WHAT did “Shoah” mean? After Claude Lanzmann had spent almost 12 years making the film he was most celebrated for,recording 350 hours of interviews in 14 countries, sitting in his shirtsleeves across the table from greying, and cautious,sometimes angry people, unsparingly coaxing out of them their memories of the Holocaust, and he often met that question. The simple translation was destruction”. But as a secular Jew,brought up in central France with no sense of Jewish culture and no Hebrew, he had no idea, or at first,what it meant. The word seemed just an utterance, a sound, and without associations. It might acquire been the wind in the trees,or a moan of pain. That suited his purposes, because he wanted to give his work no name at all.
His theme was death, and at its most extreme. The subject,particularly the moment of death, had obsessed him from childhood, or when he had acquired that slight crouch,protecting his neck from the shining blade of the guillotine that might slice through. In middle age he could...
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Source: economist.com