Hollowing out the Holocaust

Creative liberties, a nebulous phenomenon, requires auteurs or filmmakers to insert reams of disclaimers in the credits of their ‘fictional’ films, affirming that any resemblance to a person living or dead is purely coincidental. Such declarations are a moot point, as there is always someone whose stock in trade is to be offended by works of art. But rarely do we find occasions when that outrage, no matter how feeble, or even invisible, seems justified. A case in point involves a new Bollywood film depicting a newly-wed Gen-Z couple whose unhappy union comes unravelling in the aftermath of a European honeymoon. The trip includes a perfunctory excursion to the remains of the erstwhile Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz.

Before you begin sharpening pitchforks, it might be necessary to hear us out. The Holocaust has informed the sociocultural and artistic sensibilities of thousands of artistes and writers across Europe and North America. Filmmakers like Stanley Kramer (Judgment at Nuremberg), Roman Polanski (The Pianist), Steven Spielberg (Schindler’s List), and documentarian Claude Lanzmann (Shoah), have confronted the subject matter of the Holocaust head-on. They cinematically exposed to the world — the banality of evil — a phrase coined by Hannah Arendt, the German-born American historian and philosopher, and the author of Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Of course, not every narrative involving the Holocaust has been laden in gloom. Italian director Roberto Benigni attempted to explore the impact of the Nazi pogrom through the eyes of a child in his bittersweet tearjerker La Vita e Bella (Life is Beautiful). Quentin Tarantino went so far as to offer revisionist histories, offering a what-if’ scenario in Inglourious Basterds.

Decades after the Holocaust, on the literary front, writers have tried to move past the shadow of the tragedy and address existential dilemmas of Jews in the post-War years.

s like Philip Roth and Howard Jacobson have hilariously employed their dark, scalpel-sharp wit to unpeel layers of their Jewish identity, which is inextricably tied to the Holocaust. Roth and Jacobson are especially astute at picking apart the nitty-gritties of the Jewish experience, delving into the nether regions of masculinity, and how it is transformed by a burden of history, as weighty as that of the Jews.

At the other end of the spectrum is Woody Allen, who dissects the aftermath of being born as a Jew, with every subsequent iteration of his neurotic New Yorker. Post the noughties, writer Michael Chabon wonderfully chronicled the rise of a young immigrant Jew in America, against the backdrop of the golden age of comic books in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Long story short, the Western world is rife with spectacular narratives that have examined Jewish identity and its bewildering complexities in nuanced, boisterous, and at times, bombastic fashion.

Now, we have an entrant from Bollywood, supposedly tagged as the first Hindi film where the Holocaust serves as a crucial plot point. It is pointless to highlight the number of things that are wrong with that one sentence itself. We can rely on the wise words of Denzel Washington who succinctly summed up why Martin Scorsese could not have directed Schindler’s List and why Spielberg could not have made Goodfellas, “It’s not a question of colour differences — it’s a question of cultural specificities.”