a family record of enormous loss and obfuscation.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Ripp, Victor: HELL'S TRACES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479234395&it=r&asid=7dfeb60a0a9e838dd566237d6cfd0c76.
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Hell's Traces: One Murder, Two Families, ThirtyFive
Holocaust Memorials
Publishers Weekly.
263.51 (Dec. 12, 2016): p135.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Hell's Traces: One Murder, Two Families, Thirty-Five Holocaust Memorials
Victor Ripp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25
(224p) ISBN 978-0-86547-833-6
Ripp (Moscow to Main Street) travels to 35 Holocaust memorials in seven countries in an effort to better understand
the short life of his cousin Alexandre, while ruminating on the functions of memorials. Ripp never met his cousin,
though the two were close in age; Alexandre was only three years old when he was taken to Auschwitz and killed,
along with other 10 family members on the author's father's side. The memorials themselves are given more attention
than Ripp's family history. Some of the monuments are well known, such as the main Holocaust Memorial in Berlin;
others are considerably off the beaten path, such as the Grodno Ghetto memorial in Belarus and Jochen Gerz's
"disappearing memorial" in Hamburg, which slowly sank underground and is invisible from street level. Ripp is an
engaging and empathic writer who has found a unique, moving way to tell his extended family's story during the
Holocaust and to memorably honor his martyred cousin. Agency: MelanteJackson Agency. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Hell's Traces: One Murder, Two Families, Thirty-Five Holocaust Memorials." Publishers Weekly, 12 Dec. 2016, p.
135+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475225092&it=r&asid=76eefbd2201723133cf7bfa9d2cab7dd.
Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
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Ripp, Victor. Hell's Traces: One Murder, Two
Families, Thirty-Five Holocaust Memorials
David Keymer
Library Journal.
141.20 (Dec. 1, 2016): p106.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Ripp, Victor. Hell's Traces: One Murder, Two Families, Thirty-Five Holocaust Memorials. Farrar. Mar. 2017.224p.
maps, bibliog. index. ISBN 9780865478336. $25; ebk. ISBN 9780374713638. HIST
His father was a Ripp, while his mother descended from the affluent Kahan family with international connections.
Members of the Kahans largely escaped the Holocaust, migrating to the United States, where they continued to prosper.
Descendants of the Ripps have a different story altogether. One of the many Ripp victims of the Holocaust was the
author's young cousin Alexandre, who disappeared into the maws of Auschwitz in the fall of 1942. Decades later,
Victor Ripp (Pizza in Pushkin Square) takes a journey of remembrance as he attempts to make sense of his family's
past. He traces Alexandre's path from his arrest in Paris to his death in Auschwitz, visiting numerous Holocaust
memorials in countries such as Austria, Switzerland, Poland, and Russia. The author reflects on how people shape
history, even monuments, to sugarcoat past transgressions. Even memorials to the Holocaust can be used to play
political games. (He exclaims of a monument in Vienna, "How do you spell 'self-serving?'") VERDICT With a deft
touch, Ripp has written one of the more unusual yet effective Holocaust histories. He doesn't preach, just shows.--
David Keymer, Modesto, CA
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Keymer, David. "Ripp, Victor. Hell's Traces: One Murder, Two Families, Thirty-Five Holocaust Memorials." Library
Journal, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 106. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472371252&it=r&asid=048e5e7b18a5337969a69bf033448b34.
Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A472371252
10/1/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Pizza in Pushkin Square: What Russians Think
About Americans and the American Way of Life
Genevieve Stuttaford
Publishers Weekly.
237.32 (Aug. 10, 1990): p429.
COPYRIGHT 1990 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
PIZZA IN PUSHKIN SQUARE: What Russians Think About Americans and the American Way of Life Russians are
avid consumers of American mass culture--movies, pulp fiction, rock music, jazz, poster art. Astonishingly familiar
with made-in-America products, they see the U.S. as a model to be copied and transcended, even though they consider
Americans parochial, obtuse, ill-mannered, politically retrograde, consumed with trivialities and profiteering. These
findings emerge from Ripp's recent trip to the Soviet Union, distilled in a thoughtful probe that offers an instructive
glimpse of the Russian mind as well as surprising insights into the American character. The son of Russian emigres,
Ripp (From Moscow to Main Street) maintains that Russians remain shackled by their stereotypes of Americans. Black
Americans, the U.S. feminist movement, our daily political life are terra incognita on the Soviet mental map of
America, and many Russians' passionately held opinions of us rest on misinformation and gossip. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Stuttaford, Genevieve. "Pizza in Pushkin Square: What Russians Think About Americans and the American Way of
Life." Publishers Weekly, 10 Aug. 1990, p. 429. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA9286953&it=r&asid=95145d94688fe9f9bbe34584e4fe533b.
Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A9286953
Hell's Traces
Victor Ripp
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2017
224 Pages $25.00
ISBN: 978-0-8654-7833-6
amazon indiebound
barnesandnoble
Review by Linda F. Burghardt
How to make sense of a senseless act—this has been one of the primary driving forces in attempts to understand the Holocaust. Victor Ripp, the talented writer who takes up this question in Hell’s Traces, applies his ingenuity and investigative skills to trying to uncover the reasons behind the murder of his three-year-old cousin, Alexandre, torn from his home in Paris in July 1942 and gassed at Auschwitz.
Ripp starts by putting the young boy into the context of his own family history of loss, suffering, and exile. On his father’s side, ten relatives perished, while on his mother’s side, all escaped the Nazis by fleeing. Why were these two paths so divergent? How might the differences be reconciled?
To Ripp, the Holocaust is not long-ago history, but rather a series of events that were experienced directly. In order to better understand them, and to try to give order and sense to the chaos and trauma, he studied and visited Holocaust memorial sites throughout Europe. Although he made pilgrimages to six countries and went to a total of 35 memorials—each one singular and moving—he struggled to create a coherent picture of what happened in the Holocaust, and why.
In order to gain as deep an understanding as possible, Ripp listened to the testimony of survivors, and interviewed the artists and architects who designed and built the memorials. He also spoke with scholars who wrote about and interpreted the events that the memorials commemorate.
But while memorials can honor the past, can they help us recover from it? Ripp grapples with this question. Hell’s Traces is organized like a travel journal that can guide readers on a journey of their own. At every stop in every country, Ripp brings in history, geography, culture, art and politics—whether he is viewing a museum exhibit, a statue, or a column of stone with nothing more than the names of the dead engraved on its sides. We learn the how and why of every memorial, and in so doing we gain insight into the Holocaust itself and the people who care enough to make the memories last.
Ripp is a retired professor of Russian literature, and his international viewpoint and fluid writing style infuse the pages with color. From Germany to New Jersey, he ties together the conception, design, and building of the memorials in a way that honors little Alexandre, the young cousin who was exterminated in Auschwitz, and at the same time helps us cheer for the family members who were able to escape the Nazi trap and flee to safety and a new life in the new world.
Radically Different Holocaust Stories
Julia M. KleinMay 20, 2017Peter Kuley/Wikimedia Commons
Hell’s Traces: One Murder, Two Families, Thirty-Five Holocaust Memorials
By Victor Ripp
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 224 pages, $25
By Julia M. Klein
Victor Ripp, an American academic and author, is the descendant of two European Jewish families that met radically different fates.
On his mother’s side, the Kahans, a wealthy clan skilled at the art of migration, had the foresight and resources to flee Berlin in 1933. Thirty Kahans made it safely to Palestine or, eventually, the United States. Their story was documented well enough to inspire a museum display and a pending German-language biography.
The Ripps, equally itinerant but of more modest means, were less fortunate: The Nazis killed 11 relatives, living in Paris and Grodno (in today’s Belarus), including the author’s 3-year-old cousin, Alexandre. They lack even a gravesite. Victor’s father — with his wife, Victor’s brother and a very young Victor — escaped in large part because he had married into the Kahan family.
“Hell’s Traces” is Ripp’s idiosyncratic, intermittently absorbing attempt to wed the mosaic of his family history to a meditation on the meaning and limits of Holocaust memorials. He began, Ripp says, by trying to write a more conventional family chronicle, but his words “lay lifelessly on the page.” Embracing the framework of a travel narrative, he decided to enlist various sites of remembrance as entry points to a personal past.
As Ripp acknowledges in his bibliography, James E. Young, Edward T. Linenthal and others have written important books about the memorialization of the Holocaust. And the quest to illuminate the lives of murdered relatives, exemplified by Daniel Mendelsohn’s 2006 masterpiece, “The Lost: A Search For Six Of Six Million,” is a burgeoning subgenre of the Holocaust memoir.
Ripp’s twist is that he examines memorials for the light they shed on his family’s fate, often interviewing their designers and local historians as well. It’s an interesting idea, but one that can seem forced in the execution.
During his encounters, Ripp refines his ideas about which Holocaust memorials work best. He seems initially skeptical of counter-memorials, which critique the heroic assumptions of typical memorials. But he’s won over by the work of Horst Hoheisel in Kassel, Germany, including a vitrine containing a clutter of stones and an underground “ghost” fountain that functions “like a bad memory that can’t be completely repressed.”
Alert to sentimentality and political proselytizing, Ripp is aware that memorials often do the work of myth. Having read James Young, he understands that context — architectural, geographic and historical — shapes memorials’ form and meaning. And he knows that memorials require engaged spectators to complete them. Ripp applies himself to that task.
“Hell’s Traces” begins close to home, with Nathan Rapoport’s Holocaust memorial in New Jersey’s Liberty State Park. A statue of an American soldier rescuing a concentration camp survivor, it celebrates American values — a message accentuated by its dramatic siting, against the backdrop of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Ripp dismisses it as “agitprop,” but draws this unsurprising lesson: “The setting counts. A nation’s spirit always seeps into the spirit of a memorial placed within its borders.”
Traveling to Europe, Ripp visits Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a massive, disorienting field of stone slabs through which visitors can wander. Peter Eisenman’s memorial is deliberately abstract and elusive in its meaning, as Ripp notes, but an underground information center fills in names, dates and other details. “I was left in awe of the implacable power of evil,” he writes, while wondering whether there was “a particular missed turn” that led the Ripps to their deaths.
Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock’s memorial in the Bayerischer Viertel of Berlin — scattered signs and pictograms on lampposts that enumerate a host of anti-Jewish regulations — evokes for Ripp “the step-by-step corruption of a nation’s soul.” Recalling his uncle Aronchik, who hid while his wife, mother-in-law and son, Alexandre, were rounded up in Paris in 1942, Ripp asks, “Why was it so hard to realize that tragedy was closing in?”
Ripp’s journey takes him eastward and further into the past. Rapoport’s famous Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, in Warsaw, Poland, strikes him as grandiose, while Auschwitz knocks him into a “stupefied trance.” In Grodno, his father’s birthplace, he learns that his Ripp relatives were more prosperous than he had imagined. Exploring Shchedrin, Belarus, where his maternal grandmother grew up, he finds an old Jewish cemetery and a memorial that commemorates only “peace-loving victims of Nazi aggression,” a typical Soviet formulation.
In Vienna, Ripp uneasily admires the beauty of Rachel Whitehead’s Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, a stylized library in sandstone-colored concrete. And in Budapest, with its legacy of both heroism and villainy, he is especially moved by a metonymic memorial that features 50 pairs of cast-iron shoes pointing toward the Danube River.
Ripp’s last stop is Paris, Alexandre’s home before his deportation to Auschwitz. There he finds his cousin’s name inscribed on a wall in the Shoah Memorial in the Marais, and also etched in glass, in a park where children now play. In that park, past and present converge for Ripp one last time, in reverential mourning for his lost family and quiet appreciation of his own survival.
Julia M. Klein, the Forward’s contributing book critic, was a finalist this year for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation For Excellence In Reviewing. Follow her on Twitter, @JuliaMKlein
Read more: http://forward.com/culture/372376/one-author-two-radically-different-holocaust-stories/
FROM MOSCOW TO MAIN STREET: AMONG THE RUSSIAN EMIGRÉS
By Victor Ripp
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KIRKUS REVIEW
Ripp, whose parents emigrated from Russia after the Revolution, is troubled by today's ""third wave"" ÉmigrÉs (the second occurred after WW)--their disenchantment with the US, their nostalgia for Russia. The upshot of his reconnoitering and stiff, self-conscious questioning: ""they come with fully primed material desires, with a grasping ambition that is rare in our immigrant tradition""; from their Soviet experience, they're adroit at bypassing authority, at exploiting loopholes (""encountering America, with its much more flexible habits, they are likely to see it as nothing but loopholes""); their dissidence was in many cases slight, private (there's a suggestion of Castro-like dumping of troublemakers, even undesirables); they are Jewish only by enforced identity (and resist the American Jewish embrace); they congregate in enclaves, where they recreate Russian life (the food, drinking, after-hours ""rambunctiousness""); they spurn America as soulless, without ""moral fiber"" (whereas Soviet rigidity ""may some day soften""). Ripp, a teacher of Russian literature who has spent considerable time in the USSR, does much comparative sociologizing along well-worn lines. He also conducts many uncomfortable interviews with ÉmigrÉ writers and other intellectuals--still asking fatuously if-they-like-America-and-why-not, pressing vainly for some acknowledgement of deliverance. But the pursuit of intellectuals not only illustrates their ""intramural squabbling"" (Solzhenitsyn nationalism vs. inchoate liberalism) and their ""need to impress America,"" individually and collectively; it also yields some interesting comments and contrasts. Says Boris Shragin: ""We Russians have no real political consciousness. . . . Issues like taxation, the availability of social services, wages--everything that is a legitimate political issue in the West--does not exist among us."" Vladimir Aksyonov: ""The freedom of the West is disturbing for a writer. . . . Working there was hard, censorship was tough, but all the difficulties were like handicaps an acrobat sets up to overcome, it gave you a style."" At a forum on ÉmigrÉ literature, Czech novelists Milan Kundera and Joseph Skvorecky take opposing stands--for ""proving a culture's power to endure"" vs. writing imaginatively ""about life in migration."" The one writer Skvorecky cites, Edward Limonov (It's Me, Eddie), first delights Riff with his grasp of Upper West Side life, then jars him with word that he worked as a tailor in Russia; ""finally, they are aliens to anyone who has come of age in America."" Riff's inadequacies as an interviewer, observer, and analyst cripple the enterprise. His conclusion is banal, vacuous: their offspring will in time become Americans. But what he found does nonetheless exist--far more percipiently seen, though, by Skvorecky (The Engineer of Human Souls, p. 426)
Pub Date: July 27th, 1984
Publisher: Little, Brown