* Warning * Heavy Postage Ahead!
I went to see a play this week – an adaptation in Hebrew of Emile Ajar’s book La Vie Devant Soi. It’s a touching story about an old Jewish Madame raising an orphaned Muslim boy in Paris. It was also made into a movie by the title of Madame Rosa.
Madame Rosa is a former prostitute who was deported from France to Germany during the second world war and survived the camps. She is mostly a vivacious character, full of life and love: she loves the children she takes care of; she loves to dance and sing; she loves nature. Still, every now and again, when there’s a knock on the door, especially early in the morning, she panics. She often screams in her sleep too with her fears focusing on the social services, the French police, and most of all, the Gestapo.
One day, her beloved Momo (Mohamed) follows her down the stairs and finds her secret hideaway in the cellar. She tells him that it’s her “Jewish hole”, her hiding place, her little hidden shelter. This is where she goes to when the fear gets too much for her to bear.
It made me think about my own fears and how Jewish some of them are. It’s almost like two thousands years of persecution have turned this into a genetic component of my personality. And I know it is shared with others too… A national neurosis?
I am not one bit religious, which sometimes confuses people (only non-Israelis, mind!): “How can you be Jewish and not be religious? What makes you Jewish then?”
To me, being Jewish is about my core identity. It has little to do with God, the Torah, or any kind of religious belief. It’s about being part of a tribe that has been moved from one place to another for thousands of years, constantly under threat, its people persecuted and often killed.
My grandparents came to Israel to get away from the fear. It was not some distant memory either. My grandparents from both sides, the Tunisian and the Polish, have shared with me many memories of discrimination, persecution and downright pogroms and killing. Only recently have I found out how my grandmother’s family was massacred in a forest in Poland. The Nazis didn’t even waste bullets on them. They were buried alive with a few barrels of acid poured on top of them – men, women and children – to make sure no one digs out of the mass grave.
So, every now and again, I get that feeling again. I don’t think it’s just me though. I wonder how Jewish people living outside of Israel feel about this. Would be happy to hear from you all in comments to this post. Group therapy, anyone? 
on Nov 19th, 2009 at 7:20 am
Don’t take this the wrong way, I have been the ears to several people decomposing this aspect of their Jewish identity, but national group therapy sounds like a fantastic idea. Could it help bring an end to the occupation? Perhaps if the Jews in Israel and outside could come to terms with their past and overcome the victim identity, we’d be able to move forward.
Of course, once this happens, then Palestinians will also need national group therapy first for post traumatic stress disorder and then for self-victimization.
Great post, thanks for sharing.
on Nov 19th, 2009 at 7:38 am
Sarah, thank you for your comment. I can totally see how the Palestinians probably already have their own post (?) traumatic stress syndrome. War sucks that way…
I have to say though, I really don’t accept the thesis that the occupation is a result of the holocaust or of the Jewish sense of persecution. There is an element there, for sure, but it’s a lot more complicated than that… So, I’m afraid getting over our own national neurosis would probably not provide a cure for the entire Middle East
on Nov 19th, 2009 at 8:37 am
IMom:
You asked for it!!! Below find an excerpt that although doesn’t, perhaps, address this issue on an intellectual-only plane, speaks powerfully to the issue at hand. I apologize in advance for the religiosity of it , but feel the writing and relevance excuses the “dirty words” involved…:-). It’s an excerpt from a book called “Letters to a Buddhist Jew”, by a South African doctor named Akiva Tatz. Enjoy!
Akiva:
Concerning the Sinai experience: we are a skeptical, stiff-necked people. All I can say, with all due respect, and wishing it were otherwise, is something many American Jews would say, using the ugly vernacular: I just can’t buy it.
David,
It is not for sale. It is yours already. And as for the price, that has already been paid. Your grandparents paid for it when they were dispossessed in Berlin and exiled from Barcelona; your great-grandparents paid when they were cut down in York and Cracow; their parents paid when they were hounded in Bavarian forests and Polish streets, watched their scrolls burned in Paris and their homes in Madrid.
Your grandmother paid more than enough when she sold the family stove in a Russian winter to have enough to give her children a Torah education. And she overpaid with her pain when she watched her American grandchildren walk away from that mountain in whose shadow she had lived with the graceful strength of a conviction that came naturally. Walk away without looking back, mind you, unwittingly exchanging the indescribable richness of Torah for the self-help literature of a neurotic society that has forgotten what is real, or the literature and practice of exotic philosophies that cannot offer more than what they are supplanting.
on Nov 19th, 2009 at 8:45 am
Why I don’t quite get (and i’m asking in all honesty) is: Why would one want to remain loyal to “a tribe that has been moved from one place to another for thousands of years, constantly under threat, its people persecuted and often killed.” just because they were born into it?
on Nov 19th, 2009 at 9:36 am
Group therapy? OK.
Me: “Hello all! I am Aviva and I am a Jew.”
The tribe: “Hello Aviva! Welcome and Barucha ha ba’ah! Now, tell us your story.”
Me: “I was born in East Berlin in 1975 to a Sabra and the family’s most beloved German Candle Goy. I am a third generation Shoah survivor…”
The tribe: deep breathes and mumbling under the same.
Me: “…as well as a third generation offender.”
The tribe: “What? How is that? You’re kidding us!”
Me: “No kidding. While my maternal grandparents born in 1933 and 1934 survived the Nazi regime through lucky circumstances and help of their communities, I would love to say that my paternal grandparents had been some of the ‘good’ Germans, risking their lives for people like me.
They were not. On the contrary, they were proud Arians to their core and until their death. My grandfather even served in a special unite that guarded the V1 rockets at the French side of the Channel and meandered through Europe all the way to Italy once the invasion ended Hitler’s dream of the secret weapon winning the war for him. And honestly, I don’t want to know what he and his friends did while travelling through war torn Europe as a gang. When he told me about this time as a kid he always said that it had been the best time in his life.”
The tribe: “How could you cope with a schizophrenic identity like this?”
Me: “I was born a German, raised to see the world from all kind of different perspectives and through the eyes of all kind of different people. Like a brain in puberty that tries first to connect all cells there are until it realizes that the chaos inside prevents from any outside activity, I became universal citizen before I scaled back to what works best to balance things out and focus.
The longer I live, the more I learn, the better I understand, the more I experienced the more important became my Jewish roots, my Israeli heritage. I am convinced that where exists a reason for our existence and the story of life and the talents we are given to live with.
I am Jewish, part of a people, a nation. We need a home of our own where we are allowed to govern ourselves so that never again the fate and life of one of us depends on the grace of others without a choice. To protect this home for the generations to come is one of the main reasons I’ll move to Israel as I’ve seen on my way still many people who think like my paternal grandparents. So, yes I still have the typical fears in me. That’s why I’m here.”
The tribe: “Achat ha Am, how very true.”
Me: “And Sarah, just because I see the necessity of the existence of a state of Israel, state of the Jewish people, does not exclude me seeing the necessity of a state for the Palestinian people as well. It is not an either/or question, but works only in the framework of peaceful co-existence. Hence, your conclusion about the direct connection between the Jewish feeling of prosecution and the occupation is an oversimplification of things, a little ‘maybe it plays a role’ with a huge tail of ‘but’s’ that are much more important.”
The tribe: huge cacophony of different opinions called out, to each one his own
on Nov 19th, 2009 at 10:58 am
Obviously, while in the Gola/Diaspora, religion was a huge factor in holding this people together. That and antisemitism. That’s my answer to your query, Shimon.
The whole point about Israel and Zionism is resurrecting the national identity of a people in its own land, so that we no longer need external threats or religion to keep us together.