LITERARY DRAMA

Some forms of communication deal with cold facts, while others intend to rouse emotions. For example, it would be possible to read an historical report on the Holocaust without feeling deep sorrow or moral outrage. But read about it in Thomas Kenneally’s 1982 novel Schindler’s Ark, or watch it unfold on the screen in the movie Schindler’s List, and there will be tears.

I have often talked with people who claim that they only read non-fiction material because they want the truth, but I posit that we miss part of the truth if we only have factual data. Humans are feeling animals—and if we ignore the pain and suffering of the Holocaust, we have missed the core of the thing.

That’s why I read literary fiction, where the author’s intent is to touch upon the universal truths of life. I appreciate that some readers merely want to be entertained; that has its value as well—and we have popular fiction in many genres that meet that need. But I want to read novels that connect me to the human condition.

I also want my college students to read great works that meet the standards for literature—a work of art that deals with big moral issues such as Good vs Evil; touches on social wrong and teaches a moral lesson; uses elevated, figurative language; has layers of complexity and more than one message; entices readers to think; inspires.

Austrian novelist Thomas Kenneally was unknown to American readers when he was approached by Polish Jew Leopold Pfefferberg in the early 1980s with a story of survival that needed to be told. The plot centered on Oskar Schindler, a Polish businessman who owned a factory in Krakow during World War II when the Nazi’s were rounding up Jews into ghettos, eventually transporting them to prison camps and gas chambers.

Schindler was an unlikely hero—a member of the Nazi party, a businessman driven by greed; a man with great moral flaws—and yet as he became aware of the extermination of the Jewish people, he was driven to help. He convinced local Nazi leadership to let him use Jewish labor in his plant, pointing out the value of his business to the war effort and offering bribes. Pfefferberg was one of the 1200 people that Schindler was able to save.

The novel met all of the standards for a literary work, and earned Kenneally the 1982 Booker Prize. One reviewer noted the literary intent: “It would have been easy to have presented this as an adventure; an escape story, which would have been tasteless and disrespectful of those who didn’t survive. In the end it is a portrait of an almost unimaginable horror and a brief glimmer of hope.”

I deeply studied the Holocaust in my college days—to the point it is difficult for me to absorb more of its pain. I dare not see the movie version of this book (Schindler’s List), with its stark black and white images, broken only by the little girl in the red coat—a symbol of the bloodshed of the Holocaust—the deaths of Jewish people of all ages, the millions that Schindler could not save.

JONNIE MARTIN