Kesher Talk

When I was a child, my grandmother used to tell me all kinds of stories that had to do with history, Jewish history in particular. As Jewish history goes, some of these stories involved violence against Jews. Some of her stories came from personal experience, like the pogrom that took place in her home town of Orsha in Belorussia, when she was about 3 years old. She remembered people going from house to house, killing Jews. She said that some gentiles stood in front of her house to protect it, saying: "We won't let you kill Mendel [my great-grandfather]". I remember her explaining why they liked him, but don't remember what the explanation was.

There was another story that she occasionally told me, which not only was not personal, but I cannot imagine where she got it at all, because this kind of information was not commonly available in the Soviet Union. The story was that during WWll Romanians rounded up some Jews, cut them up, put them in barrels, with the word "Kosher" on them. I never heard this story anywhere else, and never actually believed it. That is, until I read this just now: Remarkably, roughly half of Romania's 750,000 Jews survived the war, but the country's early, spasmodic acts of anti-Semitic violence stand out even in the general inhumanity of the Holocaust: during a pogrom in Bucharest in early 1941, Jews were forced to crawl through a slaughterhouse where they were butchered like cattle, beheaded and stamped "fit for human consumption." That book review is apparently from the NYT, BTW.

I really want to say more about this, but I just cannot put it into words.

I was not looking forward to this war in the positive sense, but I know it is necessary, and thus I wanted to get on with it. Still, I never expected it to "fix" the Middle East, or the world. So, since it has started, although I am relieved from all the tension of anticipation, I still have this heavy feeling that I just cannot explain to non-Jews. The only way I can put it into words is this: there is no place in the world that is completely safe for anyone. No, even worse: this whole world is absolutely unsafe for all human beings, in large part through their own fault. But somehow, Israel is the safest unsafe place for the Jews. Does this make any sense?

posted by Alisa InWonderland @ 3/21/2003 09:59:22 PM