It is precisely this constantly metamorphosing recontextualization of memory, its location within both a historical continuum and a particular situation, that Appelfeld's writings so conspicuously lack, but which, ironically, is brought to them by the new historical experiences and concerns of their readers. A novel like The Retreat, for instance, which is an even harsher and historically more absurd allegory of the self-hating assimilationist drive of Austrian Jews, can be reread more disturbingly from an Israeli context as a critique of the "anti-Jewish" strain in Zionism itself. In The Retreat, a group of Viennese Jews has fled the decadent and viciously anti-Semitic capital, less to find refuge than to learn how to become more Aryan. They now try "assimilation into the countryside," in order to remake their weak, citified Jewish character (they describe themselves as "pampered, sensitive, slow, argumentative") into a new kind of being, by working the soil and getting closer to nature. Their goal is "the kind of health which is conceivable only in people who work the land" (105). Their instructor, Balaban, "promised that within a short space of time he would painlessly eradicate embarrassing Jewish gestures and ugly accents" (62), and that strenuous manual labor and an avoidance of excessive intellectualization would finally heal the "sickly members of his race" (63). Of course this strategy utterly fails the refugees of The Retreat, much as in Badenheim 1939 the fantasy that it still makes sense to call oneself "an Austrian citizen of Jewish origin" (21) is revealed as grotesquely self-deluding. What makes the historical/ethical perspective of The Retreat still stranger is that, unlike Badenheim 1939, it does recognize the intrinsic value of utterly prosaic, quotidian moments: making coffee, sharing food, and enjoying the warmth of a bed are celebrated, not scorned, in this book. The Jews of The Retreat, who arrive disliking one another and themselves, do learn to make a community and become connected to one another through their persecution and isolation. But crucially, they do not do so as Jews . Their new communitarian consciousness does not bring with it any change in their sense of what it means to be Jewsit is a totally atomistic transformation, occasioned by anti-Semitism but unconnected to a sense of specific cultural or historical options and decisions. (This fictional image is in striking contrast to the real situation in Austria, Germany, France, and Italy, where the enforced segregation of Jews and their expulsion from civil society brought with it a flowering of "returns" to Judaism and Jewish studies, especially among people who hitherto had shown no interest in Jewish culture.)

In The Retreat, the characters' slowly evolving respect for small, daily acts of mutual assistance and their growing personal courage seem particularly hollow because, in spite of their struggle to survive surrounded by racist enemies, nothing ever brings them to amend, or even to think about, their own Jewish self-hatred. In Appelfeld's novels, it is as though such self-hatred were simply a biological/historical "given" of assimilated European Jews, more fundamental to their natures than even the instinct for survival and unamenable to modification no matter what their actual circumstances. Ultimately, as still another variation on the Badenheim motif, The Retreat is interesting only as an example of how bitter and heavy-handed Appelfeld's allegories become without the devices of genteel social comedy to act as a tonal counterpoint to his theme. But reread against the grain of its own explicit intentions, The Retreat becomes fascinating for its insight into the pressure with which the sabras sought to remake the European survivor immigrants into new, physically tough, and manually dexterous Jews. For the yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine before statehood), as Tom Segev insists, "negation of the Exile took the form of a deep contempt, and even disgust, for Jewish life in the Diaspora, particularly in Eastern Europe, which was characterized as degenerate, degraded, humiliating, and morally corrupt. In their tragedy, Diaspora Jews seemed even more repellent." Berel Lang has also analyzed disturbing parallels between the Nazi rhetoric about Jews in general and certain left-wing Zionist descriptions of the assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie in the Galut : "the convergence of certain formulations . . . extends even to the use of common metaphors and in particular the charge against the Jews of the Diaspora of 'parasitism' . . . or of being 'diseased.'" Perhaps the only truly frightening moments in The Retreat come when the reader begins to be haunted by the similarity among three converging tropes: the Jewish self-contempt expressed by Appelfeld's characters about themselves, the traditional rhetoric of Austrian anti-Semites, and the scorn voiced by Zionist polemicists against the characterless and deracinated Jews of the Galut : "But the Jews are rodents; not for nothing does the world regard them as animals of the rodent species. I myself . . . what was I all those years but a rodent?" (104-5). I do not intend to propose an ironic new interpretation of The Retreat as a satire on the anti-Jewish strain in leftZionism,potentially illuminating though that might prove, but to show how different contexts and circumstances provide a text with a penumbra of sideshadows that decisively inflect the ways it can be read. In this sense, parody can be considered an effect of sideshadowing, exposing as it does the partiality of any position that "ignores or claims to transcend its own originating context." Because parody is most readily invited by doctrinal utterances that seek to present themselves as absolute, some recent Israeli novelists have been strongly attracted to showing how the Zionist prescriptions of the founder generation resonate differently in the nation today. For example, Meir Shalev's novel, The Blue Mountain (published in Hebrew in 1988; translated into English in 1991), contains a wonderfully comic metamorphosis of the Zionist injunction that the "normalization" of Jews could only take place through the redemption of the earth of Eretz Israel by physical labor. Set in a village in the Jezreel Valley, the novel is full of ironic sideshadowing, bringing to light consequences undreamed of by the heroic pioneer-ideologists. Among the most audacious of these ironies is the decision by one of the book's principal characters to turn his fruit and vegetable garden into a private cemetery. Still worse, he then charges outrageous sums to wealthy Galut Jews who had come to Palestine during the Second Aliyah (ca. 1904-14), then left when times became too hard, but still long to be buried back in the soil they deserted. When the village objects to this plan as violating everything for which the community has stood since its foundation ("We returned to the earth to farm it and to live by our own labors"), they are told by the narrator's lawyer, "My client is acting in perfect conformity with the ideals of cooperative farming. . . . My client is definitely engaged in returning Jews to the earth . . . [and] quite literally earns his livelihood from the earth."A novel like Badenheim 1939, of course, is completely devoid of sideshadows: its plot, characterization, and figuration are unswervingly single-minded, moving inevitably from the first sentences to the railway station and its "four filthy freight cars." But the contexts of pre-war Zionist polemics against the Diaspora and of post-war Israeli scorn for the weak, European Jew as a permanent victim in need of remaking, provide precisely the kind of new light in which a text like The Retreat acquires sideshadows that probably were never part of its author's intentions and that unwittingly bring it closer to the parodic element in a novel like The Blue Mountain . Sideshadowing, then, can also be thought of as the entire set of alternative interpretations, subsidiary plots, and interrogations that history encourages us to add to a work by uncovering new connections, ramifications, or contradictions between it and the world of lived actuality. Without sideshadowing, the targets of a historical satire like Badenheim 1939 are too clearly and immobilely in focus: there is no history because there is no process, only a totally static universe with unvarying global oppositions. This attempt to freeze history and reduce it to a set of immutable and strictly hierarchized binary categories (Aryan/Jew; healthy/degenerate; Übermensch/Untermensch; party loyalist/enemy of the people; proletarian/bourgeois; revolutionary/reactionary; etc.) is characteristic of all totalitarian thinking, which, whether fascist, Nazi, or communist, is profoundly anti-historical and inimical to all forms of sideshadowing.

Irrespective of one's intentions, it is also impossible to contest any of these totalitarian ideologies coherently without at the same time rejecting the figurations through which they organize and explain the world. Just as the most solid objects look different under different angles of light or set among differently shaped shadows, the certainties of ideology are threatened by sideshadowing's emphasis on the nonsystematic and the accidental. If history, rather than being governed by the iron code or law claimed by various schools of "semiotic totalitarians," actually manifests a marked degree of unpredictability amid its changes, then the creation of new shadows and unexpected patterns will be unavoidable. After noting that "the Holocaust has already engendered more historical research than any single event in Jewish history," Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi goes on to speculate that there is "no doubt whatever that its image is being shaped, not at the historian's anvil, but in the novelist's crucible. Although the responsibilities and the decorum of the two genres should never simply be collapsed together, neither is Yerushalmi's distinction between the historian and the novelist as absolute as his antithesis requires. In both kinds of writing, when the subject is an event as grievous as the Shoah, the carefulness of the imagination must accompany the carefulness with which the evidence is assembled and analyzed. Ultimately, it seems to me that the crucial issues have little to do with the differentiation in which Yerushalmi places his trust. What is needed, instead, is to challenge the fundamental narrative codes and interpretive strategies used to articulate the explanation of the world necessary for apocalyptic, Messianic historya history of which the Shoah was the demonic counter-incarnation. A new kind of anti-totalitarian narrative is called for, in which a prosaic, quotidian voice can contest at the formal as well as the thematic level the absolutist ideology that makes mass murder conceivable. This is possible in both history and fiction, and perhaps equally difficult in both, precisely because each is so deeply penetrated by an ethos of the decisive and exceptional, and each is so accustomed to the claims of foreshadowing. The whole argument of my book rests upon the elemental premise that sideshadowing is an essential aspect of such a new, prosaic narrative. The historical understanding whose direct correlative is sideshadowing not only speaks for the possibility of an always open, always undetermined future but also looks back at the past with a solicitude for the world that was wiped out, for the possibilities it contained, and for the victims who once lived within the horizon of those now permanently obliterated but once real possibilities.

And in each of these diverging stories all the others are reflected. . . . If . . . only one version . . . has come down to us, it is like a body without a shadow, and we must do our best to trace out that invisible shadow in our minds.
Roberto Calasso,
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

I think there are as many ways of surviving survival as there have been to survive.
Philp K., quoted in Holocaust Testimonies

For centuries it was in large part through the common telling of its stories and the imaginative loyalties they fostered that Jewish survival was ensured. But the two enormous transformations of Jewish existence in this centurythe Zionist movement and the establishment of the State of Israel on the one hand, and, on the other, the previously unimaginable horror of the Shoahprofoundly altered the patterns discovered inor, as I have argued, imputed tothe narratives that are now constructed to articulate the meaning of Jewish histories. The kind of ameliorative "Whig Interpretation of History" against which Herbert Butterfield already warned in 1931 has reemerged in an inverted, daemonic version as a grid for reading European Jewish history, but it is one that has no more coherence or analytic rigor than optimistic historical master plots. To recapitulate my position in its most polemical formulation: I think that in the ways the history of European Jewry has usually been narrated, its annihilation in the camps is granted a kind of negative teleology that then retroactively provides the terms by which its entire experience prior to the Third Reich is judged. And as we have seen, backshadowing of this sort, whether in the melodramatic formulations of a Pawel or Berkeley, or in the elegiac ironies of an Appelfeld, inevitably denatures the very different possibilities facing Jews living at different historical moments, under radically incommensurate and often rapidly changing conditions. It has also made the Shoah the foundation for a certain kind of modern Judaism, in which the claims of victim-hood as constitutive of Jewish experience throughout history are asserted either for their potent political charge or as cultural talismans to be celebrated or chafed against depending on the particular speaker's temperament and intentions. Beyond the immediate political consequences of such a position, consequences that include, but are not limited to, an emotional/rhetorical climate in which successive Israeli administrations seek to mobilize Jewish loyalty through a calculated appeal to the same tragic story (i.e., "Eretz Israel as the last refuge of the [inevitably persecuted] Jews"), there is a more insidious corollary to privileging the Shoah in such a way. Whether unwittingly, or as part of an explicitly accepted belief, each time the Shoah is evoked in the terms I have described, it relies on the logically prior assumption that the real "proof" of the worth of an individual, a doctrine, or a political/ethical system is how it holds up under the harshest testing imaginablea kind of in extremis veritas interpretation of an entire culture and all of its specific practices.

Clearly nothing of what I have written should be taken as an attempt to disparage the ongoing studies of the historical roots, political context, and (if this is the right phrase) bureaucratic "institutionalization" of the Shoah. But analysts are right to underline that Menahem Begin was the first Israeli Prime Minister regularly to invoke the Shoah in his major addresses, and anyone fascinated by the evocative power of narrative and rhetorical patterns will register how fraught with risks such a backward glance can be when it encourages, implicitly or by design, apocalyptic fears through the medium of its evocations. As we can see today both in Israel and in the American political and academic body, once victimhood is understood to endow one with special claims and rights, the scramble to attain that designation for one's own interest group is as heated as any other race for legitimacy and power. Victimhood, one needs to remember, is scarcely a fixed term, and there is something truly depressing in the clamor of competing voices to prove whose distress has been more persistent and devastating, and whose claims to compensatory rectification are therefore more worthy. For a particularly demoralizing example of this tendency one need look no further than the August 1991 Crown Heights turmoil between the Lubavitcher and the black communities and the ways in which it was immediately inscribed within competing narratives of victimization. Long infuriated by the perceived special treatment accorded to the Lubavitchers, black anger was triggered when a car in the Grand Rebbe's entourage jumped a curb and struck two black children, killing one, Gavin Cato, and seriously injuring his cousin, Angela. In the three days of riots that ensued, a twenty-nine-year-old Australian Jewish scholar, Yankel Rosenbaum, was murdered and two more Hasidic men were stabbed. The assaults were accompanied by intense anti-Semitic harassment in which Jews were compared to slave owners and the death of Cato was seen as a direct continuation of the callous disregard for black lives on the slave ships and plantations. In an article revealingly entitled "Invisible Man: The Lynching of Yankel Rosenbaum," David Evanier recounts how "the media at best treated the accidental death of Gavin Cato and the murder of Rosenbaum as morally equivalent. The worst ignored Rosenbaum entirely. The conflict between blacks and Jews was seen as being in balance, with the 'social justice' edge going to the blacks. . . . Anti-Semitism was not mentioned in any editorial about Crown Heights in New York newspapers until August 29 [nine days after the killing] in the New York Post ." But even though Evanier's accusation of moral obtuseness on the part of the New York media seems to me in the main justified, his own narrative is itself decidedly problematic. The reason the media tended to see "the 'social justice' edge going to the blacks" was primarily because in the United States, Jews are not regarded as a vulnerable minority, while African Americans are perceived, both rhetorically and legally, in such terms. But instead of contesting the whole ideology of justification by degree of historical victimization, Evanier, as the title of his piece clearly announces, wants only to reassign the status of principal victim, first by casting Yankel Rosenbaum as the 1991 equivalent of the unnamed black narrator of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and then by claiming that the Lubavitchers today run as great a risk of public lynchings as did Southern blacks during the Jim Crow era. The Lubavitcher community itself, in the form of the "Crown Heights Emergency Fund," placed a full-page advertisement in The New York Times on September 20, 1991, under the heading "This Year Kristallnacht Took Place on August 19th Right Here in Crown Heights." Their version of Leo Strauss's reductio ad Hitlerum was rightly perceived by those who had been in Germany on Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938) as an outrageous comparison. The brutal beatings and mass arrests of thousands of Jews, the looting of Jewish homes and stores throughout the country, and the burning of Jewish synagogues, libraries, and community centers, all organized and planned by the state itself, simply bears no relationship to the events in Brooklyn. However, I am not concerned here to reexamine the circumstances leading to the death of Gavin Cato and the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum, but rather to question the entire urge to establish one's credentials as an eternal victim in order to claim an unassailable moral high ground. Such a claim could only be substantiated by interpreting each unhappy event as a repetition/continuation of the worst experiences in the communal memory, with the result that it almost seemed to both sides to have been Nazis and slaveholders who confronted one another, rather than citizens of Brooklyn in 1991. Were the consequences of such distortions not so pernicious, they might almost be comic: the image of a Southern plantation owner with peyas (sidelocks), dressed in a Hasidic black coat and wearing his tallit and tephillin (prayer shawl and phylacteries) confronting a black dressed in the SS regalia of the Aryan master race has an undeniably macabre absurdity to it.

Moreover, as my examples make clear, in spite of current assumptions in this country, to criticize the rhetoric of victimhood does not mean aligning oneself with any particular political party or direction. Throughout much of this century in Europe, the primary political expression of the sense of being injured, and of anger at having been reduced to the role of a marginalized victim, has been the province of the far right. Fascism and Nazism both capitalized on and fueled the ressentiment of people who were convinced that they had been unfairly mistreated, while others (usually the Jews, but also intellectuals, homosexuals, members of Masonic lodges, etc.) had received unmerited privileges. Hitler, in particular, regularly appealed to the Germans to see themselves as innocent victims of a host of interlocked evils ranging from the Versailles treaty to parliamentary corruption, all secretly orchestrated by an international Jewish conspiracy intent on world rule. Insofar as the increasingly problematic categories of "left" and "right" still retain any useful meaning today, it is instructive to see that the position of justification by one's historical affliction is invoked in Israel largely by the political and cultural right, while in North America and the United Kingdom this is done primarily by the left. Yet people who are quite willing to resist the Likud Party's invocation of the Shoah to legitimize its policies are swayed by analogous arguments derived from the horrors of slavery, or the history of gender, race, and sexual-orientation-based discrimination and violence, in order to justify the creation of a newly ennobled victim group whose refrains of oppression are manipulated for legislative and political ends.It took considerable courage for the Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua to remind a predominantly Jewish readership that "we must bear in mind that our having been victims does not accord us any special moral standing. The victim does not become virtuous for having been a victim. Although the Holocaust inflicted a horrible injustice upon us, it did not grant us a certificate of everlasting righteousness. The murderers were amoral; the victims were not made moral. To be moral you must behave ethically. The test of that is daily and constant." This same distinction holds true, unpopular though such a view is, for victims of AIDS, racism, rape, or cancer, or any of the numerous brutalities and inequities that continue to flourish in our society. Indeed, it seems to me an indecency to assume that victims are somehow "ennobled" by their (usually involuntarily undergone) suffering, since such an assumption necessarily endows the cause of the suffering with the capacity to bring out a previously hidden worthiness. If anything, as the experience of recent history has shown, too sharp a sense of one's own victimization can easily lead to a compensatory urge to tyrannize over others, and those convinced of their unique victimhood are quite likely to prove tyrants both to themselves and to others if given the chance, whether their frustration is confined to a protest against the curriculum in a modern university, expressed in the mob violence of an urban riot, or vented in the murderous rampage of Baruch Goldstein, whose killing of at least forty unarmed Muslims was cheered by many of his fellow Gush Emunim settlers on the West Bank.For Jewish thought, what is most troubling in the conjunction of foreshadowing and the sense of victimization in narratives like Appelfeld's or Pawel's is its complicity with the dispiriting cliché that sees the entirety of Jewish existence as nothing more than a wrenching from horror to horror. It is exactly against what Salò Baron called this "lachrymose view of Jewish history" as only a Jammergeschichte, an endless tale of woe, that the best volumes of modern Jewish historical and cultural studies have been written, studies as diverse in scope and methodology as Baron's own Social and Religious History of the Jews and Gershom Scholem's re-creation of Jewish kabbalistic and mystical thought. In a crucial essay entitled "Deformations of the Holocaust," Robert Alter urged that "it is as important to study how the Jews lived as how they died." In many ways, I believe that it is Alter's formulation, with its principled refusal to interpret the Shoah as the single defining event of Diaspora Jewish history, rather than Fackenheim's 614th commandment, that offers a more productive relationship to the achievements, as well as to the pain, of the past two millennia of Jewish experience. But just as important, I want to insist that any sense of identity as constituted primarily by victimization is an extraordinarily problematic basis for either an individual or a group to build upon, and the sad truth is that, in contrast to the celebrated opening of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, it is "unhappy" consciousnesses that so much resemble one another in their misery, while happiness is always singular and hard-won. More challengingly, though, and against much of the writing done today on the Shoah from both religious and philosophical perspectives, I believe that very little about human nature or values can be learned from a situation in extremis except the virtual tautology that extreme pressure brings out extreme and extremely diverse behavior. Beliefs, ideas, values, and people are tested best in the daily, routine actions and habits of normal life, not in moments of extraordinary crisis, and because foreshadowing can only point to a single, inherently dramatic, rather than typical and quotidian resolution, it must privilege the uniquely climactic over the normative and repeatable. To reject the validating force of extreme crises involves both formal and ethical decisions precisely because such a rejection, based as it is on a moral stance, necessitates finding a new form of writing in order to articulate its new understanding. And only a prosaics of sideshadowing can, I think, do justice to the richness, both humanly and philosophically, of the claims of the ordinary, because it recognizes how various the strands of that ordinariness really are and how shrilly thin by comparison are the dramas we usually take as revelatory.

For someone who has been through the bleakness of the concentration camps, the conviction that the experiences undergone there have revealed a fundamental truth about the world often seems irresistible. Thus, Irene W., one of the survivors whose videotaped interview Langer cites, explains that the "extreme pessimism" that haunts her is part of a "total worldview" in which she feels that she has learned the real "truth about people, human nature, about death . . . [I emerged] knowing the truth in a way that other people don't." A member of my own family who was interned in Sachsenhausen as a youth before being permitted to leave for England still finds it difficult not to take the world of the camps as a kind of ultimate criterion by which to evaluate both his own subsequent experiences and the actions of other people. We need to be extraordinarily careful neither to condemn survivors for the bitterness that they insist is only the "truth" the rest of us are too sheltered or afraid to acknowledge, nor to share their judgment in our own thinking. For many, but by no means all survivors, their time in the camps is the central truth of their lives and stays with them, in Langer's phrase, like "a communal wound that cannot heal." We need to respect their "total worldview," but it is not, nor should we try to make it, the truth of ours. Even Primo Levi, whose best writing continually returns to reevaluate and reanalyze his experiences in Auschwitz, refuses to think of the concentration camp as a uniquely privileged source of insight into human nature. To the question whether "it is necessary or good to retain any memory of this exceptional human state (questa eccezionale condizione umana)," Levi answers in the affirmative, but only because he is certain "that no human experience is without meaning or unworthy of analysis, and that fundamental values, even if they are not positive, can be deduced from this particular world (questo particolare mondo) which we are describing." It is worth lingering here to register just how carefully Levi reverses customary judgments about the camps. If the by-now conventional claim is that Auschwitz, because of its brutality and ruthlessness, represents a uniquely authoritative testing place of human beings, Levi implies that its exceptional nature actually makes the Lager unreliable as a "laboratory." It is the singularity of the Lagers, not their representative or emblematic character, that Levi shows we need to keep clearly in focus, especially now that the Shoah is invoked so often to substantiate and lend emotional force to a diffuse range of arguments about modern society, fundamental human nature, or the character of Western culture as a whole.

In spite of the impassioned self-identification with and search for an absolute (even though absolutely negative) meaning in the experience of the Shoah by writers like Norma Rosen or Cynthia Ozick, no one becomes a survivor either by virtue of being a Jew or by the intensity of their absorption in the history and literature of the Shoah (e.g., Sylvia Plath's notorious lines from "Daddy" : "An engine, an engine / Chuffing me off like a Jew. / A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. / I began to talk like a Jew. / I think I may well be a Jew."). This fact needs to be emphasized because it can serve as a corrective to an unconscious, but therefore all the more insidious, "idealizing" (in the sense of "taking as a globally instructive model") of the Shoah. Because so much of our culture is still strongly bound to the belief that the truth lies in the extreme moments which "ordinary bourgeois life" covers over and that it is only at the (appropriately named) "cutting edge" of the unthinkable that the most valuable insights lie hidden, it has become possible, by a truly grotesque inversion, to interpret the ruthlessness of the Shoah as offering the most authenticbecause most horrendousimage of the underlying reality of our world. Although the extent, brutality, and single-mindedness of the Nazi genocide are unprecedented, its narrative incorporation into what one can call an ideology of the extreme has the paradoxical, and entirely unintended effect of assimilating it to a cultural tradition that itself encouraged a turn to the excessive and the apocalyptic. (Notice here, as well, how this paradox, in which the genocide is simultaneously regarded as utterly unique and yet emblematic of the modern world, perfectly recapitulates the earlier contradiction I have discussed between the Shoah interpreted as at once unimaginable and inevitable.)

The fascination with the brutal and the dangerous holds a compelling place in our culture's imagination. In Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, for example, the narrator, Marlow, tells his listeners that "the truth can be wrung out of us only by some cruel . . . catastrophe," and Jim himself is advised that the only way to test himself is by seeking out the most extreme and trying circumstances possible: "To the destructive element submit yourself. . . . In the destructive element immerse." But, as Dostoevsky had already predicted at the end of the nineteenth century, it is not that far from the celebration of authenticity, risk, and spontaneity to envisaging murder as the final and potentially most purifying confrontation with "the destructive element" in humankind. Moreover, as Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi points out, it is Jewish culture that regularly has been "decimated by the apocalyptic fantasies of others," and in the refiguring of the extermination of European Jewry it is especially important not to allow an internalized version of that same imaginative legacy to dictate the terms within which the Shoah is interpreted.

There is a subtle but clear link between the view that the truth stands out most clearly in an extreme situation and the conviction

that a hidden system or pattern exists waiting to be uncovered beneath the diversity of normal human existence. Both attitudes long for global revelations and are contemptuous of "mere" contingencies. Both are in quest of a revelatory moment that will disclose the one truth that matters, whether that moment be one of interpretive acumen (e.g., Freud's description of himself as a heroic conquistador ) or of extreme physical risk (e.g., the glorification of the battlefield as an arena of personal revelation). Against this notion of truth being found at the utmost hazard of life, the prosaics of sideshadowing wants to locate it in the ordinary and quotidian actions of our communal existence. To grasp just how provocative this proposition really is, it is worth emphasizing that sideshadowing's critique of "semiotic totalitarianism" applies with equal force both to the interpretive model of the human psyche proposed by the reductionist strain in psychoanalysis as well as to Tolstoy's character Pierre Bezukhov's trust in the Masonic mysteries in War and Peace; it encourages the same skepticism toward Hegelian or Marxist teleological readings of history as it does toward earlier master tropes like chiliastic numerology. Sideshadowing is defined by its attention to the pressures of randomness and contingency, to a view of the self as an aggregate of ever-changing habits, memories, and experiences, shaped in part by unforeseen and unforeseeable circumstances, and to a notion of truth as precisely what is not a puzzle to be solved or a revelation to be authenticated in a unique climactic struggle. Hence, too, prosaics insists on an understanding of time as a succession of content-rich differences, rather than as an endless repetition of identically meaningless units suddenly punctuated and redeemed by the thunderclap of the cataclysmically significant crisis. As Berel Lang argues, "a mathematical proof demonstrates no more in its second or third repetition than it did the first timeand moral judgment differs from theoretical reason in just this respect, that as it faces the 'same' issue again, it may incorporate that new judgment into the past. . . . Time appears an intrinsic element of moral judgment." But, as Lang's own uneasy quotation marks are designed to show, in human experience neither the issues nor the people confronting them are ever really "the same," so that an attentiveness to temporality and a recognition of the differences it entails are not just one part of, but an indispensable foundation of moral judgment. Similarly, because it is so dismissive of temporal development and historical context, any ideology that endows victimhood with a singular authority to make claims upon others who were not themselves the agents of the injury, strikes me as morally incoherent. Prosaics, with its emphasis on the incommensurability of specific moments, and sideshadowing, with its commitment to the multiplicity of paths issuing out of each of those moments, necessarily resist such an ideology. For a prosaics of sideshadowing, the question of how to live one's ethnic, racial, or sexual heritage is a subset of the more general issue of finding a proper relationship to temporality and communal identity. Against current ideologies that compete about which one of these aspects, most commonly either the ethnic or the sexual, should be seen as somehow foundational for the entirety of one's being, prosaics regards each one as an equally valid ground base upon which one learns to play out the infinitely complex variations that constitute our freedom. Bakhtin would argue that counterlives are imaginatively enriching because, to adapt Caryl Emerson's apt phrase, they remind us of the primacy of the differences we make over those with which we are born. As a corollary to this theme one can add Michael Frayn's insistence that "we don't choose a moral response [from a preestablished set of options], we construct one." The step-by-step, never-identical construction of a life, a history, and an ethic is the core of a prosaic practice and the principal imaginative lesson of sideshadowing.

In Jewish thought, the privileging of the claims of victimhood has created what Michael R. Marrus calls "the triumphalism of pain," but versions of that triumphalism flourish throughout Western society, operating simultaneously at the level of high art, mass culture, and political rhetoric. Frayn shrewdly asks why the paradigm of literature should so closely resemble a kind of Consumer's Report description of a new product: "Like electric toasters, the characters of fiction are tested, by stress and crisis, until they break down. And the convention is that what emerges at this point is their 'real' nature, which has up till then remained hidden from others and even from the owners of the nature themselves." The strength of this paradigm is evident throughout our culture, not merely in literature, and its persistence testifies to the interpenetration of tropes from one register to another. If the narration of Jewish history has any generalizable lesson, it is surely to illustrate the dangers of such a convention. The fact that Jews, as often as anyone else, lay claim in their own self-interest to a special access to truth derived from their unprecedented suffering only shows the persistence of a cultural topos even among those who, in other ways, have sought strenuously to shed the role. More generally, because the Shoah has been appropriated so often during the past four decades as an all too available archetype of both personal and collective suffering, its meaning has been assimilated to the most conventional données of our epoch. Despite the ritual insistence on the singularity of the genocide, the "final solution" has itself become one of the most often adduced instantiations of an unexamined and deeply false commonplacethe belief that the real worth of our culture can only be authoritatively tested at the extreme limit of human behavior.

"'For example' is no proof," runs a Yiddish proverb. Perhaps there are no proofs, only examples, each one an intricate reality of its own, linked to the others but containing a rich repertoire of counterlives and sideshadows that we are only beginning, in the face of deeply entrenched conventions, to value for their very resistance to the demand for a final proof.