Rakover
By Andrew Wallenstein
For decades, the story of one man's final moments in the Warsaw ghetto lived on. A searing monologue that captures the tragedy of the Holocaust up close, it was repeated in countless newspaper columns and synagogue pulpits. The man who wrote it was unknown and presumed dead.
Try telling that to the story's author, Zvi Kolitz. Not only did he survive the Holocaust, but he never stepped foot inside the Warsaw ghetto.
It's a testament to how extraordinary his short story, Yosl Rakover Talks to God, truly is. Over 50 years after it first appeared in print, Pantheon Books is republishing Rakover with afterwords from luminaries including French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who hailed it as "a profound and authentic experience of spiritual life." Most important of all, the name Zvi Kolitz will appear on the text, debunking the myth of anonymity that has surrounded it since its inception.
The confusion over the origin of Rakover is understandable. After all, the first-person account repeatedly cites his imminent death at the hands of the Nazis surrounding the ghetto. But Yosl Rakover was simply a fictional figure conjured up by Kolitz, who escaped from war-torn Europe before his native Lithuania was invaded. Still alive today, he went on to live a successful life ranging from his stint as an emissary for the World Zionist Congress to producing documentaries and plays.
Rakover sprang to life from Kolitz's pen in Bueno Aires during 1946. After its original publication in an Argentinian newspaper, text and byline split up somewhere along its way to dozens of publications around the globe. Whenever Kolitz spotted his work, he tried in vain to get credit, but was usually dismissed.
You can't blame him for trying. His words were being hailed the world over as a 20th century version of the Book of Job. Yosl Rakover spends 26 pages raging over his lot in life, watching his entire family and community die slowly all around him. And yet the character simultaneously exudes an eerie calm because his experiences have only reaffirmed his religious beliefs.
"You have done everything to make me lose my faith in You, to make me cease to believe in You," Kolitz writes at the close of his story. "But I die exactly as I have lived, an unshakeable believer in You."
Rakover is an intensely personal struggle with the thorny theological issue known in the Bible as "hesder panim," or the veiling of God's face. The title character considers it an honor to be a Jew, and yet can't understand why the God who chose his people is trying to destroy them.
Readers of the new edition will also get a sense of the legacy of Rakover in commentaries from Levinas, literary critic Leon Wieseltier and Paul Badde, a German journalist who took particular interest in Kolitz's life. All three writers touch on an issue most thoroughly explored by Wieseltier, that of the appropriation of the Holocaust for the sake of fiction. It was Theodore Adorno who said that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz, yet as Wieseltier notes, sometimes fiction achieves a level of truth that eludes reality.
At just 99 pages, Rakover (translated by Carol Brown Janeway) is sure to be one of the slimmest additions to any Holocaust library. But it is certainly not the lightest. For Kolitz to have written about these feelings without experiencing the Holocaust is nothing short of awe-inspiring.
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