I had my wakening to the wider world of human brutality when, at the age of twelve, The American Heritage Photographic History of World War II arrived in the mail. I was shocked to the core by the photos of Jews at Auschwitz, carts full of emaciated corpses, the burning eyes of the survivors. I went back to those photographs again and again, as though if I looked often enough, closely enough, I would see something that could explain how this most terrible of things could have happened, how someone could do what was done to those people. The scale of it, the savagery, the pitilessness—I couldn’t get over it. I read the whole book, then read it again. My brother, four years ahead of me, seeing my upset, responded by teaching me the names of other death camps: Dachau, Buchenwald, Treblinka. I said them to myself till I could say them without tripping, till there was no possibility that I would forget them. It seemed really important that I not forget. I became fascinated with Jews and Judaism. Around the same time I formed a friendship with a Jewish girl, my introduction to whom was arranged by my mother and her father. The father wanted an appropriate companion for his daughter on those weekends he had custody of her, when he would bring her to his father’s house in Sunbury, where I lived. Though I suspect he later came to question my appropriateness, it was too late by then: Lisa and I developed a powerful friendship, spanning many years. Her grandfather, who had come to America at age 13 unable to speak any English, was an observant Jew, and it was in his house that I first learned about keeping kosher: the pan in which we could scramble the eggs had a piece of twine tied through the loop, the milk dishes and meat dishes kept separate. My friend taught me the word pogrom. I was there when they sat shiva upon her grandfathers death, his body in the casket in the parlor, a little sliding door above the face. I read all of Chaim Potok’s books, The Chosen several times. I was enamored of Talmud and torah, mishnah and teffilin, and the esoteric art of Gematria, Hebrew numerology. I read Sholem Asch, and Elie Wiesel, I read Ann Frank. I became convinced that I had been a Jew in a past life. And through it all, the idea of a Jewish homeland, rising from the ashes of the Holocaust, seemed like a right and noble cause. It would be years before I understood the price other people had paid for the creation of Israel. In 1986, I went to work as a nanny for a young Jewish couple in Harrisburg, caring for their ten year old son, Ben. I lived with them for two years, and, as they were observant Jews, I had the opportunity to live intimately with their observances. We celebrated Shabbat with song, and sounded the shofar at Yom Kippur. Being in charge of grocery shopping and making meals for Ben when his parents were working, I became savvy about all things kosher. By special dispensation, my room was declared Treif City, where I could, if I felt the need, eat ham sandwiches. At Passover my room became the repository of all the food stuffs in the house that contained malt. And for two years in a row, I got to organize and shop for our Seder celebrations. We became close, that family and I. Ben was the kind of boy you knew would go places—hugely intelligent and articulate, perceptive and kind. We laughed a lot, all of us. I’ve been thinking about all this, all this time I’ve been posting about Gaza. Wanting to assert, pronounce, affirm that not only am I not anti-Jew, I have been through much of my life an ardent Hebrewphile—if there is such a word. And neither do I, in denouncing Israel’s brutality, mean to say I support or condone Hamas—or any people anywhere who, for any reason, decide that killing innocents is good for their cause. Ben, the boy I cared for, did indeed go places. He went to Israel where, after an interesting interlude as a DJ at a hip hop radio station, decided to pursue religious studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Twelve years ago today, Ben was killed when a bomb, set by Hamas, exploded in the cafeteria where he was sitting with friends.
Posted on: Fri, 01 Aug 2014 01:27:55 +0000
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