Review

Reviewed Work(s): Healing Their Wounds: Psychotherapy with Holocaust Survivors and
Their Families by Paul Marcus and Alan Rosenberg
Review by: Norman Solkoff
Source: Shofar , Winter 1992, Vol. 10, No. 2, Special Issue: Rabbinics and Talmud (Winter
1992), pp. 144-146
Published by: Purdue University Press

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 144 SHOFAR

Healing Thei
Families, edi
1989. 304 pp.

This edited book has something for just about anyone interested in the
post-Holocaust lives of survivors and their children.
In the first two chapters Kren and Steinberg provide a psychoanalytic
framework for understanding the psychodynamics of survivors and present a
review of the clinical literature on survivors and their children, respectively.
Next Jucovy considers individual and family-oriented treatment approaches
with suggestions about such procedural issues as minimizing resistance and
the timing of interpretations.
Focusing upon the children of Nazis, Kestenberg introduces the concept
of transposition to explain how major historical events may be perpetuated
across generations. She also presents an unsupported hypothesis that Jewish
children may have become the displacement victims of Nazi-death wishes
originally directed toward their own children.
One of the best chapters in this book is the interview with Anna
Ornstein (a psychiatrist and a survivor), conducted by Marcus and
Rosenberg. Dr. Ornstein rejects the stigmatization of the entire survivor
population and suggests that in the context of treatment, the survivor should
not be treated differently from other patients so long as the therapist remains
aware of countertransference possibilities. She is also more sanguine about
the adaptive capacities of survivors, whereas Freyberg, in her chapter, focuses
solely on the negative consequences of survival.
Fogelman in her very useful discussion of the group psychotherapeutic
process deals with such issues as types and quality of parent-child
communication and Jewish identity. In their chapter on family therapy, Perel
and Saul acknowledge that the clinical samples they discuss are not
necessarily representative of the entire survivor population. Their discussion
on treatment strategies to restructure "enmeshed" families derives from a
"family systems theory* perspective.
Two chapters written by rabbis make unique contributions to this book.
In the first, Rabbi Skolnik provides guidelines for working with survivors
within the synagogue environment. Not a survivor himself, Rabbi Skolnik
felt at one with his survivor congregants when after describing his
experiences visiting Auschwitz he broke down in tears. In the second Rabbi
Cohen deals in a provocative way with post-Holocaust beliefs in God. How,
in the face of genocide, may one continue to believe in the goodness of God?
The editors contributed a chapter on the religious beliefs of survivors and

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 Volume 10, No. 2 Winter 1992 145

how they could play a role in treatment

suffering among survivors who maintained
whose faith was diminished or lost. Also fr
discusses the identity problems of Jewish
their mothers during the war and spent th
Catholic institutions with changed names
new religious rituals.
Based upon their findings with the M
families with controls who had emigrated
War II, Almagor and Leon found that sur
normal limits and no significant differenc
survivors and controls.
Most survivors are now apporaching old age, and it is therefore
important to understand the relationships between the stressors of aging and
previous Holocaust traumatization. Kahana, Harel, and Kahana address the
methodological challenges confronting investigators who want to study the
elderly survivor population. Their approach to this population is to
understand the coping and adaptive strategies survivors used after losing
entire families to the Holocaust. Because of the overlap in symptoms
between survivors and controls, the authors caution against treating survivors
as a homogeneous group. Furthermore, many of the survivors studied by
these authors were able to find something positive in their past adversities to
communicate to the rest of the world in the hope of preventing the
occurrence of future atrocities.
In his chapter on alternative treatment approaches with survivors, Krell
challenges a number of potentially negative assumptions made about
survivors: their use of denial, the uniform experience of guilt about having
survived, and identification with the aggressor. Krell also takes issue with
those who describe concentration camp inmates as having undergone
"infantile regression" in the pathological sense, when what was being
observed were the consequences of degradation and humiliation.
Using very tortuous reasoning in her chapter on mourning the Yiddish
language, another casualty of the Holocaust, Hedda applies Bowlby's
analyses of stages of the mourning process to how one poet, Yankev
Glatshteyn, mourned, through his poetry, the death of Yiddish. Of most
interest in this piece are the verses written by Glatshteyn and not the
interpretive excesses rendered by the author.
It would have been useful for the editors to have included a chapter on
extrapolations from Holocaust survivors to any highly traumatized group.
The reader must also consider explanatory models other than psychoanalysis
in trying to make sense out of survivor family problems and must resist

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 146 SHOFAR

viewing sur
individuals.
Norman Solkoff
Department of Psychiatry
State University of New York
at Buffalo

"Be Fertile and Increase, Fill the Earth and Master It": The Ancient and
Medieval Career of a Biblical Text, by Jeremy Cohen. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1989. 375 pp. $44.95.

This book deals with Genesis 1:28, the blessing of fertility and dominion
conferred upon humankind in the Garden of Eden, and the history of its in-
terpretation in the Jewish and Christian traditions from ancient times until
the Protestant Reformation. The author, Jeremy Cohen, first became inter-
ested in the subject in the early 1970s when many ideologues of the ecology
movement blamed the Judeo-Christian tradition, and this verse in particular,
for giving human beings license to exploit the environment for their own
benefit without regard for the consequences (see Tikkutt 5:2 [March/April,
1990]: 74-77). The results of Cohen's investigation into the validity of this
claim are laid out in this book. Cohen has left no stone unturned in his quest
for references to our verse in Jewish and Christian sources. After a thorough
discussion of the verse in its biblical context, Cohen discusses its use in the in-
tertestamental and midrashic literatures, the halakhic tradition, and the ex-
egetical and kabbalistic literature of the Middle Ages. He then turns to
Christian literature, examining the patristic exegetical tradition, especially
that of Augustine and his successors. In the last chapter he examines the re-
lationship between Gen. 1:28 and the law of nature in a variety of sources in-
cluding canon law, Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose, and Chaucer's Canter-
bury Tales.
Very few scholars of Cohen's generation are equipped with the linguistic
tools to undertake such a thorough and comprehensive study of two distinct
yet interrelated religious traditions, and he has carried it out with commend-
able thoroughness and competence. This work is a scholarly achievement of
rare quality which sets a standard of the highest level. Not only does Cohen
summarize the work of scholars in a dizzying array of disciplines, but he en-
gages them on a variety of scholarly issues touching on his topic after a
careful and judicious evaluation of the sources. Not content to rely on
translations or printed sources, he has consulted the original Hebrew and

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