“To be a Jew in the twentieth century

Is to be a offered a gift.”

 

— Muriel Rukeyser, “Letter to the Front”.

 

To be a Jew when I was small and soft and curled as a mussel,

was torment.  Rented to pious rapists for easter or christmas, 

tied to a bed for hours, my tongue thick in my mouth, my body 

torn and stained, their rage running into me viscous like semen.  

 

It was the weight of history.  My grandmother telling me of 

running from the Nazis, our class trips to the concentration camps, 

the ruins still squatting on our soil, unforgettable chimney stacks 

aimed at the sky.  These told me what I already knew: we are 

 

weak and our lives are full of peril. It was secrets and shame.  

When I was six, my mother said, “We’re Jewish.  Don’t tell anyone.”  

And I didn’t.  Our government expediently hated our kind, used 

us as scapegoats to quash dissent, then denied us schooling or 

 

jobs, capriciously took away our papers and put us on one-way 

trains out.  It was vulnerability: the pious and fearful murdered 

us in pogroms.  The last one the year my mother was born, in mid-

twentieth century.  Some of us who stayed silent, camouflaged, 

 

kept our heads down — went unnoticed, unexpelled, stayed alive.  

But we survived ashamed, curled up, and small.  And I thought 

that’s what being a Jew meant; the best we could hope for was 

to be passed over.  I failed to notice the others, who, enraged, 

 

dangerously light, shorn of family and security, had decided to 

change the story.  To stop, or erase, the pogroms, the smoke 

stacks, the desk ghettoes, university expulsions, firings, the long-

toothed centuries of repression and humiliation, shame and 

 

helplessness eating us from the inside like apple worms, the lack 

of safe refuge, the world turning us away from its doors when we 

knocked, desperate, hands shaking, death breathing down our necks.  

As our world does, time and again, when the desperate, the death-

 

marked, come knocking.  So the dangerous ones said Never Again, and 

it sounded like a promise.  They took a country — first one half, 

then the other — so we could be safe.  They took lives, first from 

fighters on both sides, then from people on their way to work, 

 

families eating dinner, schoolchildren.  So we could be safe. They 

got more and better weapons.  They used them sloppily. When 

their rocket hit a school, killed the students, international law

said it wasn’t a war crime, just bad aim.  When they ghettoised 

 

a nation, allowed corporations to work the hungry in sweatshops, 

destroyed homes, built a wall, installed checkpoints at exits, 

randomly killed without sanction -- they said, we said, they were 

trying to stay safe; those exiles were dangerous, terrorist.  

 

Why does that sound like that other story, the one we’d already 

lived through, the one they tried to rub out like a stain?  Is this, 

always, how bullies are made: the fearful, desperate, shamed, 

snatch power and reconcile their souls to evil, first small, then 

 

large-scale, then genocidal?  How can we find safety without 

stealing it from others, without turning into what we despise?  To 

be a Jew in the twenty-first century is to have questions, heartache, 

guilt, defensiveness, a clenched jaw.  Maybe that is our gift.