the right word

Sunday's LA Times reprinted Jonathan Safran Foer's foreword to The Diary of Petr Ginz, 1941-1942, the journal of a 14-year-old Czech Jew who died in Auschwitz in 1944.

It can be dangerous to treat a diary like this as literature — to find beauty in it, and symbolism and structure. But how can one not? Here is the beginning of the passage in which Petr recounts learning that he would soon be parted from his family:

"Don't think that cleaning a typewriter is easy. There is cleaning and there is 'cleaning.' If you want the typewriter to shine on the inside and on the outside, you have to remove the carriage and wipe the most invisible corners with a small brush. Then you have to use a blowpipe to clear it out. The most difficult part are the spaces between the typebars."

When Theodor W. Adorno speculated about the possibility of literature after the Holocaust, he wasn't asking something about art (as is commonly misunderstood), but about language itself. What meaning can words have in the light of such destruction? Can "loss" have any use? Can "war"? Can "love," for that matter? Will we ever again be able to find the right word?