CONCLUSION
Throughout this class we have probed at the differences between Holocaust representation and memory in Israel and the United States. Often, we have found the differences to be slim, but often they have been great. Sometimes we can explain the differences, and sometimes we have not been able to. One of the best aspects of this course has been discovering the differences and similarities between our two student bodies. Yaarah and Tami spoke of Yeshurun and Kovner as Jewish poets, more so than Israeli poets. This is interesting. Both Klepfisz and Glatstein seem to be representing the Holocaust in ways that exhibit specific references to the American Jewish experience. The American Jewish experience, particularly post-Holocaust and post-founding of the Israeli state, has included a type of diasporic guilt merged with a survivor's guilt similar to the kind that Glatstein's "left behind" trope describes. The anger which Klepfisz and Glatstein exhibit towards their adopted country and western civilization in general is much more vehement than that exhibited by the Israeli writers. This is all the while taking into consideration the betrayal felt in the Israeli poets writing at the world for not assisting the victims. The anger demonstrated, particularly by Glatstein, is a questioning of the decision to leave behind the true Jewish life to come to America. The true Jewish life is felt by some to be traditional European "ghetto" Jewry, or perhaps, the finality and purity of emigrating to the land of Israel.
Interestingly, the anger/guilt expressed by Klepfisz seems to revolve less around the decision to move to America and remain in the diaspora, and more around the loss of the culture of Eastern European Jewry, specifically the loss of the Yiddish language. She feels guilty that her culture, the culture that made up pre-Holocaust Jewish life, is dying. Her attempt to write in Yiddish is an attempt to revive the language of secular Jewish culture as a way of remembering the past and continuing to develop this culture for the future. Here we come to an interesting juxtaposition between Klepfisz and Glatstein. Whereas Glatstein wrote all of his poetry in Yiddish -- reaching out to the Jewish-American audience who still spoke the language during his time and writing the language he felt represented his "natural Jewishness" (see Claire's guilt/anger section) -- Klepfisz struggles with writing for an audience that is not primarily Yiddish-speaking (even the Jews who read her poetry do not usually speak Yiddish) and she questions the use of Yiddish for all of her poetry. As mentioned before, she struggles with the divide between ghettoizing Yiddish by using it only for Jewish poems and taking away its unique Jewish connection by using it in poems that are not primarily Jewish (see Sarah's guilt/anger section).
Thus, while the fact that both Glatstein and Klepfisz use Yiddish points to the importance of the language for maintaining the connection to past Jewish life -- the same connection to which Avot Yeshurun clings -- the generational differences make the use of Yiddish different for the authors partially because their audiences have very different experiences with the language. Klepfisz complains that Yiddish in America has become a joke by the time she starts writing it, whereas for Glatstein the language is almost a sacred dialect. She, the survivor, writes in Yiddish to preserve the cultural Jewishness that was severed by the Holocaust, while he, the American observer with foresight, writes to tell American Jews that, "God has truly forsaken his people and will no longer be the blinding light of the Jewish faith" (see Claire's guilt/anger section). For her, serious Yiddish serves the role of making the portrayal of the Holocaust more authentic and less commercialized, while for him the Yiddish is the weighty linguistic vehicle of a call to attention for the Jewish-American public. It would seem, then, that the Jewish identities of these poets are shaped much more by their living in America than the poetry of Kovner and Yeshurun is shaped by their Israeli nationality.