When I lived in the States, it was an extremely heavy day for me. I think that's because I grew up in an area without many Jews, and to be honest, without ANY Jews who related to Judaism in a way that I did or a way that felt familiar to me. So I felt isolated as Jew all the time in my hometown. As I've written about many times before, the holocaust was a really huge part of my Jewish identity, maybe the primary part. I always had the cognizance that terrible things happened to Jews, but not a lot (read: any) of other Jewish experience to contrast with it. So on Holocaust Remembrance Day, I basically felt like I was carrying around this huge grief-anvil with no place to put it and no one else to share it with. No one even understood I was carrying anything at all, it was like they thought I was stooped over for no reason at all.
In Israel, of course, it's the opposite in every way. In the grief way, it's the opposite, because everybody shares it, in one way or another. Some Israelis are very personally connected to the holocaust, because they are survivors or children or grandchildren of survivors. Or nieces/nephews/neighbors/friends. Others are more distant but connected culturally, through education.
But nobody doesn't understand. There's a siren at 10 am (10 minutes from now, as I'm typing.) In fact, as I type, I'm sitting in the lobby of the college where I do some English tutoring on Mondays, and all of the students are filing out onto the lawn to go to a short memorial ceremony. They're dressed in black and white, the ones who are singing or participating in some way, and everybody's looking at me kind of oddly for sitting on my laptop, probably because they know I'm a new immigrant and suspect I have no idea what's going on, which was true until one of my students filled me in. I'll go outside for the siren shortly.
Anyway, when the siren sounds, everybody stops what they're doing and observes the silence, and the cars on the road stop and drivers get out, and it's the farthest thing from being one Jew in a New Hampshire high school where nobody even knows or cares but you. The farthest!
But things are also different in Israel because while I'm surrounded by people who understand the grief, I'm also in Israel, a country which was literally a daydream during the Holocaust. A country that was sung about, that we had once and lost, like Atlantis. It was a memory and a longing, and now I'm sitting in it. Can you imagine sitting in Atlantis? We drudged it up from the ocean and rebuilt it and I'm sitting in it, on my laptop. It was surreal coming into Jerusalem this morning for work. Jerusalem! For work! Like it's nothing, like it's a normal commute!
Siren time!
Anyway.
Last night, I went to an event where a survivor spoke, they have them all over the place here. Kurt, our survivor, was taken on the kindertransport from then Czechoslovakia to England when he was six. He described how, at the time, he thought it was an amazing adventure because he'd never been on a train, or out of the country, and how when he got to England he thought the tea was so bitter, and he added as much sugar as he could and it didn't get any sweeter. And he told us about the Methodists who took him in, and their farm and the farm animals.
He also read us the last letter his mother had written before she was transferred from Theresienstadt and... well, it's a bit of a mystery what exactly happened to her from there, but she did not survive the war. After the war, he had no remaining family in Europe, so he and his cousin who was with him on the farm came to Israel and joined the army and became Israeli and he's never looked back. "I've been to 38 countries," he said. "And I can tell you for sure that this one is home. This is where we're supposed to be. It's the safest place, and the best place for us, and I hope you put down deep roots and make families here."
And he also said that he doesn't consider himself a "survivor," but rather a "victor." "We won," he said. "I survived the nazis terrible scheme. I did not just survive, I won. I have two children and four grand children and had a long life with two careers and travel... I won."
I guess, as I'm writing it, that that's how I feel in Israel vs. America. In America on memorial day, I felt like the Jews survived. In Israel, I feel like we won.
What got me thinking about all of this actually was a song that my counselor Roland, from Birthright, posted on his wall today. It's an old Yiddish song, I've found out, called "Dona Dona." It seems like most Ashkenazi Jews know this song, and maybe even most people of my parents' generation, but I'd never heard it before.
The yiddish lyrics are like this:
Oyfn furl ligt dos kelbl
Ligt gebundn mit a shtrik
Hoykh in himl flit dos shvelbl
Freydt zikh, dreyt zikh hin un krik.
Chorus
Lakht der vint in korn
Lakh un lakht un lakht
Lakht er op a tog a gantsn
mit a halber nakht.
Hey Dona, dona, dona...
Shrayt dos kelbl, zogt der poyer
"Ver zhe heyst dikh zayn a kalb?
Volst gekert tsu zayn a foygl
Volst gekert tsu zayn a shvalb?"
Lakht der vint in korn.....................
Bidne kelber tut men bindn
Un men shlept zey un men shekht
ver s'hot fligl, flit aroyf tzu
iz bay keynem nit keyn knekht
Lakht der vint in korn.......
Now, I can't understand the Yiddish. So I found two translations.
The first one is the rhyming song-y one, which was popularized by Joan Baez, I guess. Here's her version:
And here are those rhyme-y words:
On a wagon bound for market
There's a calf with a mournful eye
High above him there's a swallow
Winging swiftly through the sky
How the winds are laughing
They laugh with all the their might
Laugh and laugh the whole day through
And half the summer's night
Donna Donna Donna Donna
"Stop complaining", said the farmer
Who told you a calf to be
Why don't you have wings to fly with
Like the swallow so proud and free
How the winds are laughing...
Calves are easily bound and slaughtered
Never knowing the reason why
But whoever treasures freedom
Like the swallow has learned to fly
How the winds are laughing...
BUT HERE are the lyrics translated literally, with no mind to rhyme or poetry, purely to capture the literal meaning of the yiddish:
High in the sky flies a swallow, joyfully circling back and forth.
The wind laughs in the cornfield, laughs and laughs and laughs,
It laughs for a whole day, and half of the night.
Dona dona...
The little calf cried, and the farmer said, "Whoever told you to be a calf?
You could have been a bird, you could have been a swallow..."
The wind laughs in the cornfield, laughs and laughs and laughs,
It laughs for a whole day, and half of the night.
Dona dona...
Poor calves - one binds them, carries them off and slaughters them.
Whoever has wings flies high up, and is a slave to no-one.
The wind laughs in the cornfield, laughs and laughs and laughs,
It laughs for a whole day, and half of the night.
Dona dona...
I found this information on Mudcat, where there's a really interesting debate about what the song means.
A lot of people on the thread are upset because they suppose the song is meant to be comforting, and the farmer is being a jerk by implying that the calf could have chosen to be a swallow, and that's not a thing to say to the poor calf. It's kind of the idea of victim-blaming, implying that someone was in a bad situation because of choices they made instead of choices someone else made for or on them, or just lousy circumstances. The whole "Well, were you wearing a shirt skirt? Were you walking alone at night?" line of questioning.
But I think reading the literal translation changes that idea a bit, and is more reflective of how I see Judaism in general.
The "rhyme-y" version has a lot of moralizing statements, like "treasures freedom" and "learned to fly," which do imply that there are calf-people, who don't treasure freedom and don't learn to fly, and bird-people, who do treasure freedom and do learn to fly. And that calves can choose to be calves, and people can choose to be calves and be slaughtered like them - or not.
The idea that people can choose is obvious in the way early Israelis interacted with holocaust survivors. To people born in pre-state Israel, who were already the "New Jew," all embodied and strong and hands-on, there was a lot of judgement (not ubiquitous, but too-common) about survivors, that they had stayed too long in Europe, that they had missed opportunities to escape or fight back. Sometimes they were referred to as "sheep," which is the same thing as a calf for this conversation. The fact that some people DID fight back, or DID escape, only seemed to underscore something about the ones that did not. I think this narrative comes mostly from fear, from the need to believe that fate is always under our control, that "I would have escaped, because I would have known better," because it's too much for the human psyche to accept a situation that is out of one's hands completely. Plenty of people fought back and lost, plenty of people tried to escape and failed, many brave and brilliant people were murdered.
But if you look at the literal translation, there's no talk of "treasuring freedom" or "learning to fly." There are only factual observations. Calves are born calves, and no one told them to be, they didn't choose, they just were. And people bind and slaughter them. And birds have wings, fly, and are slaves to no-one. They also didn't choose or learn to be that way, but it's how they are. I don't think it's a song that's meant to comfort, it's a song that's making a statement.
Which is how I think Judaism is in general: descriptive and not prescriptive. This is something most Jews disagree with me about. But I see Judaism as describing the world as accurately as it can, and helping people see it clearly and accurately, rather than describing a world that should be and how one should be.
This same debate appears in the Exodus story, in Passover we just finished. It's something that my Dad emphasized to me a lot when I grew up. That Moses was raised free, raised a prince in fact, and so was able to see clearly the inhumane treatment of the Hebrews and to envision an alternative fate for them. This is something the Hebrews couldn't do, they could not lead themselves out of the situation of their birth, they needed to be led by someone forged in a different way. (And in fact, there's lots written about how they never did leave slavery, they were slaves in their hearts and minds until they died in the desert. But that's another blog entry or ten.)
So anyway, looking at the literal translation, I think what we have is an idea that there are situations in which circumstances are out of your control. And that's all the more reason why, when they are in your control, you choose the path of freedom, of being slave to no-one. Again, it's not that you can always choose - but when you can, choose freedom.
This sounds obvious, but with would-be dictators popping up elected left and right around the world, I don't think it's so obvious at all. I think in some ways we're letting the rope be fastened to us just this minute. But I think we're still at a point of choice and we need to choose.
And even on a micro level, we so often choose to be or are unconsciously the calf, tied to habits, old thought patterns, locations, occupations, or people which make us unhappy or even do us harm.
I know that this factored into my choice to become Israeli, to put my weight behind the project of the Jewish State. I know people who would vehemently deny the freedom or morality of that move, but from the perspective of this Jew, being Israeli means choosing freedom and it means choosing for the next generation to be swallows. For generations of jews to be born and raised in Israel, to naturally, from birth, have wings and are slaves to no-one.
It took Israelis to show me what I could never see as a Diaspora Jew, and there were times that process felt like a farmer asking who told me to be a calf for slaughter, when I could have been a swallow. Fortunately, for me, there was choice involved and there is still, and I made the change I could and try to make choices as much as I can. Where we must be calves we must, but those moments are fewer than we tell ourselves.
I guess that is the sensation to me, of listening to this song and being in Israel on Yom HaShoah. Israelis are swallows, slaves to no-one.
