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people just don't listen
Apr. 11th, 2003 11:54 pmThis Friday night, I went to the big Shabbat Dinner because Noam was with me as a pre-frosh. Afterwards we stayed on for the Oneg, which was a speaker about the Holocaust, a survivor. The man was an interesting speaker, and he basically just told us a section of his lifestory. He began just as the Soviets were taking Riga, the capital of Latvia and his hometown, and told up to when American victory reached them. At the end of the story he answered some questions that people asked.
The questions were, in a way, the most interesting part of the talk because nearly every single one hinted at a moral in either the asking or the answering. For example, the last question was asked something along the lines of "since you've seen how vulnerable we Jews can be, you support Israel, right?" -- but he turned his answer into words about de-humanization. The Holocaust survivor warned that the de-humanization of Arabs in the eyes of Israelis is as dangerous as the de-humanization of Jews in the eyes of the Nazis. I was impressed to hear him say that, because I believe that too.
He also commented that of all the countries involved in WWII, it is only Germany that has made any national effort to reconcile and own up to its behavior. The Latvians, and other European nations, all cry that they were forced into any actions by the invading Nazi Germans, painting themselves as helpless occupied volitionless victims -- which he insists is counter-factual. He did not press the point about Germany's behavior, but the suggestion that they have, alone, attempted teshuvah should give pause to knee-jerk anti-germanicy.
He answered the inevitable "What do you believe God was doing then?" question in a realistic-to-me way. There was one more question that may, in its way, have been equally inevitable: the question was "Why did you decide to stay in your village when things were starting to look bad?". This question bugged me, and once I thought highly of his response. He had, as it happened, already explained the reason earlier in his story. But it is very possible that the questioner had come in after that part, so it would be a fine question to ask. Except for one thing: this speaker did not come from some little village in Eastern Europe, he grew up in the capital of a country, quite a genuine city. Even if the questioner had missed the very beginning, how could they have missed the fact that all the action took place in a city, that he survived in a ghetto which obviously entails a larger urban matrix, the repeated references to the work crews walking into the city for their jobs, as well as that the place suffered bombings unlikely for an isolated outpost.
I would have bet my shoe that the question-asker did not bother to stop and think before coming up with their question. Their words gave it away. I see this as a result of the standard Hebrew School unit on Life in the Shtetl. Everybody has it, and we young American Jews are trained to think of all old European Jewry as consisting of "Fiddler on the Roof" Tevyehs. In my Hebrew Schools' curricula (both the one I attended and where I teach), we learn of insular ancestral societies, with no mention of the mixed-Jewish/non-Jewish villages that also existed, let alone of major cities with a significant Jewish populous. Lodz for example -- if I recall correctly -- was half Jews before the war! That's a lot of people who are not all small-time tailors and Torah-scholars. There were seriously elaborate Rabbinical courts of the sundry regional centers. There were Jews who were Reform, even before America! And yet all of this is overshadowed, breezed over, to give a simple image of dark-robed shtetl life, that doesn't even include all of Ashkenazi reality let alone the invisible Sephardi -- or Mizrachi --- histories.
This gets my goat quite a lot.
Why bother to bring a real man, a person who can speak of personal experience and who can lay out for you every point where he feels raw chance saved him as others, even with more passion to live than he, around him were destroyed, why bother inviting him to speak, if people aren't even going to listen!?
The speaker took this question admirably, I thought. He paused a moment, and made sure to calmly point out that he is not from a "village" at all, before going on to re-tell why they decided to risk staying
The questions were, in a way, the most interesting part of the talk because nearly every single one hinted at a moral in either the asking or the answering. For example, the last question was asked something along the lines of "since you've seen how vulnerable we Jews can be, you support Israel, right?" -- but he turned his answer into words about de-humanization. The Holocaust survivor warned that the de-humanization of Arabs in the eyes of Israelis is as dangerous as the de-humanization of Jews in the eyes of the Nazis. I was impressed to hear him say that, because I believe that too.
He also commented that of all the countries involved in WWII, it is only Germany that has made any national effort to reconcile and own up to its behavior. The Latvians, and other European nations, all cry that they were forced into any actions by the invading Nazi Germans, painting themselves as helpless occupied volitionless victims -- which he insists is counter-factual. He did not press the point about Germany's behavior, but the suggestion that they have, alone, attempted teshuvah should give pause to knee-jerk anti-germanicy.
He answered the inevitable "What do you believe God was doing then?" question in a realistic-to-me way. There was one more question that may, in its way, have been equally inevitable: the question was "Why did you decide to stay in your village when things were starting to look bad?". This question bugged me, and once I thought highly of his response. He had, as it happened, already explained the reason earlier in his story. But it is very possible that the questioner had come in after that part, so it would be a fine question to ask. Except for one thing: this speaker did not come from some little village in Eastern Europe, he grew up in the capital of a country, quite a genuine city. Even if the questioner had missed the very beginning, how could they have missed the fact that all the action took place in a city, that he survived in a ghetto which obviously entails a larger urban matrix, the repeated references to the work crews walking into the city for their jobs, as well as that the place suffered bombings unlikely for an isolated outpost.
I would have bet my shoe that the question-asker did not bother to stop and think before coming up with their question. Their words gave it away. I see this as a result of the standard Hebrew School unit on Life in the Shtetl. Everybody has it, and we young American Jews are trained to think of all old European Jewry as consisting of "Fiddler on the Roof" Tevyehs. In my Hebrew Schools' curricula (both the one I attended and where I teach), we learn of insular ancestral societies, with no mention of the mixed-Jewish/non-Jewish villages that also existed, let alone of major cities with a significant Jewish populous. Lodz for example -- if I recall correctly -- was half Jews before the war! That's a lot of people who are not all small-time tailors and Torah-scholars. There were seriously elaborate Rabbinical courts of the sundry regional centers. There were Jews who were Reform, even before America! And yet all of this is overshadowed, breezed over, to give a simple image of dark-robed shtetl life, that doesn't even include all of Ashkenazi reality let alone the invisible Sephardi -- or Mizrachi --- histories.
This gets my goat quite a lot.
Why bother to bring a real man, a person who can speak of personal experience and who can lay out for you every point where he feels raw chance saved him as others, even with more passion to live than he, around him were destroyed, why bother inviting him to speak, if people aren't even going to listen!?
The speaker took this question admirably, I thought. He paused a moment, and made sure to calmly point out that he is not from a "village" at all, before going on to re-tell why they decided to risk staying
