The Müselmann at the Water Cooler (Reference Library of Jewish Intellectual History) - Softcover

The Muselmann at the Water Cooler

Trade paperback. Zustand: Good. Presumed First Edition, First printing. xx [2], 219, [3] pages. Glossary. Index. Front cover has some wear and soiling. Inscribed by the author on the half-title page The inscription reads: "For Nessa who has come to listen & will share with others, E. P. Maryland MARCH 2012". A survivor of concentration camps and the Death March, Eli Pfefferkorn looks back on his Holocaust and post-Holocaust experiences to compare patterns of human behavior in extremis with those of ordinary life. What he finds is that the concentration camp inmate Müselmann, who has lost his hunger for life and is thus shunned by his fellow inmates on the soup line, bears an eerie resemblance to an office employee who has fallen from grace and whose coworkers avoid spending time with him at the water cooler. Though the circumstances are unfathomably far apart, the human response to their situations is triggered by self-preservation rather than by calculated evil. By juxtaposing these two separate worlds, Pfefferkorn demonstrates that the human condition has not changed significantly since Cain slew Abel and the Athenians sentenced Socrates. Winner of the 2012 Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award in Holocaust Literature. Eli Pfefferkorn (Ph.D. Brown University) has served as Director of Research at the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, worked as a reviewer for the Literary Supplement of Haaretz, and edited the periodical "Hebrew Literature in Translation." He has worked as a professor at Haifa and Tel-Aviv Universities and has been a guest lecturer at Brown University. He is also the recipient of a Fulbright-Hays Scholarship. Since the passage of time plays tricks with memory, memoirs written in proximity to the Holocaust ordinarily are given greater credence than later works. One would imagine that a survivor's account written more than 65 years after the Holocaust could not find a place in the canon of Holocaust literature, yet Eli Pfefferkorn's "The Muselmann at the Water Cooler" is indeed a significant addition. The word "Muselmann" was how prisoners described the walking dead, who had given into despair and for whom selection to the gas chamber seemed inevitable. Yoking that image to the workaday water cooler gives some idea of the disjunction of experience that Pfefferkorn portrays. His Holocaust experience included ghettoization, hiding and, ultimately, deportation to Majdanek, whose former inmates have written few memoirs. Rather than go to Palestine after the war, he went to England. Still a very young man, with a long future seemingly ahead of him, Eli's restlessness attracted him to the sea. He sought training as a merchant marine. His training attracted the attention of the Zionists, who were preparing for the inevitable War of Independence and sought his seamanship to defend the coastline. Drawn to Palestine by a sense of duty to the past rather than any Zionist aspirations, Eli found himself fighting far from the sea, in the sands of the Negev. Pfefferkorn slowly made his way into Israeli society from the extreme left, gradually undergoing a self-described process of embourgeoisement. Pfefferkorn's insight into Israeli society of the 1950s and '60s reminds us of a bygone era, of its aspirations and pretentions, intellectual and otherwise. Writing in literary journals and in the Friday newspaper literary supplements, he defended a fellow survivor ridiculed by the Canaanites. Elie Wiesel was reviled by earlier Israeli generations for remaining in France and America rather than making aliyah. Pfefferkorn, who worked closely with Wiesel during the early 1980s, when the latter was chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, recounts some of the controversies relating to Wiesel's chairmanship and his resignation en route to accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. The core of this book is not what happened to Pfefferkorn either before or after the war, but rather during the Shoah and his provocative reflections on its implications. His vantage point was unique. His g. Artikel-Nr. 89269

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