The Limitations of Holocaust Narratives and the Possibility of Healing Narratives Suggested by Smith’s Fires in the Mirror

Sun-Kug Jung

doi:10.21049/ccs.2016.43..377

In this paper, I intend to focus on the 1991 racial tension and violence portrayed in Anna Devear Smith’s book Fires in the Mirror, which was published in book form in 1993. I make use of a series of interviews with many of those involved in the conflicts, which were based on the Jewish Holocaust and the history of African American enslavement. In Crown Heights, the black community and the Jewish community have each suffered terrible losses, but individuals and communities become rhetorically attached to foundational historical traumas that lie at the center of each group’s cultural identity rather than try to understand each other’s pain. Smith lets this rhetoric dominate Fires in the Mirror by putting contradictory monologues side by side in order to show how discourses on ‘slavery’ and ‘the Holocaust’ still have control over specific ethnic communities. My intention is not to delve into the conflict between the Jewish and black communities exclusively. Rather, I attempt to form an understanding of the problems of the critical/theoretical tenets proposed by ‘the rhetoric of holocaust,’ including the Jewish Holocaust and the black experience of enslavement. Such an understanding will help us see the failure in the theories, illuminating the ways that such rhetoric should have recognized its own violence and helped to forge a new relationship between racism and anti-Semitism. Fires in the Mirror mirrors back to us the ways that ‘the Holocaust’ betrays the possibility of error to indicate its own susceptibility to blindness. The cracks brought forth by conflicting narratives enable readers to observe wounds being healed and the possibility of new narrative looming up.

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