Re. The absence of "the Holocaust" from GR; Neufeld's The Rocket and the Reich

[jbor]

Most people have dictionaries, millison. The "Internet book review" of 
Neufeld's book which you deride was written by J.D. Hunley from the NASA
History Office.

A.J.P. Taylor's works on German history and WW II, despite his
idiosyncrasies and "goaks", are authoritative secondary sources which
Pynchon could conceivably have consulted prior to and during the writing of
GR.

Your use of the phrase "the Holocaust" as a catch-all term is obfuscation,
offensively so, and diminishes its specific denotation of the Churban, or
Shoah, of 1940-1945. The relationship between Weissmann and Enzian in GR has
absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with "the Holocaust".

The absence of "the Holocaust" from GR is significant. It's a shame you
haven't allowed the list to discuss it. Pynchon's narrative is written from
within the historical moment, when officiaries and the general public on
both sides of the war divide turned a blind eye to the fate of the arrested
Jews, and when the phrase itself had not yet been coined. The occurrence of
the term as a common noun to describe Slothrop's tongue at Mrs Quoad's
(118.12) and elsewhere is a type of dramatic irony, as I have argued in
detail previously, as also is the Kinderofen game which Katje, Blicero and
Gottfried play. (There is a powerful fictional treatment of the
psychological effects of this contemporary and subsequent denial of "the
Holocaust" -- by the Jewish survivors -- in Martha Cooley's novel *The
Archivist*

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0316158720/abbysworkshopahaA/102-88
64112-1866539

which is interwoven with an intriguing and resonant T.S. Eliot sub-plot.
I've posted a review below for anyone who is interested.)

No-one, apart from you, has ever accused me of being a "Holocaust-denier".
That you need to resort to such libel as a rhetorical strategy merely
indicates the collapse of your argument, and is a disgrace to your
"profession".



*******

Review of Martha Cooley's *The Archivist*:

>From Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 1998
A sophisticated and compelling debut--about libraries though without a
particle of dust, and with passion galore though about inability to love.
Matthias Lane has been bookish all his life and may not seem like much to
write about--a buttoned-up man in his 60s, chief archivist of rare books and
manuscripts in a university library. But when a grad student named Roberta
Spire asks to see T.S. Eliot's letters to his passionate but unrequited
lover Emily Hale, a set of associations is let loose that will reveal the
painful truth (and deceit) of Matt's past life and the painful truth as well
of a great sweep of the 20th century. Though 30 years his junior, Roberta
reminds Matt of his own dead wife, Judith--who was also beautiful, also
passionate, and also a poet. There are other parallels between Roberta and
Judith--both had been deceived, in one way or another, about their own past,
their parents' past, and their own Jewishness. And both, in different ways,
were connected with the fate of the Jews in WWII Europe. Judith, in fact, in
the years after the war, grew so obsessed by the emerging details of the
Holocaust--and by people's having stood by and done nothing--that she became
unhinged and was committed by Matt to an institution (just as Eliot had
earlier committed his own wife Vivienne), where a fate awaited her that will
grip any reader and that will haunt the self-blaming Matt forever. Roberta's
appearance causes him to revisit that past, revisit--and revise--his own
guilt, and suffer again both the intensity of his love for the doomed Judith
and the terrible, fear-based inadequacy of it. What sounds like an entirely
dour tale takes wings in Cooley's hands, is enlivened by her eye for
character, detail, place, period, every small human nuance--and by her
perfect, apt quotations from Eliot's poems. A superlative, serious, gripping
literary treasure. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights
reserved.