Perhaps its most famous, most quoted sentence - “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart” - has inspired many people considering how things ended for Anne, we find it astounding that she’s still able to believe in people’s essential goodness. Horn examines the enormous success of “The Diary of a Young Girl,” which has been translated into 70 languages and has sold over 30 million copies worldwide. Let us take Anne Frank’s diary, for example. Horn thinks it’s about time to say it, and this is why her book is at the same time so necessary and so disquieting. The 12 essays in her brilliant book explore how the different ways we commemorate Jewish tragedy, how we write about the Holocaust, how the media presents antisemitic events, how we establish museums to honor Jewish heritage, how we read literature with Jewish protagonists and even how we praise the “righteous among the nations” (those who saved Jews during the war), are all distractions from the main issue, which is the very concrete, specific death of Jews.Įven though each chapter reveals a different blind spot in our collective memory - ranging from Horn’s visit to the Museum of Jewish Heritage in downtown Manhattan to her travel to the Jewish sites in Harbin, China - all the essays in the book show that when we learn to remember certain things in certain ways, we set the limits of what can be said, and what cannot be said, even as we might have the urge to say it.
Horn’s main insight is that much of the way we’ve developed to remember and narrate Jewish history is, at best, self-deception and, at worst, rubbish. I felt as if I’d reached the limits of my ability to express myself. I tried to understand why, but I - a writer, after all - couldn’t seem to find a way to describe my discomfort.
But as I thought more about her words, they became more disturbing. The elderly woman had expressed - confessed, perhaps - the enormous void left by the deportation and annihilation of Motal’s Jewish population. He replied: “She said that ever since the Jews left this place, the place is dead.”
“What did she say?” I asked Andrei, the translator who accompanied me. Just before we parted, the oldest in the group, a 93-year-old woman, approached me and, in a trembling voice, fighting back tears, said something softly in Belarusian. In the town of Motal, I spoke with a small group of locals, who recalled the Jewish neighbor who’d been a good friend of their parents, or that great klezmer band that had played at their uncle’s wedding, or the amazing raspberry torte cake you could buy at the Jewish bakery. In 2014, I traveled to Belarus to learn more about pre-World War II Jewish culture around Minsk. PEOPLE LOVE DEAD JEWS Reports From a Haunted Present By Dara Horn
0 kommentar(er)
