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c05ceab
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So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the or of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an and a and a , who had married to and had a copy of Marilyn's conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in and Annie Navasky's front room, with and as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.
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annie-navasky
antisemitism
arthur-miller
atheism
bar-and-bat-mitzvah
best-man
budapest
damascus
david-rieff
debate
desecration
eastern-europe
einstein
eritrea
germany
india
iraq
islam
istanbul
jewish-question
jewishness
jews
kurdish-people
marilyn-monroe
martin-amis
middle-east
morocco
normality
poland
prague
rabbis
religion
religious-conversion
robert-goldburg
salvation
security
shakespeare
spinoza
steve-wasserman
synagogues
temples
tunisia
victor-saul-navasky
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Christopher Hitchens |
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6c89548
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Bulgaria, I reflected as I walked back to the hotel, isn't a country; it's a near-death experience.
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1990s
adventure
bulgaria
city-centre
country
crisis
death
eastern-europe
europe
european
europeans
night-club
nightlife
post-communist
sofia
travel
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Bill Bryson |
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d9ccefd
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And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin's enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and 'security' departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmulevski. There were reasonably strong indigenous Communist forces in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, but in Hungary and Poland the Communists were a small minority and knew it, were dependent on the Red Army and aware of the fact, and were disproportionately Jewish and widely detested for that reason. Many of the penal labor camps constructed by the Nazis were later used as holding pens for German deportees by the Communists, and some of those who ran these grim places were Jewish. Nobody from Israel or the diaspora who goes to the East of Europe on a family-history fishing-trip should be unaware of the chance that they will find out both much less and much more than the package-tour had promised them. It's easy to say, with Albert Camus, 'neither victims nor executioners.' But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was.
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camus
communism
czechoslovakia
david-szmulevski
east-germany
eastern-europe
germans
history
hungary
ideology
israel
jewish-diaspora
jews
nazis
poland
red-army
revenge
secret-police
stalin
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Christopher Hitchens |
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b1eba03
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I have had my mother's wing of my genetic ancestry analyzed by the tracing service and there it all is: the arrow moving northward from the African savannah, skirting the Mediterranean by way of the Levant, and passing through Eastern and Central Europe before crossing to the British Isles. And all of this knowable by an analysis of the cells on the inside of my mouth. I almost prefer the more rambling and indirect and journalistic investigation, which seems somehow less... deterministic.
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ancestry
british-isles
central-europe
determinism
eastern-europe
genealogy
genetics
history
investigation
journalism
levant
mediterranean-sea
national-geographic
savanna
sub-saharan-africa
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Christopher Hitchens |