(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . A Jew in Hiding: Four Decades Later, Terrified Again [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-14 A JEW IN HIDING: FOUR DECADES LATER, TERRIFIED AGAIN I don’t remember a time when I was unaware of the Holocaust. My father’s obvious injuries prompted questions that my parents answered frankly, explaining why he’d volunteered to serve in World War II, the ‘great and just’ war that had ended only two years before I was born. All four of my grandparents had emigrated from Russia as young adults. I understood that many members of their family--my family—had been swept up and brutally murdered in the Old Country simply because they were Jewish. No book in our home was off limits to me, although I’m not sure my parents realized which ones I was reading: The Diary of Anne Frank; stories of the Warsaw Ghetto; dramatic accounts of brave Jewish and Communist partisans and resistance fighters, often including Nazi photos of their blood-soaked corpses; memoirs and photographs of concentration camp inmates and their American liberators. The monsters in my bedroom closed, under my bed, and in my nightmares were always Nazi generals. Bent over my portable phonograph and frozen with fear and fascination, I listened over and over again to Basil Rathbone’s intense narration of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s The Murder of Lidice, which described in horrifying detail how the Nazis had avenged the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by burning an entire Czech town, slaughtering its men and boys, and transporting its women into slavery. I was haunted by the description of a German soldier’s murder of a newborn Jewish infant by slamming its head against a wall and then shooting its mother. The epic poem ended with an urgent plea to Americans to stop fascism before it took root in our own country. As a young child, I took Millay’s warning to heart. My immersion in the Holocaust left me with fierce, unspoken questions about myself: Desperate to escape notice, would I have complied with the authorities’ orders and gone passively to my death with millions of others? Would I have resisted, carried messages, fought in the ghetto or forest, stayed silent during torture? Would I have had the strength and cunning to survive in the camps—or given up hope and walked into the electrified fence? I knew that any attempt to resolve these questions was futile; still, I spent my childhood fixated on them. What frightened me most about being a Jew was that once the label was affixed to you at birth, you could do nothing to change it. To the Nazis and their kind, it made no difference whether you were thoroughly assimilated, an unbeliever, a decorated war veteran, or a convert to another religion. If even one of your grandparents (let alone my four) was Jewish, you were a Jew and worthy of contempt and extermination. My grandparents unquestionably identified themselves as Jewish. They kept kosher homes, celebrated the holidays, and spoke primarily Yiddish. But none of them practiced the religion. My mother’s parents dressed up and went to synagogue, to see and be seen, only on the High Holy Days—the equivalent of Catholics attending church once a year on Christmas Eve. My father’s parents were socialists who never went to shul. Committed atheists, my parents agreed with Marx that religion was “the opiate of the masses.” I have no memory of our family’s ever entering a synagogue except for my cousin’s bar mitzvah. When my paternal grandfather died and I asked if we would be sitting shiva for him, my father replied, “Why? He didn’t believe in that crap.” Still, my parents considered themselves to be Jews. I infuriated them by arguing that Judaism was a religion, not an inherited identity. If you didn’t believe in or practice the religion, it was hypocritical for you to call yourself a Jew, just because you ate some food, sang some songs, valued education, and spoke a little Yiddish. When people asked about our family background, I asserted, we should say we were Russian—the same way that other people said they were Swedish or Japanese instead of responding that they were Buddhists or Lutherans. Contending that all Jews were members of a separate ethnic group was asking for trouble. Why place yourself and your family in danger for a religion that you’d rejected? Adopting my husband’s last name made living incognito possible. Given the environment in which we lived and worked, that seemed like the safest choice: despite its reputation for drinking and debauchery, New Orleans was a parochial city dominated by its tight-knit Catholic majority. There were few liberals—and no discernible Jews—in the offshore oil industry in which my husband worked. Determined to spare our daughters the terrors that had haunted my childhood, I explained that, while Grandma and Grandpa were Jewish, we were not. We attended no religious services of any kind, celebrated Christmas with enthusiasm, answered our children’s questions as equitably as we could, and told them they were free to make up their own minds about what they believed. Still, I handed down the cultural components that were precious to me: serenading them with Yiddish songs and lullabies, cooking them matzoh brie on winter mornings, giving them Chanukkah gelt in their Christmas stockings, reading them tales from the Old Testament, and making sure they knew and appreciated their family history. My husband had always loved to sail—racing on the open water gave him a chance to clear his head and challenge himself as part of a team. Because he couldn’t afford to maintain a boat of his own, he found opportunities to race with members of the area’s affluent sailing community, finally settling into the crew of a magnificent Frers ketch. When its owner was crowned King of one of the city’s prestigious Mardi Gras krewes, he surprised us with an invitation to the krewe’s exclusive ball. He also invited us to the private early morning breakfast that followed the ball’s remarkably formalized revelry. In the early morning after the ball, we were ushered to our seats at the New Orleans Country Club. I was shocked to see a sign on each table, reminding members that people of color were barred from entering the club—and that any member bringing a Jewish guest was required to notify management immediately, so that a club officer could accompany the guest at all times. At one point during the breakfast, the table went oddly silent as the King’s wife asked me what my maiden name had been and why I seemed hesitant to reveal it. Stammering something about all the crazily complicated Russian names in the family, I reeled off the three that were least recognizably Jewish: Kovalier, Kushelevich—and Orlofsky, “like the prince.” I sat uneasily through the rest of the meal, half expecting the Gestapo to burst through the door and drag me out of the club. Breakfast with the krewe’s royal court revealed the shameful answer to one of my lifelong questions: Under interrogation, I hadn’t been courageous. Crouched fearfully in a closet constructed of childhood terrors and protective sophistries, I had been complicit in the betrayal of my ancestors and the community of my birth. It was long past time for me to start taking tentative steps into the light. That day, I determined, would be my last as a Jew in hiding. Now, four decades later, I am terrified again. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/14/2199469/-A-Jew-in-Hiding-Four-Decades-Later-Terrified-Again?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/