When Memory Comes: Let the Tears Flow

Abstract

ABSTRACT The title of the essay alludes to Friedländer’s Holocaust memoir of 1979. Lament – unabashedly lachrymose – evoked by the memory of Auschwitz resists and implicitly questions the politicization of Holocaust commemoration. Furthermore, lamentation defies both theological and secular explanations of the Holocaust as defiling and vitiating the depth of our grief, and paradoxically our hope-against-hope that the evil that continues to haunt the human family will be ultimately vanquished.