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Nonfiction
A Writer Reckons With the Fact That 'People Beloved Dead Jews'
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PEOPLE LOVE DEAD JEWS
Reports From a Haunted Present
By Dara Horn
In 2014, I traveled to Belarus to learn more about pre-World State of war II Jewish culture around Minsk. In the town of Motal, I spoke with a small grouping of locals, who recalled the Jewish neighbour who'd been a good friend of their parents, or that great klezmer band that had played at their uncle's wedding ceremony, or the amazing raspberry torte cake you could buy at the Jewish bakery. Just before we parted, the oldest in the group, a 93-yr-old woman, approached me and, in a trembling voice, fighting back tears, said something softly in Belorussian.
"What did she say?" I asked Andrei, the translator who accompanied me. He replied: "She said that e'er since the Jews left this place, the place is dead."
I was moved. The elderly woman had expressed — confessed, perhaps — the enormous void left by the deportation and annihilation of Motal'south Jewish population. Just as I idea more well-nigh her words, they became more than disturbing. I tried to understand why, but I — a writer, after all — couldn't seem to discover a style to describe my discomfort. I felt equally if I'd reached the limits of my ability to limited myself.
Reading Dara Horn's "People Love Dead Jews," I could feel the words coming dorsum to me, as if I were reacquiring a language. Not a new language, in which you must learn a vocabulary and grasp the rules of grammar. But equally in Platonic epistemology, where learning is essentially a recollection, I felt as if I were recollecting, retrieving something I had been asked to forget. From childhood on, as Horn points out, we are told to replace this linguistic communication with a more symbolic ane, consisting of all the familiar codes and tropes: "Those who practise not larn the lessons of the Holocaust are jump to repeat them," say, or: "We will never forget."
Horn'south principal insight is that much of the fashion nosotros've developed to think and characterize Jewish history is, at best, cocky-deception and, at worst, rubbish. The 12 essays in her brilliant book explore how the different means we commemorate Jewish tragedy, how we write about the Holocaust, how the media presents antisemitic events, how we establish museums to award Jewish heritage, how nosotros read literature with Jewish protagonists and even how nosotros praise the "righteous among the nations" (those who saved Jews during the war), are all distractions from the main issue, which is the very concrete, specific death of Jews.
Even though each affiliate reveals a dissimilar blind spot in our collective retention — ranging from Horn's visit to the Museum of Jewish Heritage in downtown Manhattan to her travel to the Jewish sites in Harbin, Communist china — all the essays in the book show that when we larn to remember sure things in certain ways, we prepare the limits of what can be said, and what cannot be said, even as we might take the urge to say information technology. Horn thinks it's about fourth dimension to say it, and this is why her volume is at the aforementioned time so necessary and so disquieting.
Let us accept Anne Frank's diary, for example. Horn examines the enormous success of "The Diary of a Young Daughter," which has been translated into seventy languages and has sold over xxx million copies worldwide. Possibly its most famous, near quoted judgement — "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart" — has inspired many people; considering how things concluded for Anne, nosotros find information technology astounding that she's still able to believe in people's essential goodness. Just here is Horn's straightforward response: "It is far more than gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered united states grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote near people being 'truly good at heart' earlier meeting people who weren't. Three weeks after writing those words, she met people who weren't."
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Horn's view is that Anne's words are inspirational exactly because her perspective is not only incomplete just too fake. We take the easy mode out rather than plumbing the depths of evil. We look for universal lessons in lieu of attending to the actual persecution of Jews. Horn wants us non to exist encouraged past what seems to be the proliferation of these forms of remembering, a proliferation spawned by an arcadian, graceful perspective that has as its aim to reaffirm the values of the very civilisation that, in spite of information technology all, shattered so many Anne Franks.
In three other essays, Horn deals with the upswell of anti-Semitism in the United States. Here it becomes clear that her business about the means we remember is inextricable from the way we relate to what is happening today. Horn claims that setting the Holocaust as the bar for anti-Semitism means that "anything short of the Holocaust is, well, not the Holocaust. The bar is rather high." According to Horn, this might explain the limited shelf life, and so to speak, of current events like the gunning downwards of Jews in Pittsburgh, in San Diego, in New Bailiwick of jersey.
And then there'due south the moment of relief that Jews feel when nosotros get in at the famous questions in Act Three of "The Merchant of Venice": "If you prick us, practice we not bleed? … If you poison us, do nosotros not die?" And so Shakespeare was not really an antisemite, only rather, more benignly, a satirist when he limned Shylock's stereotypical Jewish character. After all, he is Shakespeare, and we want him on our side.
Or how we recognize the Chinese authorities's investment of $30 1000000 to restore "Jewish heritage sites" in Harbin, a city that was built by Russian Jewish entrepreneurs, who flourished there until they were no longer required.
"People Love Dead Jews" is an outstanding book with a bold mission. Information technology criticizes people, artworks and public institutions that few others dare to claiming. Reading this book, I started to find the words I should have said to that woman in Motal. I should have responded that perchance Eastern Europe has been left with a void, but I have been left with hardly any family unit.
Merely in that location is a rare moment in Horn's book in which she admits the austerity of her own perspective. Information technology'south in "Legends of Expressionless Jews." The common family story that so many American Jews have heard about their surnames existence changed at Ellis Island is a myth, she writes. The names weren't changed by fault. American Jews preferred to modify their names to be able to fit in, to blend in, to assimilate.
I expected Horn to criticize the purveyors of this fable. After all, they distorted the past to avoid the discomfort of its truth. Only she writes: "Our ancestors could have dwelled on the sordid facts, and passed down that psychological damage. Instead, they created a story that ennobled united states, and made u.s. confident in our part in this great country." Perhaps revision of this sort does not ever have to be about self-blinding. Maybe, as Horn suggests, it is "an act of bravery and love." Some things are just too painful to say.
Reading Horn's beautiful words, I thought that possibly, subsequently all, what this adult female in Motal wanted, and needed, was a simple cheers, a handshake and a apprehensive nod.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/08/books/review/dara-horn-people-love-dead-jews.html
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