Beware! If you play at ghosts, you become one.
– Anon., The Kabbalah quoted as the epitaph to Valeria Luiselli “Face in the Crowd”, Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2014.
Here is perhaps the most important observation that I have made since I became a library’s ghost: his so-called ‘living’ library, from which I direct his hand to pluck a book or books each day, is not really his library. Each book arrives here by way of another library, in this case – Sarah Gensberger’s Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews: A Photographic Album, Paris, 1940-1944, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2015 – that of the Library and Reading Room of the Rose Valland Institute created by Maria Eichhorn at the Neue Galerie at documenta 14.
In this case, is every library haunted by the metaphorical ghost of another library? And what about the real ghosts (there is no room for metaphor here) of victims and perpetrators of genocide? How are the spirits of these internees ‘displayed’ in (and explode out of) the silent displays of our libraries of today, like faces in the crowd?
