By Allan Appel
Dual Identities: Living in Meier’s Shadow
By Arthur Horwitz
Koehler Books
As an affectionate tour of late 1950s through early 1960s New Haven Jewish life, Arthur Horwitz’s new memoir Dual Identities is an informative delight. It also offers an inside seat on a career in journalism, especially Jewish journalism – how you rise from reporter, then editor, then, publisher, then Jewish media leader.
As the title reflects, Dual Identities is also an intimate sketch of New Haven’s Holocaust survivor community — especially its participation in the first Holocaust memorial on public land and in creation of the inaugural video interview archives of survivors.
The emotional heart of the memoir aims to explore the challenges the first generation of Holocaust survivors faced then, and still cope with now, in navigating handed-down trauma. Horwitz is the son of a Holocaust survivor, Sally Horwitz, who continually reminds him of the horrors she survived. She pressures Arthur to live the life that her own murdered brother Meier never could. Those pressures form the through line of the memoir, with mixed but frequently moving results.
Horwitz references repeatedly the “secondhand smoke” that pervades his life — the toxic, indirect and lingering nature of the trauma his mother inherited from survival at Skarzysko, and that at every opportunity she passes along to him. The smoke is both a literal reference to the plumes he breathes while surreptitiously listening in on his mother and fellow survivors smoking cigarettes and talking in the kitchen, and a metaphorical reference to the ovens at the camps.
The book begins with Horwitz discovering a photograph of a 6-year-old child, arms upraised, Nazi rifles at his back, eyes looking at us through history. Sally insists, contra to the facts the entire family knows, that that’s her murdered brother Meier — although it’s clearly not. Young Arthur must live not only his own life but perform and achieve for the both of them.
Horwitz, who began his career writing for the New Haven Register before pivoting with a Yale School of Management degree to a career in newspaper publishing, draws on a vast cache of interesting memories, including lots of verbatim dialogue. Attentive to detail as he is, Horwitz sets up this major confrontation as central to this story. He refers in passing to Meier throughout the rest of the book, when the uncle’s ghost haunts Little League sign-ups to graduation to ascension in the Jewish publishing world.
The story’s most poignant vignettes emerge from childhood recollections, such as when Horwitz as a teen calls out to his mom that he just wants to lie in bed some more and be a lazy American kid, and not get up just yet. Her response to him, called from an adjoining room, as casual as if it happens all the time: “If I didn’t get up when I was asked, I’d be shot.”
Another example, 30 years later in this fast-paced chronicle, occurs when Horwitz has taken over the Detroit Jewish News and put it on the map. One day the offices mysteriously burn down. His own first reaction is that skinheads or local Nazis surely must have done this deed.
It turns out the fire marshal has determined it was in reality an electrical fire. Yet Horwitz has seen it through the lenses his mother has fashioned for him all his life, namely that the antisemites are always around every corner and ready to pounce. That is more secondhand smoke, literally and figuratively.
He duly notes these incidents and the discrepancies, the confusion of identities and realities, of course. He does so with little anger or emotion or ill effect, in a tone of resignation almost as if to suggest it’s simply his fate as the child of a Holocaust survivor, and a redoubtable one at that. This is just the way it is. Like the newspaper reporter he was trained to be, Horwitz tells us the facts. As a reader, I looked for more about how he felt.
Towards the end of the memoir, a now elderly Sally is moving in to live with him and his wife (I love how Horwitz expresses such delightful affection for Gina, herself the child of a survivor) and their three kids. His response is tellingly that he’s worried about the “doses of secondhand smoke she’ll spew,” especially as her mind may have begun to wander. He worries that will cause embarrassment to friends and associates.
There is a gesture toward reckoning at this point, three quarters of the way through the memoir. Horwitz assesses that he hopes his life has given his mom reasons for her to feel his accomplishments have brought more honor than shame to the memory of her lost brother.
I can only speculate that the heavy load Horwitz and the second-generation survivors bear is that having Jewish children isn’t enough. Being a titan of the Jewish news business isn’t enough.
Horwitz reports with skill on the accumulated psychological pressure that he has to live two lives — that nothing he does is good enough. A reader wonders: How did Horwitz deal with all that pent-up pressure? That feeling that nothing he did could be good enough? He reports on the pain. In my reading, he doesn’t engage fully with the impact on him or the difficult questions about whether he deserved to endure it. Why is there not a single scene in the book where Horwitz in some manner confronts his mom about what to my ears sounds like a healthy dose of psychologically damage-generating behavior? Is that simply not allowed? Did it simply never happen? Did it, and he chooses to skip over in the narrative? Did those scenes occur only in the mind? A version of this kind of inquiry is what I hoped the book might deliver, including the understandable need to balance his own struggles with the far greater horrors his mother endured (losing her brother and parents, barely surviving life in a concentration camp).
The second-generation Holocaust theme functions structurally in Dual Identities as a journalistic bracelet on which Horwitz hangs his vividly remembered stories and vignettes of his town-gown childhood; of the people who opened doors, and inspired him; of the sights and sounds of Oak Street and the now gone immigrant Jewish community.
A standout for me is Horwitz’s dad’s obsession with “the store! the store!” which he tried to keep open first in the Hill and then in West River. Horwitz captures how the struggling and ultimately failing place of business – along with the “smoke” — rules the family life.
In particular, a richly composed scene where young Arthur is recruited to sit beside Grandpa helping at the store and watches the denizens of the shtetl-like world of Oak Street walk one by one in the human parade is a priceless time capsule. It evokes the early fiction of Bernard Malamud.
As the memoir winds town, Horwitz describes a turn to poetry to explore his feelings, and so perhaps I’m wrong. For really who am I to judge what Horwitz’s ultimate purpose is in the book? For everyone who writes a memoir, there is a different knot of reasons. In Dual Identities there’s an obvious homage to his mom. And the work is, of course, a gift to give to his own children, a contribution to the documentary history of the Jewish community of New Haven. A memoir is a delicate elusive thing; while it reveals much, it also reveals what still remains hidden.
Towards the end, in the chapter “Sally’s Story,” we learn how his mom began to write her own memoir, complete with the forced marches, the begging for morsels of food, handwritten on legal pads, which her husband dutifully and lovingly transferred to more readable form. Horwitz then writes, “They awaited a publisher.” Is this memoir, Dual Identities, not only his own but his mom’s as well?
He writes: “I always nodded but found reasons for evading the project. While most were work-related, some reflected my reluctance to lower what remained of the emotional shieldI still tried to maintain as protection against secondhand smoke stories and Meier shaming.”
Horwitz finally does state that he chose Jewish journalism in no small part to help the Jewish community see themselves not limited by a Holocaust-centric insularity and complex and troubling emotions, but rather as part of a larger secular whole. That is commendable. Too many in the mainstream Jewish community were then and IMHO remain today, especially related to the ongoing Israel-Palestine agony, enchained, prisoners of World War II and the Shoah’s “secondhand smoke.” So much so that it clouds our way to a place of reconciliation. We dearly need to travel there, hard as it is.
Dual Identities is a contribution to that journey. I applaud Horwitz for his efforts. Norman Mailer, who served as an infantryman in World War II, once said that each work of art, each book, each story we tell, whatever else it accomplishes, adds an inch to the house of humanity we are all building. Dual Identities does that, and far more.
