History
“A Nightmare from Which I Try to Awaken”
Chayym
Zeldis
“History,”
observes James Joyce, “is the nightmare from which I try to awaken.”
My own begins
with beatings administered by the neighborhood gentile kids. Why? Because,
they inform me, I had “killed God”, How had I accomplished the feat? “You
stuck pins in Him,” they sneer. I was seven or eight when I was knocked flat
in the empty schoolyard and trampled by my attackers like a doormat. The dust
that I, and all mortals, would one day inherit as eternal home entered my eyes
and nostrils and mouth to advertise the fact.
Those were pre-World War II years. I was,
from the instant I quit my mother’s womb, at once a son of Israel, a people
stretching back some 50 centuries, and a child of America, a nation that had
begun its career something more than two centuries before with the genocide of
the indigenous Indian population and seizure of its lands. Those were the
years when a “famous” sign in Mt. Freedom, NJ read, “No Jews or Dogs Allowed”,
when the notice, “Restricted”, in apartment buildings, country clubs, etc.
meant no Jews wanted. They were the years when Father Coughlin preached
Jew-hatred openly from his radio pulpit; when the German Bund, supporting
Hitler, marched in Yorkville, Manhattan; when Henry Ford defamed the Jews and
called history, “the bunk”.
It was a time when American Jews changed
their family names to keep a low profile or “pass”. On the High Holidays, when
we walked from our non-Jewish neighborhood to the synagogue, my father
carefully wrapped the prayerbooks in newspaper – my feeling was that he did it
to hide our identity from the gentiles and so keep us safe. It was not until
Israel was established that Karl Shapiro, who battled anti-Semitism for
recognition, would write that he could meet the “blue-eyed” stranger’s stare
and “say my name aloud”. Until 1948, we Jews were what Maurice Samuel termed,
“a ghost people”.
“The child,” says Wordsworth, “is father
of the man”. My childhood, as does everyone’s, casts a long shadow over the
terrain of my life. A short story called, “A Dream of Jesus”, and five novels
revolving around the life and death of that same fellow-tribesman, sprang from
the bitter soil of my American raising. Said literary excursions were my
desperate way of coping with my own personal, the Jewish people’s, and the
world’s history.
As I grew older,
I was both drawn and impelled to define my identity. I owed and would always
owe much to America: but I had a debt to pay to my Judaism, the Judaism whose
influence had partially shaped the land of my birth. Undoubtedly, the most
weighty factor in my decision to settle in Israel in 1948 was the Holocaust.
It was clear to me that but for geography, I might well have gone up an
Auschwitz chimney; that a host of nations had over the centuries created the
atmosphere and paved the way for the genocide; and that many countries had
either lent support to it or else remained indifferent and passive. In mind
and heart, I believed that Jews had an inalienable right to the homeland they
had never given up, and a supreme moral obligation to resettle and rebuild it.
As Jews, we have given much to
civilization: in Biblical times and in the two millennia of Dispersion, and
now in modern Israel. For 10 years, my wife headed her psychological section
in the rehab unit of a large and prestigious New York hospital: she gained
intimate knowledge of what brutality and violence can do to the human body and
psyche. Reacting to the horror of the wounds inflicted by Arab suicide-bombers
– nails imbedded in brains and hearts, shattered spines, smashed-in skulls,
massive burns – she rages not only against the perpetrators, but also against
the world which either fails to react appropriately or actually encourages
them. “We Jews made a terrible mistake,” she tells me, “in giving to the
world. If only we could take it all back! The Ten Commandments and the
Sabbath; Isaiah and Amos and Job and the Psalms of David; Freud’s theories and
Einstein’s formulae; Heine and Proust and Kafka; Salk and Sabin’s vaccines…”
The list of Jewish contributions to human welfare is endless and she goes on
and on.
I listen. I say nothing. Like her, I am
filled with loathing for history. I regularly write in a small room made of
reinforced concrete, the one window and the door are steel-plated: it is the
bomb shelter that Israeli building code requires. Outside, to the east, some
five miles distant, lie Samaria and Judea, for 30 centuries Jewish and never
abandoned, where Israel fights the same ultimate malevolence that in the 1940s
brought the free world to the “valley of the shadow of death”. Beyond are the
shark states – Syria, Iraq and Iran – and beyond them, an assortment of dismal
despotisms. We here in Israel, and the nations which profess to love liberty,
must eliminate the mortal danger these enemies pose. The democracies can
rationalize or temporize or even indulge in fantasy or outright denial. But it won’t
help. As in 1939, we are on the brink.
Inside my
shelter, I take a break from writing and switch on the radio for the news.
Once again, the Christ-killer accusation echoes from my childhood, presently,
it falls from the lips of the Syrian dictator. I shake my head.
“Nightmare,” I
murmur, “ is the history from which I try to awaken.”
