by Andrew Potok
Back home among the sighted, a new category, my friends wanted to touch my white cane and the exotic equipment, magnifiers of every conceivable kind, kits for sewing buttons, measuring cups and spoons, catalogues of talking levels and scales. But they were fascinated not only by my new widgets, but also by an unknown and alien world, introduced to them by one of their own. In fact, because I lived at the top of a long dirt road, a fifteen-minute walk to the village below, the cane turned out not to be all that useful and, because Charlotte was a very good cook, neither were the “techniques of daily living.” In our kitchen, I didn’t have to listen to burgers frying or to time a medium boiled egg with my newly sensitized ears or talking timer. So there I was again, not yet blind but not sighted either, belonging in neither world.
“Why don’t you get a PhD?” my friend Gerry, the president of Goddard, the local college, asked.
“A PhD? In what?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “but you’ll think of something.” He could have suggested that I join the Merchant Marine and I would have done it.
I tried to give a shape to my life, a bell curve right side up or, turned around, sagging, or a pyramid, a circle, humdrum or exotic, driven off course by war, betrayals, and blindness. Could I do art history if I couldn’t see the art? What about the history of music or of Europe in the twentieth century, both very appealing? Some blind people I knew chose counseling others going blind or those taking to the bottle, but I found the thought of spending the day in vain efforts to alter behavior seriously boring. Instead, I blew off the academic world and flew to London in pursuit of a woman who claimed that she could cure not only any old blindness, as one might expect from a quack, but, specifically, retinitis pigmentosa. I allowed Julia Owen, a pear-shaped Austrian sadist, to cheerfully administer as many as fifteen bees daily to the back of my neck and alongside my ears. “Isn’t this what we all do in a milder form when we pop multivitamins or serotonin reuptake inhibitors or get sloshed?” I asked Charlotte who flew to London with me.
“It doesn’t usually include transatlantic airfare,” she said or, as it turned out, a miserable six months, neck and cheeks bursting like overripe plums, the pain constant and without end.
When Julia Owen asked me and the dozen or so others she was abusing to write testimonials, we snapped to attention and, of course, we turned in neatly handwritten pages, mine illustrated with angelic bees in the margins.
“How could you write that garbage?” Charlotte asked when she visited during my fourth month.
My illustrated testimonial bought me another two months of torture, during which I continued to tape-record commentary on each day’s events; thoughts about quackery, medicine, normalcy; and the fear of facing a life without eyesight. When I returned home, uncured and humiliated, I had the tapes transcribed and sent to the friend who first read me the Telegraph article, hoping for understanding, sympathy, and a few chuckles. She, then an editor for the New York Times, called the next day. “It’s a book,” she said. I joined an MFA writing program for one semester, then sent a chapter each month to an adjunct faculty member engaged in writing his own memoir, which helped produce my first book, Ordinary Daylight. It was well published, well reviewed, a life-changing event. Not only did the Julia Owen lunacy cure me of ever again seeking a cure for the incurable, but it led to a different kind of salvation, a new career.
4
A NOTE FROM MARTIN LUTHER
1.
According to British historian Tony Judt’s Post-War: A History of Europe Since 1945, of the 126,000 Jews in pre-war Austria, some 4,500 returned after the war. In the Netherlands, of 140,000 Jews, 110,000 were deported and fewer than 5,000 returned. In France, 76,000 were deported and less than 3% survived. In Germany, 21,450 Jews survived out of a pre-war total of 600,000. And in Poland, 97.5% of the Jews were exterminated. Those who returned were not welcomed, but instead blamed for their own suffering; and worse, thousands were murdered by Poles. In Paris, where one returning Jew tried to reclaim his occupied apartment, a mob formed, chanting, “La France aux Francais.”
I have never understood why there is so much hatred of Jews. When did all this begin? The religious scholar Reza Aslan writes that when Pontius Pilate ordered Jesus’s crucifixion, he was absolved by Jesus himself, who was supposed to have told him that it was not he but the Jews who ordered the torture on the cross. According to Aslan, that moment—plus a horde of plutocrat Jews crying out that they had no king except Caesar—marked the beginning of anti-Semitism. Aslan does not explain why those folks chose Jesus and Christianity rather than another of the many available sects, except to conjecture that “the resurrection was the deciding factor,” staged or not. It was missing from the myths of other sects, and thus the Jesus sect has survived for two millennia so far and is as violent a sect as any other.
On each side of the beginning of the Christian era, every messianic group was allowed to ply its trade until it failed to conform in some way to the scriptures and prophecies; these sacred texts, thought to be divinely inspired, were blindly accepted.
I too am awed by the unseen, unheard, unsmelled, and unfelt, the reality of space-time, quantum mechanics, quarks and gluons—universal truths that do not ask for obeisance, fealty, or prayer. In my view, imagination can be better used in the creation of art than in populating a heaven and hell with gods and goddesses, angels and devils.
But in the realm of hope and faith, anything is possible. Faith and reason do live side by side, like unicorns and goats, but once the ancestral fears of lightning and thunder, earthquakes and floods vanished, we were left with the prospect of a heavenless oblivion, with only our fellow human beings to fear.
One friend sent me on an intellectual expedition into theodicy, a justification of the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient God in a world replete with natural disasters, slaughter, and human evil; but the notion of theodicy and its concomitant belief in a mystical force running the whole show is interesting only to believers.
I don’t know how to tolerate, for instance, the wish to kill or die on behalf of one trumped-up messiah or another, the scramble for ever-odder self-help schemes preventing a critical look into the real causes of the political hold on inequity and the violence that is inequity’s certain consequence.
At the time of Christ in Palestine, it seems that everyone was hell-bent on finding the Kingdom of God, zealot seekers appearing principally during reigns of immorality, not unlike our own time, especially in America, where fundamentalists chase after angels, gurus, and shamans. The religious scholar Reza Aslan writes that when Pontius Pilate ordered Jesus’s crucifixion, he was absolved by Jesus himself who was supposed to have said that it was the Jews who ordered his crucifixion and therefore Pontius Pilate had nothing to feel guilty about. That moment, plus a horde of the plutocrat Jews of the time crying out that they had no king except Caesar, according to Aslan, marked the beginning of anti-Semitism. He does not explain why those folks chose Jesus and Christianity rather than another of the many available sects, except to conjecture that “the resurrection was the deciding factor,” staged or not. It was missing from the myths of other sects, and thus the Jesus sect has survived for two millennia so far and is as violent a sect as any other.
Four centuries after it was decided to restart the calendar at zero and the Romans were fully Christianized, Christian literature began to display extreme hostility toward Jews. The accusation of deicide that is still with us, especially in Poland, led to the burning of synagogues and the killing of Jews.
Appearing at this time was the revered theologian John Chrysostom, now Saint John Chrysostom. He preached Eight Homilies Against the Jews, “the pitiful and miserable Jews, brute animals concerned only with food and lust, although such beasts are not fit for work, they are fit for killing.” Christ himself was supposed to have said: “But as for my enemies who did not want me to be king over them, bring them here and slay them.”
In Europe during the Middle Ages a f
ull-scale persecution of Jews gained steam. Libels, expulsions, forced conversions, and murders became the standard. Between 1400 and 1600 Western Europe was more or less “a world free of Jews.” Banished from most countries, and existing only in the tiniest numbers through special exemptions, actual Jews were hardly ever seen. But this was the time of Christian Europe’s conviction that it was becoming too Jewish. During this period of cultural change and doctrinal and political disputes, adversaries of Christianity had to be extinguished.
Martin Luther brought this rhetoric to a fever pitch. In 1523 he accused the Roman Church of becoming “more ‘Jewish’ than the Jews,” and as he grew older he tried to convince his contemporaries that “so thoroughly hopeless, mean, poisonous, and bedeviled a thing are the Jews that for 1400 years they have been, and continue to be, our plague, pestilence, and all that is our misfortune.” In 1543 Luther published On the Jews and Their Lies, in which he wrote that “the Jews are venomous beasts, vipers, disgusting scum, devils incarnate, a base, whoring people, no people of God. . . . Set their synagogues and schools on fire, destroy their prayer books, forbid their rabbis to preach, raze their homes, confiscate their property and money. They should be shown no mercy or kindness, afforded no legal protection, and these poisonous envenomed worms should be drafted into forced labor or expelled for all time.” He provided detailed recommendations for a pogrom against them, calling for their permanent oppression and expulsion, writing, “Their private houses must be destroyed and devastated, they could be lodged in stables. If this avails nothing, we will be compelled to expel them like dogs in order not to expose ourselves to incurring divine wrath and eternal damnation from the Jews and their lies.” At one point Luther wrote, “We are at fault in not slaying them,” a passage that may be termed “the first work of modern anti-Semitism, and a giant step forward on the road to the Holocaust.”
In the Germany of the 1930s and ’40s, the only morality was fidelity to race, making any non-racist attitude such as mercy to the weak a destructive Jewish idea. According to this German racist philosophy, reason over impulse drew the races away from the natural human struggle and resulted in the decimation of the species. Jews were weak, cowardly, and gutless. Reciprocity, peacefulness, and ethical considerations were considered poisonous Jewish ideas, and yet, at the same time, these “philosophical Jews” were accused of a fierce hunger for world domination.
The European Jews who survived the Holocaust were given an inhabited land in middle eastern Asia by munificent colonialist Europeans used to remaking boundaries, not so much as reparations to a victimized people as for geopolitical reasons. Why did they choose Palestine rather than, say, Germany as the Jewish homeland? Why not Germany or at least a part of it? How about Bavaria or the Rhine Valley, with maybe the Ruhr Valley thrown in? That would certainly have provided enough land for the eight million Jews who now inhabit Palestine. Perhaps not all but many people in the world would have understood if a few million German perpetrators were forced to give up their land. Those Germans could have squeezed into what was left in Germany or shipped to, say, Madagascar. So why Palestine, as much the homeland to those strange Arabs who lived there as far back as the Jews, who, like them, felt a cockamamy God-given right to the place.
It may be naïve to express a deep emotion regarding Israeli attitudes toward Palestinians but it’s almost impossible for me to understand why the beneficiaries of this donation, the Jews in Israel, have no problem uprooting others and are capable of egregious disregard for human life and dignity. Shouldn’t one expect Jews, after all they’ve been through, to be morally superior? It seems that no amount of victimhood, no matter how unspeakably ghastly, prevents victims from becoming oppressors when the chance arises. Now that there is a Jewish homeland, and nationhood provides, for some, a sense of belonging, it also allows, even assures, the worst components of national behavior: pridefulness, pitilessness, and exclusiveness. Every nation state is capable of indulging in uncivilized ways, surrounded by angry neighbors or not. Even though Israel will never be my home, as a Jew I can’t escape feeling a certain sense of pride as well as feeling implicated in the heartless decimation of Palestinians.
When, in the early 1960s, I flew from Greece, where my then-wife Joan, my two little kids, and I were living, to meet my mother in Israel, both she and I felt enormous pride, both of our hearts racing with the feeling that this might be the first and only place where we can be safe as Jews. “Can you believe it,” my mother asked me, “that Jewish people are farming their own land and driving the trains?” Even though I did not feel unsafe in Greece or in America, my entire body felt different in Israel, unburdened of the fear of hatred or expulsion. But after nearly a week in Israel, I yearned to fly back to Greece, the philosophical and art home, the one where my mind felt free.
But where in the worldview called Judaism do atheists like me belong? If religion is the glue that has held Jews together against all odds for millennia, then what replaces that glue for people like me who do not obey any list of commandments, instructions, or prophecies; no prescriptions from an angry Old Testament God or from the milder Christian one? Proclaiming my Jewishness has nothing at all to do with religious beliefs, nor is it based on the refusal to leave a sinking ship, or the fear of abandoning others like me who have been the despised scapegoats of the world. Rather, it’s the pride that has grown with every unhappy visit to Poland, the pride of having survived in spite of them.
In his book Anti-Judaism, David Nirenberg considers the intellectual history of Western civilization in Christian and post-Christian thought, the role of anti-Judaism being a central theological and political idea. According to Nirenberg, the negative view of Judaism established in the earliest Christian polemics became a common tool in many different intellectual efforts to understand the world and to denounce opposing understandings. Jews were considered guilty of the stubborn adherence to flesh, and were therefore enemies of the spirit and of God; they were accused of enticing Christians to believe in law instead of love, the letter instead of the spirit, the material world instead of the soul. Nirenberg shows that many of the important conceptual and aesthetic developments from Saint John to Saint Augustine to Muhammad, from Shakespeare to Luther to Hegel, depended on denigrating Jews. For thousands of years the patterns of anti-Judaism have evolved to provide great thinkers and ordinary citizens with ways to make sense of their world. In the modern period, revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries continued to use “the Jewish problem” as something to be overcome. “How could that tiny minority convincingly come to represent for so many the evolving evils of the capitalist world order?” Nirenberg asks.
And why is this tiny minority treated as though it was responsible for the evils of Stalinism? Was it the convenient myth in Eastern Europe of a Judeo-Bolshevik alliance? Many intellectuals of the left hoped for years that something was out there to reduce the inequity, the disgraces of capitalism. They proved to be wrong, but a hope lingers and it is the hope of decent people alike, Jews and non-Jews. And yet in Poland and every other eastern European nation, when Jews were no longer slaughtered just because they were Jews, they were slaughtered for being Communists.
It was not only the caricatures of ugly misshapen Jews from Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer tabloid, which had a circulation of 480,000 German readers, but the belief that money was the motivating force in the Jewish psyche. Aside from the fact that a huge majority of European Jews were poor, the few who did amass great fortunes did so in similar ways to Christian robber barons. It is probably impossible for anyone to get filthy rich without filthy deeds, without stepping over dead bodies, without lying and cheating, without destroying others.
In Claude Lanzmann’s monumental film Shoah, one of the two surviving fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, then living in Israel, says, “If anyone opened me up and kissed my heart, they would be poisoned.” Even though I have not earned the right to feel that kind of hatred, I understand it, unwilling and unable to ever e
rase thoughts from my mind of so many ordinary German men causing such persistent, relentless agony.
For me the most unforgettable scene in the film is of a boy, I think Janek by name, now a young man, who sits in front of a lineup of Poles, the church whose services they just left behind them, screaming at Lanzmann that they have always loved Jews. The look on Janek’s face, over whose head they are shouting, is one of shame, empathetic shame, his innate morality bringing a blush to his face, his sweetness almost unable to bear the hypocrisy. Thus unforgiving hatred and rage contrasts with the shame—empathetic shame at best—of those Poles who deny the poisonous nature of their Jew hatred.
Once born into a tribe or a nation, we belong. We appear and are defined as Americans, Poles, Jews, Muslims, or Christians. Being born in any country is a matter of chance. But what does belonging to a tribe of Germans, Poles, Americans, or Israelis mean? A strong ambivalence has always existed within me, a wrestling match between a deep desire to belong and the equally powerful need to remain an outsider. It’s lonely not to belong, but then, what can I belong to without reservation or shame?