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  “My purpose in life,” Vanessa said in class now, “is to find a purpose, if that makes any sense.”

  It made a great deal of sense. A ripple of amusement greeted Vanessa’s remark. Mr. Leon smiled, and other students raised their hands. Clare said, “I don’t think we know yet. You grow—you’re not born with a purpose.”

  Was it just my own restlessness? Or was I hearing the smallest outbreak of rebellion? The students of English 10G admired their teacher—that was obvious from the first few weeks. But they may have been groaning internally over the job of reading a concentration camp memoir—reading it after studying first a whimsical then a morbid fantasy of totalitarian rule, followed by an outraged, absurdist fiction of the Second World War and its aftermath. They didn’t say as much; none of them would have challenged the reading list. But they resisted saying, at that moment, why they lived. They didn’t know yet. It was, after all, a bullying question.

  In class, the rebellion (if that’s what it was) spread a little further. A pale, skinny boy, Adam Steinberg—the boy in the apron in the Alanis Project video—took up the why question. Adam, as I was learning, had a stubborn streak, even a streak of intellectual pride. “Sylvia Plath had a why,” he said, “but she still killed herself. She chose to kill herself because she couldn’t bear the how.” In other words, Nietzsche’s remark, which Frankl quoted, was inadequate: There were people who had a why but still couldn’t bear to live. Poetry was the why; the difficulties of living, the difficulty of being Sylvia Plath, was the “how” that she couldn’t put up with. I admired Adam’s formulation, but then Jordan of the strong shoulders and candid gaze, topping Adam, said, “Her purpose in writing was to kill herself, so that became her why.” Not exactly a joyous exchange, but the two statements taken together made one of the niftiest, most spontaneously generated bits of conversation of the year. Mr. Leon looked pleased. If this was rebellion, he liked it.

  * * *

  I knew this stuff. That was part of the problem for me. I had been reading about it my entire life. “The Holocaust” was not a phrase current when I was a teenager, but the fifties and early sixties produced a consequential amount of journalism, nonfiction, and fiction about the Nazis’ war on the Jews. There were extraordinary historical and theoretical works like Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which I read in college; Raoul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (1961); later, Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, which drew heavily on Hilberg’s work; and many other studies, including Martin Gilbert’s numerous volumes. Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, published in English in 1952, became an enormous international success. Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, published here in 1960, had, in its emotionally devastating way, commanded a huge readership; Night has been widely read in American schools for decades. There were many, many other histories and fictions and also critical studies of Holocaust literature itself by Terrence Des Pres (1976) and still later by Ruth Franklin (2010). And, of course, television shows and many movies including Claude Lanzmann’s epic documentary film Shoah (1985) and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), and, finally, the development of an academic discipline devoted to the Holocaust, which produced fresh material and controversies every year.

  Now, as I began Frankl’s book, I felt a wave of revulsion. Not at the book; at least, not at first. But at myself. I had read a great deal about the Holocaust. Had I become addicted to the catastrophe? Hooked on the self-importance that reading about it conveyed to me, the reader? What was the point of reading another death-camp memoir?

  The students, of course, were not addicted, and, if pressed, I would say that they should know in detail what happened to the European Jews in the middle of the last century. So, calming myself down, I focused on the obvious question: Was the book any good? Writing just after the war, in 1945, Frankl no doubt wanted to tell Germans and Austrians what had been done in their names. When he describes the rituals of dehumanization in the camps, and when he sticks to the physical degradations, he’s powerful and convincing. At the point of initiation, the SS guards give orders. And then:

  With unthinkable haste, people tore off their clothes. As the time grew shorter, they became increasingly nervous and pulled clumsily at their underwear, belt and shoelaces. Then we heard the first sounds of whipping; leather straps beating down on naked bodies. Next we were herded into another room to be shaved: not only our heads were shorn, but not a hair was left on our entire bodies.

  Mr. Leon read the passage very slowly and distinctly, and then he asked the students to break up into their groups and talk over what such an experience might mean. The students conferred in hushed tones for a while, and then Mr. Leon called them to order. “Stripped of everything,” he said, “what do you have?” When he said that, I remembered the first class of the year, and his insistence on every student’s identity. The students had to acknowledge one another, look at each other when they spoke. Identity was the center of human life for him.

  “They are all the same,” said Marco. “They felt empty because we always put such an emphasis on material things, and they were shaved, left with nothing.” Vanessa, reading a slightly later passage from Frankl aloud, insisted that they still had their shoes. “They had possessions and might have them again some day,” which was a hopeful thought about a place with very little hope. (I remembered again her telling me how important the space inside her head was.) Susanna added, “Your memory is there,” at which moment Marina, building on Susanna’s point, said, “They can choose, go inside themselves for meaning rather than allow the Nazis to define their meaning in their possessions. The Nazis, their intention was to dehumanize, to eradicate. But if you choose to use that stripping to go within yourself, that leads to empowerment.”

  Which certainly was the essence of what Frankl believed: you could triumph inside by insisting on a purpose, a goal, a justification for your life. But then Clare, who had been shrewd about Vonnegut and was beginning to capture the emotional meaning of the books we were reading, raised her hand and said, “We will never understand what was there,” which was a remark that moved me in itself and crystallized my gathering irritation with Man’s Search for Meaning. Viktor Frankl was clearly a strong man, and very likely a good man as well. His specialty before the war was treating suicidal patients in Vienna and convincing them that they had reasons to live. He did the same in the camp, arguing with people who wanted to quit, even lecturing them. A noble pursuit. But Frankl had the unpleasant habit—it was both a moral fault and a compositional fault—of setting up shop as a psychiatrist in the middle of a concentration camp memoir. And then drawing banal lessons out of what he had experienced and observed.

  Love, it turned out, was what you had to live for—the why that could help people bear the “how.” The vanity of Frankl’s professional lessons and easy moralism enraged me, since, of course, those who lost hope and those who didn’t lose hope, those who loved and those who hated, those who were virtuous and those who were evil pretty nearly all perished together. That group included Viktor Frankl’s family. It may be impossibly arrogant for me, as a mere reader, to say so, but Viktor Frankl seems only to have half understood what he and his fellow inmates were subjected to. We can all agree that it’s better to be strong and life-loving at any time. But what the Nazis intended—and largely succeeded in doing—was to destroy heroism and martyrdom and sacrifice alike in the endless silence that descended on millions of people. That’s why Clare’s remark—that we couldn’t know what was inside the mind and spirit of the victims—was powerful. Clare respected the silence.

  Viktor Frankl little realized what another camp survivor, the great Italian writer Primo Levi, insisted on, that the true witnesses to the camps were dead, and that anyone who survived, including himself, had to be an exception, even an anomaly. Levi spent eleven months at the end of the war in Auschwitz. In his extraordinary book If This Is a Man (original American title: Survival in Auschwitz), published in 1947, and later i
n The Drowned and the Saved (1988), Levi speaks of “the drowned”—those obviously sick or weak or guileless. When such people arrived at the camp, the inmates marked them as unable to survive more than a few weeks. And then there were “the saved”—those who had some special skill or charm or knew how to make themselves useful to the camp administration and therefore improve their chances of survival. Levi distinguishes between those who possessed hardihood and cunning, and those who did not. It’s not a moral distinction—in fact some of the saved, he says, were morally reprehensible. So having a why was beside the point. The how was the only thing. Not only that, Levi’s many works disprove Vonnegut’s insistence that nothing intelligent could be said about a massacre.

  What was happening to me? I was competing with the teacher. And not just any teacher, either. Mr. Leon led the students through an emotional discussion devoted to a single passage. In the section of the book set in Theresienstadt, Frankl reports his happiness at meeting a young woman who knows that she is going to die yet finds consolation in looking at a barely blossoming tree outside her hut. With Mr. Leon’s prompting, the students, one after another, spoke of what it meant to know that life goes on after individual death—along with Frankl, they believed that clinging to the natural world was a way of holding off despair.

  The conversation was detailed and fine; they were serious kids. Yet I wanted to tell the students about Primo Levi. He was the person to read on these matters, not Viktor Frankl. I kept my mouth shut, but what I would have told the students about Levi is this: He survived because he was useful to the Nazis as a chemist, and was given some extra food by another inmate, an Italian. Then he got lucky. In January 1945, as Soviet forces approached from the East, the SS evacuated the camp, taking most of the remaining inmates (some 60,000) with them. But Levi was sick with scarlet fever and, along with about 7,000 others, got left behind. The Soviets liberated the camp, and Primo Levi, after a long, bizarre journey (described in a subsequent book, The Truce) got home to Italy.

  The “meaning” that Levi found when he wrote If This Is a Man lay in confronting, as a writer, the reality of what he had been part of, not moralizing about it. In the most famous moment in the book, Levi, a new prisoner at Auschwitz, and suffering from thirst, noticed an icicle through an open window and tried to grab it. A Nazi guard knocked it out of his hand. “Warum?” (Why?), asked Levi. “Hier ist kein Warum” (Here there is no why), answered the guard. In recent years, “Hier ist kein Warum” has become one of the most quoted lines to emerge from the war, indeed from the twentieth century. There is no why, no justification, only power.

  “Hier ist kein Warum” becomes an unintended rebuke to Viktor Frankl’s use of Nietzsche and the notion that as long as you had a why to live you could figure out a how. Yes, the meanings of why are quite different. Frankl was talking about a purpose that keeps someone alive; the guard was telling Levi that he doesn’t have to give a purpose—reasons—for anything he does. The guard’s assertion of power negated the inmates’ purpose. They might have a purpose, they might not, but in that place it didn’t matter; the guard’s power obliterated theirs, whether he had a “why” or not.

  So went my thoughts, in class and later that week, as the students chewed over Frankl’s text—pointing, under Mr. Leon’s guidance, to one passage or another, pulling the parts together, doing their work as readers and interpreters. In between these discussions, in an exercise that struck me as strange (in this context), they worked on sentences—active voice, passive voice, dependent clauses, misplaced modifiers. Mr. Leon now told them that the passive voice was the right voice when the subject of the sentence is being acted on: “Baby Annabelle was delivered yesterday by Dr. John Gruen,” which made both John and Annabelle glow. Mr. Leon, as always, injected a little grammar into soul-making and a little soul-making into grammar. Punctuation, too. Could you use contractions in formal writing? He said no. School writing was formal writing. Okay, you had to know the rules before you broke them. Myself, I can’t and wouldn’t refuse to use contractions, which brought speed and informality into prose.

  Obviously, I had to stop competing with the teacher. Sean Leon was not a Puritan divine; he was not a Catholic missionary (though he certainly had the temperament of both); he was definitely not a sixties-style countercultural guru. He was an English teacher, and he would get them writing in good sentences while asking them what their purpose in living was.

  * * *

  But that was not the end of the matter. Arriving one day in March to hear the end of the Frankl discussion, I saw students standing in the halls in clumps. Some were in tears. Others just looked grim or disbelieving. It seems that a teacher many of them knew, Jon Goldman—Mr. Goldman—had died the day before, alone in his apartment. His mother entered his place and found him on the floor. He was fifty years old. He had a son, not living with him, who was eleven.

  Coming as it did, right then, in the middle of the existential discussions and the camp discussions, the death was something that Vonnegut might have turned into an insolent little scene. It was almost a sick joke. The question of “Who are you, and what do you live for?” became exactly the point, right there at the Beacon School in the course of an ordinary school day. What Mr. Leon was always trying to get the students of 10G to recognize—that life was too short to waste—had suddenly become inescapable. But I didn’t have the heart to say, “So it goes.”

  Mr. Leon came into the room and stood silently in front of the class for a long time. He held his hand up to his face—a gesture I had never seen before—and he was very still.

  “How many of you had Mr. Goldman last year,” he asked, finally. A few hands went up, and there was another long silence, and the two silences together, I thought, amounted to a kind of memorial service. Mr. Leon walked around the front of the classroom, his palm still pressed against the side of his face. “I’m really trying to think where to go with today’s class,” he said at last. “Do we talk about it on its own, talk about Viktor Frankl? What do you want to talk about?”

  The fearless Marina, her hair flying wildly to the side, got things going: “I had a lot of trouble with my English teacher last year. I used to go to Mr. Goldman and talk about writing. I had a conversation with him, and now I can’t.”

  Mr. Leon nodded. “I’m not a very good business-as-usual kind of guy. When something happens, I can’t just go right ahead. So we’ll talk about what happened. I’m not going to pretend that Mr. Goldman and I were friends. We weren’t close like that. But if you think of your life as a narrative, Jon Goldman was a narrator of my life. Never again will he be a narrator, I’ll never shake his hand again, and that’s strange.” And he began talking about Jon Goldman, his teaching at Beacon, his love for his eleven-year-old son. “What’s left behind? Life is very tough sometimes. What’s left behind? All your thoughts are extinguished. What’s left behind is that his son will remember the rest of his life that his father loved him. That’s one hell of a legacy, to leave that mark.”

  I slightly knew Jon Goldman myself. Earlier in the year, I had talked to him in the “faculty lounge” at the school—a drab room with computers, copy machines, and a couple of round white tables. Between classes, teachers ate a sandwich on the plastic tables and graded papers. The room couldn’t really be called a lounge at all, but at cramped Beacon, except for an empty classroom, it was the only place for teachers to go. Several times, when I wandered in, Jon Goldman was planted there. I never went to one of his classes, but he told me about the unorthodox reading lists he had favored recently—science fiction and noir fiction, which he loved, and probably got students to love. He wanted to break down the distinction between core literary texts and genre work. He was enormously friendly, and he spoke passionately about Beacon and about teaching. But he was also clearly unwell. He sweated heavily, and he rambled in a way that unnerved me. In the spring semester, he was on forced leave. At home, suddenly not teaching, he had died of a heart attack.

  I thought I u
nderstood why Mr. Leon, standing in front of the class, had been silent for so long. He was not close to Jon Goldman, but a fellow soldier had fallen. Teaching had been Mr. Goldman’s identity. When his job was extinguished—when he was stripped of his identity, in Viktor Frankl’s terms—his life came to an end. And Mr. Leon was troubled himself. Some weeks earlier, he had ruminated aloud in class. His older brother, though only in his forties, was very sick—dying of cancer—and he spoke of quitting and going home. His mother had raised all five children and was now alone, and she was “lost, utterly lost.” He was distressed about being away from Louisiana. Then he stopped and said, “Being a teacher—is that my entire life? What else is out there? If I stop being a teacher, what will become of me?”

  The students went silent on that day. They couldn’t answer his question. At least not aloud. He hectored them about their lives, and it couldn’t have been clearer to them that he had a calling. They put up with his hectoring because he took his job—and them—so seriously. They were his purpose.

  As he talked about Mr. Goldman, I remembered what he had told me in PD O’Hurley’s—that he had never met his father, Lamont Leon. “I heard he was charming and funny,” he said. Now I remembered what else he said—that his father, after abandoning the family in Ireland, became a popular English teacher and poet in Tampa, Florida. And that he, Sean, found out about him only in 1998 when someone sent him a newspaper clipping. Lamont Leon had died in school of a heart attack. “He looks animated in the photo; it’s scary how much he looked like me,” he said.

  Mr. Goldman’s death had made him silent, and no wonder. He had recently been asking himself what else he might be doing with his life, and here was a teacher whose life ended the minute he stopped teaching. Yet Sean Leon’s vocation, his vocation as an English teacher had been set all along, an inheritance from the father he had never known. It was a mixed blessing. Jon Goldman’s eleven-year-old son, as Sean Leon told the class, had the great benefit of knowing that his father loved him. But Sean Leon would never know whether his father loved him.