During December of 1977, I found myself intensely nostalgic for the remembered rituals and celebrations of the American Christmases I had grown up with on the suburban mesa of my Pasadena childhood. Even as an assimilated Jew, I had excitedly awaited Santa’s arrival on Christmas eve, sung carols in school and around the neighborhood, and decorated our tree with bulbs and tinsel. This was my fourth Christmas away from home. The previous three had been spent with the Peace Corps in the Central African Republic; this one I passed by myself in the studio apartment of a gritty working-class suburb of Paris. The stream-of-consciousness conjuration of my idealized childhood eventually got refined into a chapter of my family memoir, part of which was excerpted in last month’s newsletter. I had originally titled the chapter “Memories and Blood” but eventually swapped it for the less emotionally charged “Xmas.” There was another change I made decades later. I was aware by this time that there was a certain dissonance in the fact that all my memories and sentiments around winter solstice derived from Christianity, a religion and tradition I had no interest in claiming as my own. So, in the final sentence, I wrote, “We were talking about Christmas, and we were also talking about Auschwitz …” I wanted to insert the knife blade of the Holocaust reference because if that wasn’t a touchstone of my atavistic Jewish identity, what was? And yet I felt as though I had written the sentence in bad faith. It nagged at me. And then, as I wrote about the African American massacres – the Red Summer of 1919, Tulsa in 1921, and now the Rosewood centenary – I thought about my own connection – or lack thereof – to the history of Jewish disasters.
This was the thing: we weren’t talking about Auschwitz. I was born five years after the liberation of the concentration camps. My parents – that whole generation of Jews -- had learned about the systematic massacre of millions of Jews either first-hand through direct participation in the war, or through the loss of family members, or through the chilling, unbelievable news accounts as the monstrous scale of the disaster hove into view. Six million Jews. It was a number beyond imagining.
I never had to imagine it on my Pasadena mesa. The Philipsons no longer had Old World family roots, knew of no lost relatives or Holocaust survivors. We belonged to no synagogue, engaged in no intra-ethnic discussion, or lament, or reckoning with the enormity of a coordinated massacre that had been visited upon a people with whom we shared a label. I don’t remember my parents mentioning the Holocaust. They certainly wouldn’t have mentioned it by that name because “Holocaust” didn’t come into widespread use amongst English speakers until the 1978 TV film of the same name. I was 28 then, well beyond my formative years. Eight years earlier, I had lived and worked on an Israeli kibbutz for five months. I was mildly shocked when, riding a bus in Jerusalem, I saw the blue numbers tattooed on a woman’s arm. The kibbutzniks I knew talked at length about the heroic war for Israel’s survival in 1948, not about the Holocaust. There was a Hebrew term for it, shoah, but I only learned about that word through Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary of the same name.
I don’t know when or how I learned about the Holocaust. There was no bolt of horrific lightning. It leaked into my consciousness somehow. By the time Schindler’s List seared Spielberg’s Jewish agony onto the American consciousness in 1993 (the power of movies!), there were no surprises for me. I had picked it up from other sources: a visit to Israel’s Yad Vashem, Elie Wiesel’s harrowing memoir of Auschwitz; Alain Resnais’ sober documentary "Night and Fog," bits and pieces of oral history I had gathered from friends and acquaintances who did have a personal connection.
The memorialization of the Holocaust, both in America and Europe, continues apace (I personally recommend the Jewish Museum in Berlin) but has added little to my highly mediated and personally distant relation to this thing. I am a Jew, and I shed Jewish tears. But I also shed tears upon viewing Athol Fugard’s Master Harold and the Boys and the 1999 movie Boys Don’t Cry.
As for the Holocaust, when I recently tried to watch the 2020 Polish film, The Champion of Auschwitz, it was all beautifully staged and all too familiar: the haggard hopelessness of the stripped prison overalls, the cockscomb arrogance of the Nazi uniforms, the casual death and violence visited upon the inmates, the gray utilitarian buildings and “Arbeit Macht Frei.” I turned the film off after 20 minutes. I’d had enough.
- Robert Philipson
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