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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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shakespeare
india
religion
annie-navasky
arthur-miller
bar-and-bat-mitzvah
best-man
budapest
desecration
eritrea
marilyn-monroe
martin-amis
morocco
prague
religious-conversion
robert-goldburg
steve-wasserman
synagogues
tunisia
victor-saul-navasky
jewish-question
david-rieff
rabbis
temples
spinoza
normality
einstein
istanbul
security
salvation
poland
jewishness
eastern-europe
kurdish-people
middle-east
damascus
iraq
debate
atheism
islam
antisemitism
jews
germany
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Christopher Hitchens |