What can we learn from this painting?: The marriage portrait of Charlotte von RothschildThe Israel Museum, home of the Dead Sea Scrolls and a fantastic collection of art, has a well-deserved reputation for hosting world-renowned art exhibits. Particularly in the realm of Jewish art -- that is, art created by members of the Jewish community -- the Israel Museum most often provides a vibrant, honest experience. However, its two most recent exhibits, "Looking for Owners: Custody, Research, and Restitution of Art Stolen in France during World War II" and "Orphaned Art: Looted Art from the Holocaust," leave much to be desired.

"Looking for Owners" features pieces that the Nazis looted specifically from French Jewish communities during the Holocaust, while "Orphaned Art" features works of art looted from other European Jewish communities that were discovered in various hiding places by the Allies after the war. The art in both exhibits was collected by various organizations, professors, and graduate students who did years upon years of research in order to determine the owners of each piece and their countries of origin. An effort to return the uncovered pieces to families with legitimate ownership claims would have been an important endeavor, but instead, the entire project served as means of creating various exhibits to simply display the artwork.

Both exhibits consist of largely unrelated pieces of work that were simply owned (not created) by well-to-do Jews before the war. This alone does not establish a cultural contribution to the world of art by the Jewish community, nor do the works themselves tell us much about the lives of this portion of the Jewish community (upper-class European Jews). Instead, they merely serve as a rather mundane display of the wealth of their owners. The majority of the paintings displayed were either portraits of well-known families, such as the Rothschilds, or mediocre oil paintings of all things gold, shiny, and generally superfluous.

There are still many significant cultural contributions from pre-war Jewish communities that have yet to be salvaged from the remnants of the Holocaust. A people that, since WWII, has established a state and arguably redefined communal resilience, warrants the exhibition of more than a mere display of what was taken from them.

It could happen to you: The book cover I was quite small, perhaps eight, when it occurred to me how deeply I disliked the other children. I mean, it wasn’t as if I had wanted them dead or anything; it just didn’t seem as though we had much to say to one another. I’m sure that murdering fireflies and smearing the glowing intestines in a lurid streak across the grass with one’s shoe has its own rewards, but none that compare to an evening spent indoors, memorizing the recitative to an obscure Gilbert and Sullivan operetta and congratulating oneself on one’s own superiority.

Peering out my bedroom window with bemused disdain at the local gang of young ruffians, vulgar Philistines who had probably never heard of Derek Jacobi, as they pelted one another with water balloons or gleefully terrorized some delicate future interior decorator, I invented games of my own. Solitary, secretive games, tailored especially to my peculiar fixations. For example:

WHAT TO PACK WHEN FLEEING FROM THE NAZIS

Food, of course: Ziploc bags of Cheerios and Skittles, apple juice boxes, and cans of Diet Coke from the pantry. Family photographs – I’d want images of my annihilated relatives to occupy a place of honor at Yad Vashem. A few suitably depressing items of clothing and, finally, books. The books were the most important. Even the an activity as challenging as fleeing the Gestapo was bound to include some downtime, and the titles I packed were chock-full of helpful hints, sure to help me out of any jam or rat-infested crawlspace under an abandoned Warsaw building where I and three others lay hidden, eating rotten potato peels and creeping in the dead of the night to relieve ourselves in the frozen sewers.

I speak, of course, of the genre known as Young Adult Holocaust literature, a body of work specifically designed to remind Jewish children that no matter how safe they might feel, there will always be those who wish to destroy them. As on perspicacious young reader observed in his “Kid’s Review” (in the name of research, I browsed a few such tomes on Amazon recently): “Would you want to be a jew when you are getting ready to be killed by the germans I wouldn’t.”

There was Touch Wood: A Girlhood in Occupied France by Renée Roth-Hano, outlining how to pass as a convent-educated Catholic. I learned the appropriate times to cross oneself (out of fear, reverence, or superstition), invoke a saint (for a lost object, a difficult problem, or when beset by a pack of thieves), and that Frenchmen who refer to Jews as “wily Israelites” are less virulently anti-Semitic than those who prefer the more traditional “filthy Christ-killers.” The Island on Bird Street by Uri Orlev taught me how to burrow under the ghetto wall, how to keep and shoot a gun, and that the only person you can really trust is your pet mouse. And in Number the Stars by Lois Lowry, I discovered the importance of being Danish.

Way before Spiderman: Kirsten Dunst in the TV movie Such tales of woe were plentiful, yet unlike their real-life counterparts, these brave, benighted children, these Henryks and Hannahs and Boleks and Shmuliks, rarely wound up in Auschwitz. They might lose all their earthly possessions, be assaulted by classmates and teachers shouting racial epithets, even have parents or younger siblings murdered before them (all events deemed appropriate for young readers and beneficial to the formation of their Jewish identities), but clearly the experience of a death camp, even fictionalized, was just too scary. There as, however, one notable exception: The Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen.

  It was like a dare, that book. To have read it – not just to have checked it out from the library and stared at the cover, paralyzed with fear for three or four days, but to actually have read it – was a kind of status symbol. It marked you as a force to be reckoned with, a deranged loose cannon, the kind of kid who would stick her hand in a tank of piranhas or say “Bloody Mary” three times in the mirror at midnight with a death wish in her eyes. The others would whisper about you in car pool before they picked you up on the first day of school, like you were Dennis Hopper. Don’t mess with her. She’s crazy. Loco. Read The Devil’s Arithmetic cover to cover and ain’t been the same since.

While the film adaptation starring Kirsten Dunst has somewhat deflated its epic creepiness, The Devil’s Arithmetic is probably the most frightening book ever written for children. It’s certainly the most frightening book I’ve ever read. The chilling premise is that Hannah Stern, a modern thirteen-year-old girl, prefers the company of Gentile friends to studying for her Bat Mitzvah and is weary of visiting her elderly grandfather, a semi-catatonic concentration camp survivor who spend his days parked in from of the Hitler – I mean, the History – Channel, weeping uncontrollably. “I’m tired of remembering!” she exclaims.

Well, as every Jewish child who has had his Hebrew school class visited by an itinerant representative of the Anti-Defamation League knows, he who does not remember history is condemned to repeat it. I think it’s printed on the mini-Frisbees they hand out after they’ve finished terrifying you.

For Hannah, with her casual disregard for the suffering of her elders (and at thirteen, she should really know better), this concept will take a particularly vivid form. Upon opening the door for Elijah at her grandparents’ Passover seder (to which she has come grudgingly – bad girl! Bad JEWISH GIRL!), she feels a strange breeze across her face and is mysteriously whisked away to…the magical land of Birkenau!

Shameless: Shukert's memoirThe fish-out-of-water/new-kid-in-school scenario is very common to children’s literature, playing on a child’s fear of strangeness, loneliness, of not belonging. Most of these stories, however, do not feature Josef Mengele as a supporting character. But eventually Hannah, with a little help from her fellow inmates, masters the camp rules for survival – basic bowl-and-potato etiquette, exploiting the lesbian tendencies of the female guards, and of course, “never stand next to someone with a G in her number. G means Greek, and the Greeks don’t last long” – only to discover that such rules are merely a superstitious construct devised by the prisoners to delude themselves that they can somehow subvert, or at least delay, the inevitable, and lo, the ungrateful little JAP gets sent to the gas chamber. Ha! That’ll learn her!

But lucky for Hannah, instead of paralyzing her central nervous system as she claws futilely at the walls with her fingernails until finally suffocating to death in agony, the gas transports her safely back to her own time like three clicks of a pair of ruby slippers, sadder, wiser, and presumably more willing to call her grandparents once in a while. Maybe even come over, spend a little time, would it kill her? No, it wouldn’t. Typhoid, sadistic medical experiments, the hungry Rottweilers when you get off the cattle car, that’s what kills you. Bubbe and Zayde only want to see you once in a while, is that such a crime?

The message was hardly lost on me. And as I practiced taking apart the showerhead to check for Zyklon B pellets before I turned it on, I noted to myself that if anyone was going to open the door for Elijah at the seder, it was going to be my sister. She was almost five years younger than me and hadn’t even started kindergarten yet; she had a lot less to live for.

This is what we were raised on. These were the stories that filled our heads – I’m speaking Rothian “we” now, the “we” that means every Jewish person of my generation anywhere in America. Our parents’ generation, the baby boomers, had focused on happy Jewish things like the state of Israel and Sandy Koufax. They seldom spoke Holocaust at home or at religious school. It was too recent, too vivid, too painful a reminder of the world’s cruel indifference. But we could take this burden, this legacy of unspeakable pain. Enough time had passed. We wouldn’t be crushed under the weight.

Excerpted from Rachel Shukert's book of essays, Have You No Shame? due out April 29 from Villard.

Joshua Suzanne, proprietor of the East Village’s Rags-a-Go-Go, likes to talk to people who wander into her shop. And she likes to videotape herself talking to them, and to post said videos on YouTube. Luckily, she had her camcorder poised and ready when Israeli filmmaker Ari Libsker came a’calling. What emerged was a strange but compelling, accent-inflected (hers: Massachusetts, his: Israeli) conversation about Libsker’s new documentary, Stalags, which opened at the Film Forum last Wednesday.

Libsker’s much-buzzed-about film explores the popular literary genre of Holocaust porn that emerged in the 60s. The booklets (stalags) were a huge hit among Israelis, particularly the children of survivors, who were led to believe the tales of buxom Nazi prison guards raping and torturing captured American soldiers were for real. (Indiewire has a pretty in-depth assessment of the phenomenon in its review of Libsker’s film.)

Libsker tells Suzanne he was motivated by a desire to know what could have possibly made this sexy but sadistic (or masochistic, depending on how you look at it) genre so popular in Israel. Time Out New York’s David Fear posits a more specific corollary question: “The insane popularity of this pulp-porn among Israelis makes you wonder: Was this the result of a society searching for catharsis in smut, or the largest case of Stockholm syndrome ever diagnosed?”

Libsker’s topic is inarguably fascinating, and the New York Times review of the film  criticizes only its brevity. (It’s just too short — 63 minutes — to do the topic justice).

Nestled among racks of second-hand shirts, the filmmaker and the shopgirl manage to have an important little chat about a topic that is as disturbing as it is titillating. And in an interesting twist, Libsker tells Suzanne that those wishing to view a YouTube clip of his film can do so on his Web site, www.stalags.com. Go ahead and try. YouTube removed the video for use of the words “sex” and “Holocaust.”

Stalags plays at Film Forum through April 22.

You have got to be kidding me.

The [Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs] has presented UNESCO with a draft resolution for the preservation of the memory of the Holocaust and prevention of its denial.

Oh, stuff it.

The historic proposed decision, concerned with preservation of the memory of the Holocaust and prevention of its denial, is part of a campaign conducted for the past three years by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in conjunction with international communities in general and with the United Nations[.]

Why is the ministry of foreign affairs doing this, and why is the UN indulging this juvenile "politics of gesture"? Relations with Iran are exquisitely sensitive at the moment, and as we know, Iran does not recognize the Holocaust. It is foolish and pointless to antagonize Ahmadinejad and the mullahs over something that happened sixty years ago. However regrettable the events of WWII may have been--and make no mistake, they were regrettable--we need to focus on today, and not waste our energies revisiting old tragedies. </satire>

The MFA has managed to harness 70 countries from all continents to the initiative, including one Arab state. Voting on the decision will take place at the 34th session of the UNESCO General Conference, to be held in Paris from 16 October to 3 November 2007.

So voting starts today. I hope everyone votes yea, but only after insisting on a brief amendment stating the obvious: that it is equally imperative to preserve the memory of other genocides, such as the Armenian Genocide, and to prevent their denial.

Meanwhile, in other news, Armenian-Americans continue to plead with Jewish- American organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, as well as with the foreign ministry of Israel, to stop abetting Turkish efforts to destroy the memory of the Armenian Genocide.

Alik Arzoumanian, a granddaughter of survivors of the genocide, delivered this speech to the Massachusetts Human Rights Association last Friday:

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As an assimilated Negro, I find that black Jews just tickle my fancy. (Any Oprah/Sarah Silverman hybrids, call me!) I agree with the writer Julius Lester when he says, “What I find remarkable about Jews: They’re the only ethnic group that seems to care about blacks. At least Jews want to learn.”

I’ve certainly tried to learn a Jewish girl a thing or two on blacks, so I figured Julius Lester might have some words of wisdom for me. I first discovered Lester when I stumbled upon his must-read 1984 New York Times interview with James Baldwin (during which Baldwin exclaimed “Fuck Norman Mailer!” when Lester mentioned the author of “The White Negro”—sadly, the Times struck it from the record.) Besides being an academic and literary star—he's author of over 45 books and a decorated professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts—Lester also happens to be that most intriguing of exotic birds, a black Jew. He made a name for himself as a writer, radio commentator, and avowed atheist during the civil rights era, but converted to Judaism in 1982 after years of religious searching (Lovesong, his spiritual memoir, details this journey.)

At 68, Lester is still writing; next spring HarperCollins will publish his novel about lynching, told from the point of view of a 14-year-old white boy. I took to asking him some questions over e-mail.

 

 

THE BLACKER THE BERRY, THE JEWER THE JEW

I think the average black person is suspicious when the average Jewish guy distinguishes himself from the average white guy—at least in America. What do minorities like blacks or Hispanics have in common with American Jews, and what are their differences?

Not a huge fan of Normal Mailer: BaldwinIdentity has many faces, and one’s social identity may not correspond to one’s personal identity. There are Jews whose personal and/or religious identity is so forceful that they resent being identified as white, even though they look like “the average white guy.” Someone who identifies first as a Jew sees him or herself as living by a value structure that believes in justice and equality as opposed to a white guy whose value system is different. Perhaps blacks should not be so quick to dismiss a Jew who insists that he is not white, regardless of what he looks like.

Growing up in the forties and fifties, I always thought Jews were different from whites. Jews were people who empathized with blacks, who understood what it was like to be discriminated against. When I was doing radio on WBAI from 1968 to 1975, people would call me on the air and identify themselves as being “white and Jewish,” and that always confused me because, in my mind, Jews were different from white people.

None of this is to say that Jewish racism does not exist, because it does. And black racism exists, despite those who maintain that blacks cannot be racists because they are victims of racism.

It is increasingly difficult to generalize about blacks, Hispanics, and Jews because of increasing class differences within each group as well as generational differences. For example, blacks and Jews of my generation and older worked together in the labor movement and the civil rights movement. As fraught with tensions as black-Jewish relations became, that coalition meant something. The present generation of blacks and Jews do not see why it is expected that blacks and Jews will work together. The black-Jewish coalition means nothing to them, and I would not argue with that. The events of their lifetimes—Farrakhan, Israel, Arabs—mean very different things to each group.

Different from the rest of the country: Unique New York However, having said that, black-Jewish tensions have been more pronounced in New York than, for example, in the Midwest, where I found blacks and Jews working together on many issues with none of the suspicion and antagonism that can exist in New York. People too often think that the experiences of blacks and Jews in New York reflect the state of affairs between blacks and Jews across the country, but that is not the case. I know it’s difficult for New Yorkers to believe that their experiences do not represent the truth for everyone in America, but New York is unique.

Politically I think blacks and Jews made a huge mistake in the 1980s and 1990s by not reaching out to start working with Hispanic groups. Even twenty years ago, demographic projections suggested that Hispanics were going to become the largest minority group early in the 21^st century. That has happened earlier than anyone predicted. As Hispanics become an increasingly strong political group, the public discourse on whom and what constitutes a minority will change, and neither blacks nor Jews are prepared to deal with the shift. Blacks are in the process of losing their golden status as the largest minority group, and this loss is going to have an impact on black identity, which has been too focused for too long on being victims.

 

SLAVERY: OVER FOR 142 YEARS. THE HOLOCAUST: OVER FOR 62 YEARS. BEING A VICTIM: TIMELESS.

Is there a statute of limitations on historical tragedies? For how long is Auschwitz or Jim Crow Mississippi relevant to a young Jew or Negro in New York City?

Compassion fatigue: Remember the Maine? A very interesting question. I suppose one needs to ask if there is a statute of limitations on memory. There was the recent article in the Sunday Times about people who are tired of memorial services for the victims of 9/11—about “compassion fatigue”. The article referred to the numerous events that were once remembered by public ceremonies and are scarcely remembered now: the sinking of the USS Maine, the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

One of the real problems facing America today is that since the 1960s, Americans no longer share the same historical memories, or we do not share those memories in the same ways.

In the summer of 1973 I taught summer school at a small college in Macon, Georgia. In one of my classes was a very beautiful blonde girl who invited me to drive up to someplace in north Georgia with her. I declined. I knew that northern Georgia was prime KKK territory and as much as I wanted to sleep with her, driving into Klan country was a price I was not willing to pay. When she asked me why I told her about the Klan’s prominence in northern Georgia, about segregation and the backs of buses, etc. She looked at me with her wide blue eyes like I was crazy said in her honeyed southern accent “None of that ever happened down here.”

Echoes of the past: Jim Crow Mississippi can't be forgotten Even though she was blonde, she was not dumb. She had come of age after the changes wrought by the civil rights movement and had grown up at a time when blacks sat anywhere on buses, when there were no white and colored water fountains in stores, when blacks and whites went to school together. I was floored by her response. I had no idea that history could be wiped out so completely in so short a time. This was 1973. The summer nine years before, I had been in Mississippi waking up every morning half-surprised that I hadn’t been killed during the night. After that day I didn’t know how to talk to her, (which was sad because she was really a beautiful girl) because her experience negated the history I had endured.

It is not enough that we remember only what happened to us. We should make the effort to remember that which happened to others, even others before we were born. So many U.S. states and cities have Native American names. The people are gone; all that remains is a word from their language, which is really a kind of tombstone. Massachusetts is a Native American word meaning “High Mountain Place.” Connecticut means “Long River Place.” It is my obligation to remember. The act of remembering connects us to each other. The life of the young black in New York grows from the lives and deaths of blacks in Mississippi who endured and struggled so that he would not have to endure and struggle in quite the same ways. The same goes for the young Jew.

Still relevant?: Building the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin Our lives do not begin with our births. Our lives exist on a continuum. Part of that continuum is that our lives today will become someone else’s past, and how we live our lives will, to some degree, give texture and context to the lives of people not yet born.

One of the things I love about being Jewish is that remembering is an integral part of being Jewish. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur we sing melodies and say prayers that date back a thousand years and more. On Tisha B’Av we still mourn the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem more than 2000 years ago. At Passover we remember the exodus from Egypt, which may or may not have happened, but something happened that was transformative.

It is my wish that the young black New Yorker will remember Auschwitz as well as Jim Crow Mississippi, and that the young Jewish New Yorker will remember Jim Crow Mississippi as well as Auschwitz. Remembering the sufferings of others makes us come closer to each other.

Seems to be being a black Jew might have some perks. For example you can’t be “out-victimized” by anyone, right? It also seems the particular black-Jew blend should have a nickname. Any suggestions?

If there are perks to being a black Jew, I missed out. And I must be dumber than I realized because it never occurred to me that no one could out-victimize me. I never thought of being black or Jewish as being a victim, which just goes to demonstrate how much out of touch I am with the times I live in.

As for nicknames, oy vey! Virginia Hamilton wrote a novel called Bluish about a kid who was black and Jewish, but “bluish” sounds more like an alien in a bad Sci-Fi movie. The police chief (or maybe he’s former police chief now) of Charleston, South Carolina is (was) a black man named Reuben Greenberg, and he is Jewish. He said he was working on a recipe for fried chicken soup. That’s as close to black-Jewish humor as I’ve seen.

 

THE JULIUS LESTER GUIDE TO BLOGGING WHILE BLACK, JEWISH, AND 68 YEARS OLD

You’re a blogger at 68, when many people your age are still trying to get on to the Internet. Do you think it's important to stay engaged with the youth generation? Do you think blogs are a good medium for bridging generational gaps?

The non-linear world: Can you blog and walk at the same time? There are probably more people my age online than is recognized. I think it is important to stay engaged with the youth generation to the degree that is possible. I taught at the University of Massachusetts for 32 years, retiring at the end of 2003. I retired in part because I couldn’t continue to bridge the generational difference between my students and me. Yes, I blog but Facebook, YouTube, and other such enterprises are beyond me. At age 68, I keep having to decide: Given however much time I have left, how do I want to use it? One of my children is on Facebook and I enjoy logging in and seeing what she’s up to, but I don’t have the time or energy to create a Facebook site for myself.

One difference that my daughter and I talk about is that I grew up in a “linear world,” i.e. the world of print, and also a world in which you did one thing at a time. She has grown up in a world of simultaneity, a world in which one does several things simultaneously. It took me a while to understand that I can be talking to a friend in France on Skype and at the same time being sending that friend an attachment relating to what we’re talking about. And there’re probably four other things I could be doing at the same time. I grew up taking piano lessons; my daughter grew up with Garageband. A big difference.

I want to stay engaged with younger generations but recognize that I can only do so to a limited extent. Aging has its own interesting challenges and rewards. One is relief that I won’t be young again; another is the ability to look back to when I was young and what my dreams were and being able to say that I have achieved what I set out to achieve and more, that I didn’t sell out, that I made my dreams become reality. I would not trade being 68 for anything.

Are there any classic writers that would have thrived in this new media environment?

The Perez Hilton of Dublin: Joyce (drawn in text) This is a very interesting question. The writer who first comes to mind is Malcolm Lowery. I don’t remember the name of the novel, but one of his novels has a separate text running in the margin next to the main text. I wrote a short story (“The Child,” published in Join In: Multiethnic Short Stories) and a novella (“Catskill Morning,” published in Two Love Stories) in which I attempted to tell two stories—one in the margin, the other the main text. And I think James Joyce would have excelled in this new environment. To be able to add visuals to stream of consciousness feels like a natural for him. Although he’s not a writer, certainly Picasso would have thrived on the kind of art that is possible now, which can combine text, visuals, and sound.

I went with Baldwin one day to help him buy an electric typewriter. It frightened him so, I don’t think he ever used it.

What blogs do you read? You mentioned seeing me on Gawker.

I read Gawker, Jezebel, The Assimilated Negro, and several blogs devoted to women’s fashions. I love women’s fashions and subscribe to Vogue, Paris Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, W, and a couple of others. Both Gawker and Jezebel are funny as hell. The contributors on both have raised cynicism to a height that has its own peculiar beauty. However, Gawker needs to lighten up on the cracks about old people.

Regarding Leo Strauss, there is something particularly bizarre in the fact that the discussion always turns to politics. Not Politics in the Aristotelean sense, but everyday politics; the transient concerns and resentments of the current moment. Strauss, who thought in terms of the entirety of Western civilization, would likely have found this quite bizarre.

The truth beyond the debate over whether Strauss is the neo-con devil incarnate or simply misunderstood is that Strauss probably would not have cared one way or the other. His primary concern was, in fact, the role of the philosopher in society; both in historical and theoretical terms.

Strauss, like other Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany such as Hannah Arendt, struggled throughout his career with the question of what, exactly, had gone so horribly wrong in Germany and in the West as a whole. He was, in other words, trying to wrap his head around the fact of Auschwitz; and the sense that Auschwitz was not some horrifying aberration from the Western tradition but the fulfillment of something dark and terrible at the heart of that tradition.

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Yesterday I got an e-mail from my cousin Matt saying, "a hundred years ago today Isak Altbaum left Europe...thank God we got out of Poland!"

Attached to Matt's e-mail was a manifest of all the greasy "steerage aliens" (a term worth reviving, if ever one was) packed into the bottom of the ship Amerika as it set sail from Hamburg to New York on June 5, 1907. Isak Altbaum's name is there, and he's listed as a 33 year-old tailor from Russia, of the "Hebrew" race, travelling alone.

Isak was my great-grandfather, the first of my family to make it to America, Steerage Aliens Aboard Amerika, one hundred years ago yesterday: Great-grandpa Isak Altbaum is number 13 (clickable)and I'd always known that he arrived in New York sometime after the abortive 1905 Russian "dress rehearsal for revolution." The story of his flight to America seemed more mythical than historical, and this unexpected hard evidence--the name, the actual date, the papers that accompanied him to America--felt almost indecent, like a challenge to the 20th century Exodus narrative that my family has woven for itself over the decades. This wasn't just one man's trip across an ocean, after all, but my family's own piece of the Great Wave creation event upon which all Jewish-American family folkore is built.

And now old stories would have to be reevaluated in light of historical fact. Even worse, the centennial was being rudely thrust upon me--it was a hundred years to the day since my family left Europe for America. I felt as though I should be taking stock. What would Isak think of the lives of his American descendants, at T+100 years? Is this what he came for? Would he have been horrified by us? He left everything he knew, and everyone he loved, to cross an ocean in the bottom of a ship for the dream and privilege of starting over, alone, impoverished, in a profoundly foreign country. Is the life I'm leading worthy of the Odyssey that made it possible?

These are irritating questions to have thrust upon you in the middle of a work day. So instead, I began to think about the far more frightening questions with which this voyage ultimately confronted Isak himself.

Amerika sailed from Hamburg, an alien metropolis to which Isak would have travelled in order to catch a ship to the bigger, more alien metropolis across the ocean. He made his way to Hamburg from Frampol, the east Poland shtetl that was his home for the previous 33 years. (Frampol, some of you will know, is also the name of the fictional shtetl in which Isaac Bashevis Singer set many of his stories, but yes, there was also a real shtetl called Frampol, near Lublin, and it's where my family was from.) As a kid I often heard the story of what Isak and those who followed him to America were told when they left Frampol to head to America: "Don't ever forget where you come from," said the family they left behind.

That line was always presented to me as if it were thick with poignance and pathos, but in less reverent moments I wondered whether, with all the accumulated Talmudic wisdom that was surely bouncing around Frampol, they mightn't have sent Isak on his way with something a bit less obvious, a bit more zing.

In any case, in the family lore that came down to me, the story of the people of Frampol ends as we, the America-bound young and foolish, head toward the sea to catch our ride to the Promised Land, and the people we left behind send us off with their little nugget of saccharine Old Country wisdom, each of them looking just like Tevye or his Marxist son-in-law Pertchik (the women the same, but in dresses). And that's how Isak's parents and siblings and cousins in Frampol have remained frozen in the narrative of our Jewish-American family for the past 100 years.

But of course life didn't stop in Frampol in 1907. Did Isak use telegrams or mail to remain in touch, to learn how the people he'd loved for all the first half of his life were faring? How did Frampol, and my great great-grandparents, great uncles, etc., make out during World War I, the Russian Revolution, or later? Suddenly yesterday I wanted to know, and Isak must have been desperate to know the same.

But if he did learn anything about the lives of our family who remained in Frampol, find out, it wasn't passed along to the next generations. Just "Don't ever forget where you came from," and then the heavy suggestion that, sometime later, the cataclysm. Surely they were all killed by the Nazis? Is it possible that their story somehow had a happier outcome?

In 2007, a question like this need not remain a mystery: yesterday, after getting my cousin's e-mail, I googled around a bit. This is what I found, excerpted from an out-of-print book titled Eyes on the Sky, by one Wolfgang Schreyer:

13 September 1939, the town of Frampol, with a population of 3000, and without military or industrial targets, nor any Polish Army defenders, was practically annihilated by Luftwaffe bombing practice. In the opinion of Luftwaffe analyst Harry Hohnewald: "Frampol was chosen as an experimental object, because test bombers, flying at low speed, weren't endangered by AA fire. Also, the centrally placed town hall was an ideal orientation point for the crews."

Given the alternatives, I suppose this amounted to quite an outstanding stroke of luck for the Altbaums and other inhabitants of my ancestral shtetl. They never lived to suffer ghettoes, deportations, camps, were never separated from their children or spouses. Instead, they were wiped out on a single fall day because they made for particularly fine target practice for the young heroes of the Luftwaffe.

And yet however much DNA I may share with the people who died on 13 September 1939, and even though some of them loved a person (Isak) who loved a person (my grandfather, Sam, Isak's son) who I loved, I can't, even if I try, feel very much more intimacy with their tragedy than I do with any other catastrophe affecting no one I know. Their parting request to us, the new Americans branch of the family, was that we not forget them. And we do remember them. But as I read about their demise yesterday, I felt no more horrified, infuriated, or depressed than I would reading about any other atrocity. Mostly, I just felt the amoral fascination of a history buff to learn that the Jews of my ancestral shtetl were massacred in so eccentric a fashion.

I do, though, wonder about Isak, who in photographs always seemed to look dour and a bit irked, as though he was peering out at the 21st century ass-clown American luftmenschen he'd spawned, and wasn't pleased, wasn't pleased at all. I can't be sure why his own story of Frampol concluded the day he left in 1907. Was this a conscious decision of his? Is it possible he genuinely never knew any of what unfolded in Frampol's 32 remaining years.

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Irena SandlerA 97-year-old Polish woman was honored today for saving 2500 Jews during the Holocaust. In the ceremony at Parliament, the Polish President Lech Kacyzinski said that Irena Sandler deserved a Nobel Peace Prize. (if for nothing else than being able to keep count of all those she saved, no doubt)

Sandler, who lives in a nursing home was too frail to attend the ceremony, but received major commendation from all.

“I think she's a great lady, very courageous, and I think she's a model for the whole international community,” Israeli Ambassador David Peleg said after the ceremony. “I think that her courage is a very special one.”

In 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial awarded Sendler one of its first medals given to people who saved Jews, the so-called “Righteous Among the Nations.”

She was given the honor in 1983, after Poland's Communist authorities finally agreed to allow her to travel abroad.

Last spring I went to the new museum at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. I’d seen Yad Vashem in its old, pre-2005 incarnation, back when I was in my own old, pre-college incarnation, and I’d felt all the obvious things: angry, scared, sad, extremely Jewish.

Beautiful but Frustrating: The view from Yad VashemBut nothing prepared me for my adult reaction to the new museum. I suppose post-graduate life has made me more goal-oriented: With every new exhibit, I felt more and more like I should be doing something. All those sepia Jews in the photos on the walls, posing so solemnly on German street corners in 1938—they needed help, goddamn it! Someone needed to go rescue them, someone like me, flush with the privileges that life in America can grant a person if she’s lucky.

The museum spills you out onto a promontory overlooking Jerusalem. It’s supposed to inspire a sense of gratitude: At least now we have this. In my worked-up state, though, it felt like being sent to bed early. Filled with proactive, problem-solving, world-saving energy, the last thing I wanted to do was gaze at a pretty view.

Of course, nothing I could do would help anyone whose face appeared on a photo inside the museum. But it’s not as if that was the world’s last genocide. Back then the Darfur situation was just beginning to gain media attention; what about that? The view from the promontory was undeniably gorgeous, but I would have vastly preferred to see it blocked by a big table staffed by a member of the American Jewish World Service who could grab me by the shoulders and show me how to help.

Yes, It's a Movie About A Cute White Guy: Hugh Dancy in Beyond the GatesThe movie Beyond the Gates covers another post-Holocaust genocide: the violence that overtook Rwandan in 1994. The clip below appeared in my inbox recently with a polite request to mention it on the site. It involves a UN soldier talking about how proud he is that his Belgian grandparents housed Jews during the Holocaust. If you’ve read Phillip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families, then you know the UN’s peacekeeping force didn’t live up to such noble standards.

I haven’t seen the movie, but the response on IMDB suggests that it’ll leave you with that same frustrating urge to do something—anything—to stop a humanitarian crisis that’s already over. That’s why the American Jewish World Service link is above—and why I’ll repeat it here for good measure.

Florida resident Peter Sachs is "seeking 4,300 posters with an estimated worth between $10 million and $50 million, which are in the possession of Berlin's German Historical Museum."

Sachs, whose family fled Germany when he was just a year old, is hoping to reclaim part of his family's extensive art collection of 12,500 posters. The mission was started by his father, Hans, after WWII.

The museum maintains that since Sachs' father, Hans Sachs, received compensation of 225,000 German Marks (approximately $50,000) from the West German government in 1961, the posters should remain in its collection.

Sachs' main argument is that the compensation was paid when it was assumed the collection was destroyed in the war, and that once his father found out that part of it had survived, he started trying to get access to it in the East German museum where it had ended up.

Peter Sachs will testify before a German panel today.

It's good to be reminded that, despite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's best efforts, not everyone in the Muslim world buys the line that open mindedness about the existence of the Holocaust is the mark of a freethinker and an anti-imperialist.

The organization Jewish Voice for Peace sends us links to two recently published rants against Ahmadinejad's Holocaust revisionism. At MrZine, Mahmoud al-Safadi, a PFLP member recently released from an Israeli prison, says in an open letter to the Iranian president,

Like you and millions of people in the world -- among whom, alas, are innumerable Palestinians and Arabs -- I was also convinced that the Jews exaggerated and lied about the Holocaust.

My long imprisonment [in Israel] provided me with the occasion to read books and articles that our ideology and social norms made inaccessible to us outside the prison. The more I learned, the more I realized that the Holocaust was indeed a historical fact and the more I became aware of the monumental dimension of the crime committed by Nazi Germany against the Jews, other social and national groups, and humanity in general.

Whatever the number of victims -- Jewish and non-Jewish -- the crime is monumental. Any attempt to deny it deprives the denier of his own humanity and sends him immediately to the side of torturers. Whoever denies the fact that this human disaster really took place should not be astonished that others deny the sufferings and persecutions inflicted on his own people by tyrannical leaders or foreign occupiers.

And in an article titled “True Muslims Never Deny the European Holocaust,” Ibrahim Ramey of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation writes,

[The] world now witnesses yet another wave of historical revisionism and Holocaust denial, this time emerging not from European Anti-Semites, but from none other than the President of Iran. Indeed, this head of state has taken the unprecedented act of hosting an international conference of anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, and even white racists like former Klan leader David Duke, to gather in Tehran to deny the magnitude, if not the very existence, of this barbaric act.

As a Muslim of African decent in the United States, whose ancestors were victimized by the enormous crime of slavery, I object. And I believe that all Muslims, like other human beings who value compassion and truth, must vigorously object to this gathering as well.

Now if we can just get a few heads-of-state as ruffled as Ramey and al-Safadi, we'll be getting somewhere.

The Amsterdam apartment where Anne Frank began her diary before going into hiding from the Nazis has been restored to the style of the 1930s to create a refuge for persecuted writers….Using photographs from the family archive and a letter from Anne Frank describing the apartment, a team of experts worked for months to remove modern fixtures and decorate and furnish the residence in the same style it was left in by the family. A carpenter reconstructed the writing table at which the 13-year-old probably started her diary in June 1942, weeks before disappearing into the secret annex of a canal-side warehouse to hide during German occupation of the Netherlands…. The first resident of the apartment at Merwedeplein in southern Amsterdam is Algerian novelist and poet el-Mahdi Acherchour, 32, who is working on a new novel. --Reuters, October 28, 2005