Books, Arts & Manners: From the Jaws of Death

THE OLD question of whether the Holocaust can be accosted head on in a work of art receives a resounding affirmative answer in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. The issue was raised most conspicuously apropos of Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy; the New York Times Book Review once concluded in an article that such monstrous horror could be tackled only by indirection, and held up Paul Celan’s marvelous poem “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”) as the proper solution. But it seems to me that Eastern European filmmakers had some noteworthy successes with frontal attacks, and now we have one, too.

The film is based on a documentary novel by the Australian writer Thomas Keneally, whose work also underlies one of my all-time favorite movies, Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. Keneally heard the true story of Oskar Schindler and the Schindler Jews from the owner of a Los Angeles leather-goods store where the novelist had brought his briefcase for repair; the man was one of those Jews. Schindler was a minor Catholic Sudeten-German businessman who, when Hitler conquered Poland, moved to Krakow to strike it rich. Prospects for clever opportunists were good. Schindler joined the Nazi party, and acquired an enamelware factory confiscated from its Jewish owners, where he could manufacture kitchenware for the German troops.

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John Simon

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THE OLD question of whether the Holocaust can be accosted head on in a work of art receives a resounding affirmative answer in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. The issue was raised most conspicuously apropos of Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy; the New York Times Book Review once concluded in an article that such monstrous horror could be tackled only by indirection, and held up Paul Celan’s marvelous poem “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”) as the proper solution. But it seems to me that Eastern European filmmakers had some noteworthy successes with frontal attacks, and now we have one, too.

The film is based on a documentary novel by the Australian writer Thomas Keneally, whose work also underlies one of my all-time favorite movies, Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. Keneally heard the true story of Oskar Schindler and the Schindler Jews from the owner of a Los Angeles leather-goods store where the novelist had brought his briefcase for repair; the man was one of those Jews. Schindler was a minor Catholic Sudeten-German businessman who, when Hitler conquered Poland, moved to Krakow to strike it rich. Prospects for clever opportunists were good. Schindler joined the Nazi party, and acquired an enamelware factory confiscated from its Jewish owners, where he could manufacture kitchenware for the German troops.