At the end of the movie "Persian Lessons", Reza, the male protagonist who crossed the waves, was in the Allied rescue camp and was asked "how many Jews did you remember the names of the slain Jews", and he began to recite the 2840 names he remembered. The faces of the Allied officers and soldiers were at first incredulous, and then they stopped their work, and the chaotic tent gradually fell silent, only one Jewish name after another sounded, and the survivor mechanically recalled the names he remembered, and the audience burst into tears. In this segment, the actors' out-of-control emotions and tears are most likely not the result of the "performance", because the act of "remembering names" constitutes a powerful empathic moment, the intensity of which overrides fiction and documentary, and the creator and viewer are helpless.
The language made up by name retains the memory of "people"
"Persian Lessons", a film that was initially unknown, became a topic of conversation, perhaps because the chain of "name-language-memory" created a new metaphorical perspective and emotional fulcrum for the holocaust theme. The film opens with retreating German officers throwing the roster of registered Jews into the furnace, and the living who were slaughtered like cattle by them burned their names, and their lives were trampled on, but so on. So when the male protagonist recalls the burned names one by one, it is a moment like the coming of the Messiah, the moment of resurrection, and the names recall memories related to the individual, to the identity, to the living person. The reason why the thin and helpless male protagonist remembers these many names is that when he was arrested in the concentration camp, he lied that he was a Persian, and was arrested by a petty officer in charge to become a "Persian teacher" and has been protected by the latter ever since. In order to continue the lies and his life, he changed the names of his Fellow Jews into words and fabricated a language that did not exist. This non-existent language saved his life, and also preserved a little bit of "human" breath in the hellish time and space of the death camp.
The names of the victims became language, and language salvaged memories related to people. This is a perspective that has not been seen in the past Holocaust genre. This is not a completely fictional story, language made up by name is a real survivor archetype, this story is excavated and told, both with the bizarre attraction of the plot, the stronger power comes from the meaning of life carried by name and language, and on the level of symbols and metaphors, they are the against the terrible past of death camps - those Jews, when they are alive, are not treated as human beings, die like cattle; but when their names are remembered, they are at least preserved as people history.
The Israeli writer Appelfeld wrote many novels around the Holocaust and racial persecution, but he considered his true style to be "the voice that created the consciousness between oblivion and memory", and in his dialogue with Philip Ross, he proposed that the experience of the Jews was not so much "history" as some kind of dim subconscious, and everything that happened to them was kneaded into various shapes by time, and the result of the events as it was was that the creators were enslaved, producing poor quality and bizarre stories. Chronicle narratives that are faithful to historical facts are often an unreliable scaffolding. Appelfeld's view points out that the creations associated with the concentration camps, showing that the wonders and samples of human nature are limited, even insignificant, what kind of fiction can enter that nightmarish time and space outside of the appalling adventures?
This is the regret of "Persian Lessons" beyond the surprise. It may honestly be blamed on the bizarre reality that the creators filled the two-hour drama time with a horrific plot – was the male protagonist's lie debunked? What if the real Persians came? Can he trade a can of canned meat for a tribulation in a concentration camp? At what cost is he willing to save others? Will the people he saved pay for his life to save him? In this process, it is not so much that the male protagonist is walking a tightrope, but rather that the playwright is carefully weaving the closed loop of the play. The first time a German officer chats with the male protagonist in fake Persian, the first thing he says is "I have forgotten what my mother looks like." He unknowingly uttered one Jewish name after another, saying "forgotten" past—a simply constructed moment, so precise that there was no blank space. This exquisite sense of structure covers everything, fate always plays footnote with clever cooperation, and when the audience assumes the identity of the protagonist, it is more felt that this is an adventure that relies on the accident of good and evil in human nature, but it is difficult to enter the time and space of a convincing concentration camp.
What kind of concentration camps, what kind of narrative?
To be precise, the film occupies a new perspective, but enters the popular, conventional concentration camp narrative. It repeats the path of Schindler's List or A Beautiful Life, where concentration camps become testing grounds for human trials, officers and prisoners are ordinary people with good and evil, and characters' behavior and choices depend on whether good prevails or evil dominates. In some moments, it is even lyrical, such as the German officer's affectionate recollection of "his brother in exile in Tehran because he did not want to join the Nazi Party", and the "brother who may be far away in Tehran" reluctantly provided a little emotional support for the officer's enthusiasm for learning foreign languages, but he shifted the enthusiasm for learning to the obsessive-compulsive disorder of saving the life of the male protagonist at all costs, which is actually absurd on the level of reason, so that everyone in the play has to ridicule: Could he be your lover?
There are many cases of German officers sheltering Jews, but their attitude is exactly animal-like possession, so preservation from beginning to end is rare, most of the time it is natural Darwinian "you rob me of what I have, and I can destroy you." This leads to another, more painful and responsible narrative of the Holocaust, as Agamben summed up in Means without End: everything in the concentration camp transcends crime and justice, which is the space of exception, where human identity is stripped, this deprivation is two-way, and both the perpetrator and the victim are reduced to naked life, either beast, or animal, or both beast and animal. It was a world far deeper and larger than the goodness or evil of human nature, and it was the world that writers such as Appelfeld, Primolevi, and Kosinski tried to enter with the art of writing.
Perhaps Schindler's List and A Beautiful Life have passed too many years, and the doubts they have encountered have been largely forgotten, and in the face of "Persian Lessons", if the one-sided "touch" is satisfied with "walking a tightrope of good and evil in extraordinary circumstances", then this is still a bluff comfort, innocent people are not compensated, and disappearing names are finally gone.
Author: Liu Qing
Editor: Guo Chaohao