Last year, one beautiful fine spring day I was in one of my favourite used bookstores with my teenaged daughter, Kiki Tzipporah. Yes, I have a Tzipporah and a Moshe too, but no Gershom, and instead, I have Yishai.My daughter was at the comics table at the back of the store hunting for Buffy the Vampire comics to add to her collection while I was rummaging through a stack of books on the table beside the comics. I was more or less lost in thought and wasn’t paying a great deal of attention to the conversation the two clerks were having in the back as they unpacked books from boxes until I heard the phrase “those Jooos’. It wasn’t so much even the words but the sneering tone with which the words were uttered that broke my inner concentration and caused me to pay attention and listen up.
Its not that Jews haven’t been the subject of discussions I have participated in but I bet the fingers of one hand could easily number all the conversations I have overheard by strangers discussing ‘Jews’. In a place as vast and diverse as Canada, Jews are too small a number to garner much attention, well - until lately that is. Who knows, perhaps Jews have always been a topic of ordinary discussion from non-Jews, and maybe, its just I haven’t gone out enough to notice.
Either way, these young clerks crossed my Jewdar, and held my undivided interest and as the conversation turned to the Holocaust and their long litany of complaints against the so-called overt preoccupation for the Shoah which holds ‘the Jews’ unnaturally captive and hostage to in its memory. Every single word cuts like a single knife plunged over and over in my heart.
I stood there shaking in rage when suddenly I feel my daughter’s arms wrap around me around me, and the soft whisper of her voice in my ear telling me to put the books down and now is not the time to fight. “Not this way”, she says, “Not this time, they don’t know and they will never understand. Let it go.” she says, as she attempts to pull the books from my hands. At first, I resist but then, I realize she is right, so I let the books drop from my hands unto the table. I sag against her as she pushes me towards the front of the store and leads me out the door telling me it will be okay.
But it never is. And how, to begin even to explain it? What are the words to make anyone fully understand or even feel just a tiny bit of it? How to explain to these young men - sixty years is a grandparent, aunt, an uncle, cousins, one grows up never knowing. All those blank spaces in family memory who no one ever knows because their life was stolen – all those worlds never borne…times millions? I wanted to tell those young men the horror of it never really ends until memory dies or is lost. It can’t, when your daughter at nine looks at a picture of line of young women going to their death in Auschwitz and screams because she sees her mother’s face written on another waiting in line for the ‘shower’.
I remember taking the book from my daughter and looking at picture and wondering what her name and age was. I wonder at the mystery of her life, and I wonder if in fact, she belonged to me and mine. She must, I think, otherwise how else to explain the uncanny resemblance to me. I, who grew up looking like no one living, have found my twin in the pages of an obscure book. Whose daughter, whose sister, whose aunt, whose cousin was she I ask myself. I searched through my memory and cannot find a single trace of her but what does that really prove? So many names, so many ties, but so few faces and so few memories. And it is at that moment aliyah – the need to rise up and return to Zion became a siren’s song in my daughter’s heart for she feels the weight of 2,000 years of history pressing and knows ‘never again’ only means until the time when memory dies.
I am two generations removed from the Shoah and my best friend is merely one yet we are the same age. Her father at 14 became a partisan. After the war he went back to Minsk to find his home and any trace of his large family. He wasn’t looking for parents, or brothers, or sisters, as he watched them all die before his impotent eyes. Instead, he searched for any trace of aunts, uncles, cousins…really anyone. All he found was a distant cousin in Winnipeg and a china tea cup which belonged to his mother. He carried that single tea cup half a world away into Canada. Her father is but a blessed memory now, and so, on Yom HaShoah we fill the cup with Israeli wine and take turns sharing a drink of remembrance for all those worlds we do not know which are irrevocably lost to us.
I haven’t forgotten those two young men in the bookstore, and when I hear old men who should know better deny the holocaust my heart is indeed hardened. For those old men serve only to give cover and bred ignorance in the young, and therefore, bring the tomorrow after ‘never again’ one day closer. I care not for your vapid and airy apology, nor your god who you claim to apologize before nor your church. All of this means less than nothing to those who will never know the worlds which were irretrievably stolen from them.
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