On the 16th July 1942, Rabbi Bereck Kofman was picked up from his family home by the French police; he was taken first to Drancy and then deported to Auschwitz, where he was killed. His daughter writes:
When I first encountered in a Greek tragedy the lament ‘o popoi, popoi, popoi’, I couldn’t keep myself from thinking of that scene from my childhood where six children, their father gone, could only sob breathlessly, knowing they would never see him again, ‘oh papa, papa, papa’.
How is one to understand the echo of the lament in the sobbing of the children?
Plato’s objections to tragic art are ethical; it is said to bear upon a crisis which only the individual can suffer - upon, that is to say, the sphere of the private which Plato always distrusts insofar as it is set again what for him are the interests of the common. Why else does he advocate the distribution of children among members of the polis?
The danger, for Plato, is always that of the attachment to particulars rather than to the whole; the individual soul is always too protean, too unstable; loss of one to whom one is attached threatens instability; if it is to attain harmony this is only by relating itself to the common, to no one and to everyone, to attain that ideal distance which Alcibiades discerns when Socrates refuses his embrace.
Grief, then, is the danger. A danger which pushes forward in tragic art where, and Antigone is the most obvious example, grief is born of ties of kinship. ‘The law presumably says that it is finest to keep as quiet as possible in misfortunes and not be irritated....’ And the law of Plato’s ideal community will be such that it forces apart ties and attachment in order to eliminate the relations which, as Freud knew, were at the seat of tragic drama.
Tragic art calls forth that part of the soul which is ‘far from prudence [phroneseos], and is not a companion and friend for any healthy or true purpose’. And with the child who gre up to write Smothered Words? What becomes of the companion, the friend revealed in Kofman's mourning? One might say: hers is not a private mourning; she mourns not only for her father, but for all those who died.
Yet the ones who died, she reminds us, are emblematised by the figure of the Jew, the one who over and again will have been excluded from our community. ‘Auschwitz’, this ‘senseless breaking of the human race in two’ was, Kofman writes, ‘desired by the anti-Semites and the Nazis so that the Jew would signify repulsion, the Other in all his horror, the abject who must be kept at a distance, expelled, exiled, exterminated’. A distance beyond that which Plato advocates but which permits a different reflection on the polis, on the common.
Kofman, after commenting on Antelme’s The Human Race, will allow herself to write of a new humanism, a new ethics, of a ‘”we”' that is 'always and already undone, destabilised’. Plato sought to expel the tragic poets, more dangerous even than the figure of the tyrant, from the city. Kofman will discern a community who are always so exiled and which reveals itself even amidst grief. The childrens’ ‘oh papa, papa, papa’ lament their father. What kind of friend or companion is born in this lament?
Bereck Kofman was beaten to death when he refused to work on the Sabbath. 'My father, according to the story, said that he had been doing no harm, only beseeching God for all of them, victims and murderers alike. For that, my father along with so many others suffered this infinite violence: death at Auschwitz, the place where no eternal rest would or could ever be granted'.
Infinite violence: it is this dying without measure and without recompense that keeps the child awake in Kofman. A child she would awaken in each of us, insofar as her book never contents itself with a private act of mourning.