On Joan Rivers and Auschwitz

At 80, Joan Rivers is an inspiration to a lot of women, as well as men: she is energetic far beyond her age.  She is active writing, performing on stage, screen and on television. According to her website she also lectures, designs jewelry and creates cosmetics. Many people younger than her do not accomplish a fraction of what she does. And, she can be hilarious even if you do not like her coarse humor and vulgarity.

 On Friday, October 11, my husband and I saw her performing in Westbury Music Hall in Long Island. We actually went to hear one of our favorite singers and record producers Steve Tyrell, whom we follow when he appears in New York. That night he opened the Joan Rivers act.

As was evident from the applause Joan received when she appeared on stage, most of the audience came to see her, not necessarily the elegant Steve Tyrell.

Indeed, the crowd loved and adored her. They admired her outrageous outfit, and her jokes. No one could dispute that she was peppy and animated, enthusiastic and lively, and funny. She made fun of herself and her relationship with her beloved daughter, of every ethnic group, including her own, and she didn’t apologize for any of that. If you didn’t like it, you were too “stupid.” Everyone laughed, even me, for I am a tough audience when it comes to standup comedians.

She was gracious to some members of the audience, especially a gay couple that got engaged on stage, which was of course, part of her “shtick,” though, apparently the man whose hand was asked in marriage by his partner was surprised.

Watching Joan, I admired her energy and her wit, and allowed myself to enjoy a fellow Jew, and female, though, as you might have guessed, I do not appreciate her crudeness. Despite it all I thought that at eighty she was indeed inspirational.

Then she mad a joke about Auschwitz. To say that it was tasteless is an understatement. As a Jew, whose grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and other relatives perished in the Holocaust, I was utterly insulted by her. As every Jew in the audience should have been. I was even more insulted when I looked around me and saw the crowd laughing. There are subjects no one should joke about. Taboos. The Holocaust and other genocides are among them.

Shame of you Joan.

      Perhaps she never visited Auschwitz and its neighboring death camp, Birkenau. Or perhaps she did, but it might not have affected her the way it affected me. As I have written before, and don’t mind repeating, nothing I have studied, read, seen, not Yad Vashem, not even my previous visit to Terezienstadt, prepared me for Birkenau and Auschwitz—for their enormity and for the efficiency with which the Nazis ran their death-oiled industry.

What shocked me the most was that not even the minutest detail was left to chance: not the place where the trains would first stop, where victims would initially be "selected," where they first undressed, where they were first disinfected and shaved, their hair used by the Nazis to manufacture fabric; not where they were disinfected for the second time, where their clothing was first fumigated, where their clothing was fumigated for the second time, where their clothing and belongings were collected, sorted and stored, where they would die by Zyclon B poisoning gas, where their corpses would be burned.

It took merely 25 minutes from the time the human cargo arrived at Birkenau for those "selected" to become ash. Many of those who survived that selection were sent to the hell of Auschwitz. And Auschwitz and Birkenau were only two camps where Jews were slaughtered while the world kept silent.

Shame on you, Joan Rivers.

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On Islan Nettles

It’s summer and writing doesn’t come easy.  First there was my trip to Israel in June, the beach in July, and a cruise on the Danube this month, visiting Serbia, where one can still see the remnants of NATO’s bombing in the 1999 Kosovo war, Croatia, Hungary and Austria.

From The Austrian Alps I meant to write about my meeting by chance with Sonja, a lovely teacher who I came across in the tiny town of Vordernberg, where we ate pizza in a small Turkish restaurant, and where Sonja talked to me about multi-culturalism in her beloved country.  But I procrastinated, then turned too busy to write anything as I was completely consumed with reviewing the Hebrew translation on my memoir, which I hope I can publish in Israel soon enough.

I could write about the carnage in Syria and the options the US and its allies have in punishing President Assad for his systematic murder of men, women and children, possibly with chemical weapons. But I decided to leave this subject for my Middle East class, which I will begin teaching this coming Thursday.

Then I saw the news today about the vigil in Harlem, New York, for Islan Nettles, the twenty-one year old transgender woman who died Thursday after being removed from her life support five days after she had been brutally attacked by a man who got furious after he realized that his female friend was actually born a male.

The attack on Islan was the latest in a series of disturbing hate crimes against members of the LGBT community in the city, which increased dramatically this year.

It is perhaps ironic that Islan’s vigil is taking place on the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous speech on freedom and equality, and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Ironic but not terribly surprising, given the progress the gay community has made in the US and in other countries with respect to same sex marriage, progress that must threaten those reactionaries who irrationally fear homosexuality and same sex marriage.

Like what I think is a response to the embracing of same sex marriage, history witnessed the surge of illiberal reactions to the progress minority groups had made in different parts of the world. It happened in Europe with the surge of anti Semitism after the emancipation of Jews in France and Germany in the eighteenth century, and England in the nineteenth century, when European Christians felt threatened by the granting of equal rights to Jews, like racists reacted to the emancipation of slaves in nineteenth century America, and even to the Civil Rights Movement of the twentieth century, culminating in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Let the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Movement and the senseless death of Islan Nettles be a reminder of what we as a civilization deserve: freedom to grow in our own skin, gender, religion, nationality and sexual orientation.

  

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News About Women

Last week I was captivated by news about women, some encouraging other disturbing.

On Friday, Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl activist who had been shot in October by Taliban gunmen and miraculously survived, celebrated her sixteenth birthday at the UN.  Secretary General Ban Ki-moon designated July 12 as Malala Day; a day intended to represent the goal of education for all children. In an inspiring speech that was immediately scorned by many Pakistanis, Malala declared her day to be “the day of every woman, every boy and every girl who have raised their voice for their rights.” 

Viewing her speech on television I hoped that I was watching a future world leader, who would continuously encourage young women and men to speak out and demand their rights and liberties in spite of the danger they’d face doing so in the countries they live.

The other good news of the week appeared in Nicholas Kristoff’s New York Times’ Op-Ed column on Sunday, where he informed his readers about the Danja Fistula Center, which opened last year, with the help of the Worldwide Fistula Fund. The center was built to help young girls in Africa who suffer from the physically and socially debilitating condition known as obstetric fistula, resulting from injury during childbirth. Some of these girls who suffer from the disease were married off at 12 or 13 years of age, giving birth when their young bodies were not prepared for pregnancy. Fortunately for these girls, there is now a hospital in Danja, Niger, that cures them.

The bad news came from Cairo, where women demonstrators, who took to the streets before and after the ouster of Egypt’s Islamist President Mohamed Morsi on July 3rd, have been sexually assaulted, some of them raped. Reportedly, close to 200 women have been attacked in those demontrations. Yet the military, the police, and the transitional government there have remained silent.

Some of these women were violated twice. After they had been assaulted the first time, when following men who appeared to be their rescuers, instead of leading the women to safety as the men insinuated, the men guided them to isolated areas, then sexually assaulted them.

The commonality between Malala’s attack – one among many attacks of Pakistani female activists, the practice in Africa and other Global South countries of marrying off young girls and the sexual assaults of Egyptian women, is the acceptance of such practices in societies that are male-dominated politically, culturally and religiously.

The Danja Fistula Center was built by physicians and ordinary people who care about the plight of others. It was a small but encouraging step in a patriarchal society, the likes of which exist in a world where conflict and war, abuse of power and inequalities - among other calamities - form an inescapable reality.

Malal’s words were heard worldwide. Will her brave voice continue to confront that reality? Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment-Assault is an organization that intervened in the assaults on women in Tahrir Square, Cairo. Will their actions get the attention of those in power? Could they direct the world’s attention on women in India and elsewhere, where they suffer the same misfortune?

Hopefully, with these expressions we are witnessing the courage that allows women to challenge disparities that unfortunately still exist today.

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The Yellow Agricultural Gate

The sun just set. It is Thursday. I am sitting in one of the most enchanting places I have been to, at Rotman’s veranda restaurant in the village of Lotem in lower Galilee.  When my husband and I arrived in the village on Wednesday, we were waiting for its electric yellow gate to open, as we did today.  On both days we drove in easily; no one was at the gate to ask us questions. This was entirely different from what we saw a few days earlier at the agricultural yellow gates of two adjacent West Bank villages that could be any of several under Israeli control. There, residents waited for the Israeli military to open the gates, so they could pass with their goods through the Israeli check point and security separation barrier system. Sometimes they wait for hours for the gates to open and then they wait some more to pass through the gates if they are allowed.

The securty barrier system, made up of a separation wall and roads fenced on both sides with wires, was built by Israel to stop Palestinian suicide bombers from infiltrating the country. There is disagreement whether it is the separation system that sharply reduced the number of suicide attacks, or whether it was the realization by the Palestinians that such attacks were counterproductive.  Most likely it’s both.

Fortunately for innocent Palestinians who must pass through Israeli checkpoints – even within the West Bank -  there is Machsomwatch, with whom we visited parts of the West Bank to witness what occurs in some of the checkpoints.  Admired by segments of the Israeli society and scorned by others, the organization describes itself as a movement of Israeli peace activists, women mostly, who oppose the Israeli occupation and the denial of Palestinians' rights to move freely in their land. Through its activities it hopes to bring to an end the Israeli occupation, which causes damage to the Israeli and Palestinian societies alike. The organization also hosts Palestinian families for a beach day in Israel; many of the visitors see a sea for the first time.

The reasons for the reduced number of suicide attacks in Israeli notwithstanding, the atmosphere Wednesday night on the veranda restaurant in Lotem was entirely different from the mood we saw in the West Bank, where Arabs and Israelis live a separate lives. At Rotman’s, Israeli Arabs and Jews were dining side by side, in what seemed to be a harmonious environment. There were no radical Jewish settlers tormenting Arab villagers, young boys were not sought by the military and residents were not woken up at two in the morning, their home searched and ransacked. Here, Arab villagers and their Jewish neighbors could not be nicer to each other.

On the personal level, on Thursday, when we lunched in the Arab village of Pekiin, Nadia, the Muslim restaurant owner, told me her innermost personal problem thinking I was an Israeli living in Israel, not in New York. It is not necessary to retell her story.

“I swear to you, I never told this to anyone. I don’t know why I told you all of this,” she apologized tearfully. We hugged as friends do when I left .

The friendliness I witnessed may not symbolize Arab-Jewish relations in all of Israel, particularly not in the northern Galilee. Additionally, this apparent harmony may not last. It is certainly possible that relations between the two communities would explode one day. But for now it seems as if common interest and mutual respect take precedent over an ethnic divide.
 
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On this Mother's Day

Though the commercialization of Mother’s Day may overshadow the true meaning of the day – paying tribute to mothers or other motherly figures in our lives - I loved the gifts I both gave and received today, the most cherished is the blessing of being a mother to my daughter Odellia, who was a true miracle baby, and a grandmother to Gabriella and Jacob, eight and five.

            We started the day, together with my son-in-law Richard and my husband Stephen, watching Gabriella in a play, moving along to a lovely lunch, after which Odellia, Jacob and I spent the afternoon buying seasonal planting flowers, which I potted for my daughter with the help of my grandchildren. Throughout this lovely day I kept thinking about the chipped cream porcelain woven basket, adorned with two roses on each side, that is in my possession, a Mother’s Day gift I had bought my mother with my savings when I was fourteen, in Israel.  But it was really my mother who I was thinking about. 

            When I was growing up my beautiful mother Khaya suffered from severe recurring depressions. Perhaps she should have been hospitalized at that time rather than being treated by her own doctors, primarily with electroshock and heavy medication for which my father paid huge sums. He refused to have her institutionalized and separated from my sister and me, since she only suffered from her “nerve disease” in winter time, recovering mentally and often thriving in summer, becoming a mother who cared for her daughters, and being always over-protective of me, the fragile looking child I was. 

           When she was in good health I felt secured with her, and even loved, for she was the mother who wished she were sick rather than me when I was ill. She was the mother who took me to my favorite restaurant - a rare outing when I was a child - watching me eat the food I liked, ordering nothing for herself. She fought to place me in a better grammar school and went to school to defend me when necessary. She made for me the most beautiful Purim costumes, for most of which I won first prizes in school (Purim is a Jewish holiday that commemorates the rescue of the Jewish people in ancient Persia). She was the mother who took me for my first bra even though, at fourteen, I did not yet need one, but she said that she wanted me to have pretty breasts when I grew up to be a woman. She was the mother who took me to the dermatologist to prevent acne and to the gynecologist when my menstruation was unsteady. She was the mother who made sure that my sister and I wore the finest clothes and that we ate the best food. 

            Though as a child, my mother regularly called me offensive names, unsuitable not only for a child’s ears, I loved her still. Did I think it was my fault that my mother suddenly turned into an unrecognizable woman when she suffered from her uncontrollable behavior when she was ill? Did I feel helpless because there was nothing I could do to help her? The answers to these questions I do not have. What I am certain of is the enormous compassion and love I felt for her in sickness and in health. 

When I was thirty-four she asked me if she was a good mother to me. I told her that she was, doing the best she could. If she asked me the same question today, I would tell her it was a wonder how she managed at all. 

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On this Holocaust Memorial Day

On this Holocaust Memorial Day I want to pay tribute to members of my family who perished in the Holocaust and to those who survived it. 

In 2008, with seven of my maternal cousins I visited Plunge, our mothers’ hometown. With no Jews left in twon after WWII, Jewish life there all but died. Walking there I could not help but think about how all those picturesque houses I saw – among them my mother’s house that was made into a women’s clothing store in 2005 - had once belonged to Jews who, during the Nazi years, were forced out of their homes into ghettos, then murdered.   

We visited the areas that used to be the Telz and Shavli ghettos, to where our family was taken. We visited, too, the nearby forest of Koshan, where my grandmother, aunts, uncle, my unborn cousin, and other relatives are buried in mass graves, together with eighteen-hundred other Jews from their town. By those graves we solemnly recited the Kaddish prayer for the dead. 

We walked by the paths on which my aunts Sorke and Eerle walked daily - four miles each way from the ghetto to the German aircraft factory, where they were forced laborers, and back to the ghetto. Young and good looking they survived the 1941 Koshan massacre, witnessing the murder of their mother and sisters alongside the hundreds of others from their home town. Their brother Itzik was murdered in Telz, probably in the Rainiai forest, in the outskirts of town.

Having immigrated to Palestine in 1933, eight years before the Nazi occupation of Lithuania, my mother (and two of her siblings) did not experience the fear and horror of the World War II years that her family did. But she might have never forgiven herself for escaping that terror.

We also visited with Jacob Bunka, eighty-two at the time, who has been for years the only remaining Jew in Plunge. He lived with his wife in a one-bedroom apartment, which he had turned into an archive, documenting and memorializing the life of Jewish Plunge that ended with the Nazi slaughter. A known carver, he had also erected numerous towering totem-like sculptures made of tree trunks, commemorating the Nazi victims of the killing fields at Koshan and other forests. 

In the summer of 2010 I traveled through Poland with my paternal cousin Anat, to trace our family’s history. My father and her mother, their parents and siblings, escapes the Holocaust: In 1926, after witnessing and stopping an anti-Semitic incident, my grandmother Brucha Bakman decided in no uncertain terms that her family will immigrate to Palestine.

We traveled through the horrors of Birkenau and Auschwitz. Nothing that I haves studied, read, or seen in films, documentaries or photos; none of the interview I had watched and the Holocaust museums I had visited, including Yad Vashem; not even my previous visit to the Terezienstadt concentration camp near Prague, had prepared me for those death camps. What socked me most was the efficiency with which the Nazis ran their oiled death machine and industry. They left nothing, not even the minutest detail to chance: they carefully calculated where the trains carrying their Jewish human transport would first stop, where their victims would initially be selected for immediate death or for forced labor, often by young SS soldiers; where their victims first undressed, where they were first disinfected and shaved, their hair used by the Nazis to manufacture fabric, and where they were disinfected for the second time if they had not been immediately selected for the gas chambers; where their clothing was first fumigated, where their clothing was fumigated for the second time; where their clothing and other belongings were collected, sorted and stored; where they would die by the Zyclon B poisoning gas, and where and how their corpses would be burned. It took merely twenty-five minutes from the time the human cargo arrived to the camps selected to die and turned into ash. 

In Krakow, from where we left for the camps, a Jewish festival was taking place. When we returned there from our emotional trip the town was festive with live Hasidic music and dancing. I needed to be among the celebrators. Anat, who was shocked at my ability to do so immediately after the horror we just saw, could not. But for me, standing in the center of Krakow, where the Jewish Ghetto once was, surrounded by hundreds of joyous Jews and non-Jews alike, celebrating Jewish life, was the very answer to the place from where we had just return. To me, it epitomized Jewish continuity in Eastern Europe in spite of Hitler. Nothing would have angered him more, I thought tearfully, than seeing the great granddaughter of Samuel Bakman, who died of starvation in the Radom Ghetto, and the great grandniece of his sisters Khaya, who was murdered in Auschwitz, taking part with so many other descendants of his victims, in the revival of Jewish culture in Poland. 

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On This Passover Eve

When, this past Monday, on Passover eve, I began to write a new post, I meant to devote it to President Obama’s pro-Zionist speech in Jerusalem (March 21) and to the meaning of Zionism, and relate it to Passover, the Jewish holiday of freedom. But the smell of burning onions emanating from my kitchen drew me from my study back to my kitchen, as I prepared for our family Seder. I was foolish to presume that I could host a Seder in the evening and devote time to write a post. I haven't written for a month, I thought, it can wait another day or two, or….

The act of turning over the frying onions in a large cast iron skillet and their smell took me back to another place and another time, and to the two women who most influenced my life, each a Zionist in her own way.
Where I went back to was the terrace in my family's ground floor apartment in Tel Aviv. The time was sixty-two years ago, on Passover eve. The women were my paternal grandmother Bracha and my mother Khaya. They were cooking for all thirty or forty of us – my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, and my cousins, who would gather in my grandparents’ home for the festive Seder.
They were frying onions and gossiping at the same time. So that I wouldn’t hear the gossip, they sent me to the terrace – to no avail - to watch over the cooling onions.

My grandmother, an ardent Orthodox Jew, and a true feminist decades before the term reached the Orthodox community, literally forced my grandfather to agree to emigrate from Poland to Palestine.
The immediate cause of my family’s emigration was an anti-Semitic incident my grandmother witnessed while traveling on a train during one of her business trips. She was sitting in a car full of passengers, some of whom were Orthodox Jews. When one of the Christian passengers, accompanied by a few of his brute friends, pushed off a Jewish passenger’s hat and laughingly took out a folding knife from his pocket and moved to cut off the young man’s beard, my grandmother grabbed his arm and commanded him to stop.

When she arrived home she waited to talk to her husband without their children present. Only then she proceeded to tell him about the train incident. “We are going to Palestine,” she told her husband in no uncertain terms at the end of her story. With those five words she saved her family from the madness that would erupt in Europe with the rise of Hitler less than a decade later. In February 1926, on board the ship Dacha, my teenage father and his family arrived in the northern port city of Haifa where they first settled.

When my mother was sixteen or seventeen, she belonged to the Revisionist Zionist movement Beitar (founded in 1927 in Latvia). By the time she had graduated from Plunge’s Hebrew Gymnasium (high school), she was fully committed to the Zionist movement, planning to immigrate to Palestine, to take part in the rebuilding of a free, democratic Jewish state there.

In 1932, when she was eighteen, my mother left home for the Lithuanian city of Klaipeda, or Memel. There she joined the HeHalutz (The Pioneer) movement, training to become a pioneer in Palestine. It was during that year of training while working on a farm in Memel, that she experienced the strongest expression of anti-Semitism she had personally endured. Working much faster than the non-Jewish farmers - picking strawberries as I recall from her stories - they threatened to kill her if she did not slow down. Perhaps it was her beauty as well as her efficiency that irritated them.

In 1933, my mother left Lithuania for Palestine aboard the ship “Martha Washington,” with other HeHalutz members. Her family members who stayed behind were not as lucky as my father’s family.
Together with Blumma, a woman she had met on the boat and with whom she became life-long friends, my mother arrived at a settlement in northern Palestine, where she became a legendary cook, preparing meals for her fellow pioneers. Blumma, a heavyset cheerful woman of whom I have fond memories, lost her laughter after one, and then another of her sons fell in Israel’s wars. But my mother lost her own laughter much earlier.

When she left her family behind in Lithuania at the age of eighteen, she followed a legacy of courage, determination and perseverance, and a commitment to a cause. But her bravery, as well as her sense of purpose and resolve, gave way to seasonal depression and despair that began when she was in her early thirties, shattering not only her own life, but the lives of those who lived closest to her - my father, my sister, and me. We loved her nonetheless.

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