Page 22 - FMH7

Diaspora, Identity, Choice, and Epi-
My father’s family are Jews who originate, at least within recent centuries from Eastern Europe. Although my Jew- ish identity feels somewhat unstable and fragmented, I still feel a sense of identification with this Diaspora. I was never bar mitzvah-ed, nor had the idea that I was Jewish repeat- edly instilled into me as a child. However, I did still grow up celebrating Jewish holidays with my family. I can recite the Shabbat prayers for wine, bread and candles in Hebrew, albeit without understanding what nearly all of the indi- vidual words mean. Nor do I understand any the words of Ma Nishtana, (the best Jewish song in my opinion) but the melody and propulsive tempo shifts are pretty infectious when sung together at Seder (the annual endurance party for Moses) and you can feel the history and tradition reso- nating through your lungs. So why do I identity as a member of this Diaspora?
Firstly, is an unwillingness to renounce a part of my heritage that has suffered so much. Three short quotes from my grandfather’s autobiography might convey some of the weight of this history...
genetics
Father used his chemical skills and the chemicals and
Zacharias Gabriel Szumer zachariasszmr121@gmail.com
equipment of the laboratory to manufacture potassium cyanide....which he would sell in small half gram quantities in glass ampoules.....many people wanted to hfave the means for “a final escape” in preference to torture and humiliation
....it was agreed that Mother would sell her diamond en- gagement ring, her last and only valuable piece of jewellery, and give all the money to the sisters who would use part of it to acquire a certificate of baptism for me (to pretend he wasn’t Jewish)
Our camp of some 300 odd Jews was the
only island of Jewish life remaining from the former commu- nity of over 16,000
Reading my grandfather’s autobiography is a strange expe- rience in ominous anticipation. Quite a lot of it is simply an account the innocent experiences of a quite normal East European childhood; making sauerkraut and jam, discover- ing pornographic pictures in an uncles drawer, getting drunk with a local priest etc. But if you are reading it with even a basic knowledge of the Holocaust, there is a pulsing, skin prickling beat that is inevitably crescendoing and enclosing him and his family. At first it is more muffled (an omen of the pounding of German boots that would later be above my grandfathers head as he hid underneath floorboards), but becomes clearer as the knives begin circulating faster, cutting swathes through Europe’s Jewish population. His book is full of the names of relatives that did not escape the Shoah (Holocaust), and I still remember the first time I saw the family tree at the end of it, with so many branches end- ing between 1940 and 1945, their names followed by (Killed in the Shoa). I also remember once coming home from primary school once with a tiny swastika drawn on my arm in pen, (which I had put there to explain to an unknowing classmate what a swastika was) and being told by my father to wash it off right away, and that my grandfather would be heartbroken to see it. A reminder that this was still a deeply emotional and heavy memory (and also that ‘cool’ post-