I really don’t know how it happens sometimes, how it ends up that I read a book from the pile next to the bed, and the next one I pick up relates to it — matches it in theme, style, subject. I don’t stack them up that way. Sometimes if there is a large number of books, I’ll arrange them in a pattern of fiction and non-fiction, but that’s as far as I go.<\/p>\n
It happened again this week. I finished Hope: A Tragedy<\/a> by the wonderfully gifted Shalom Auslander<\/a>, who can make humor so dark you can barely see through it. The book involves a man who finds that, in the attic of his new home, an elderly, cranky, and somehow alive Anne Frank has set up housekeeping. Although not the focus of the story, Anne Frank’s presence brings up a question among the characters that resonates with many Jews: If the Holocaust happened here, happened now, what would we do? Where would we hide? And who would hide us? Who would risk life and limb — and that of his or her family?<\/p>\n The question also arose in the title story of Nathan Englander’s<\/a>\u00a0 recent What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank<\/a>. While publicity for both works may clue some people in to the Anne Frank link, I wasn’t aware of it. Weird.<\/p>\n Last night, as I worked through Englander’s stories — to a one engaging, thoughtful, and meaty — the question loomed: who would risk all to save me and my family? When you go through the list of friends and neighbors, all with their own problems and struggles, you have to think carefully about who you could ask to take the kind of risk that people took to hide Jewish families during the Holocaust, and who might agree to it. I don’t even know if I would hide me. I like to think I would, but I have a son to think about, right? I don’t want to be murdered for my humanity.<\/p>\n Anne Frank and I share a birthday — June 12 — and a name (her full name was Anne Lise), and I always felt a connection with her as another broody, intense, literary, Jewish girl who had issues with her mother. I have thought, more than once, about how it must have been to hide in a small space with strangers and people you didn’t really like, fearing for your life and the lives of those who were feeding and caring for you. As I’ve gotten older and watched the polemic of political discourse grow more and more extreme, I wonder if it could happen again. We don’t seem to care if some groups of people are demonized — gays, Muslims, immigrants. Maybe you don’t see the relationship, but just as I know that a kid who tortures animals is more likely to grow up to torture people, so I know that a society who can dehumanize on group of people can dehumanize any group of people.<\/p>\n I didn’t always think this way. As a 20-something grad student, I went to Israel, where the 6 million dead from the Holocaust are constantly mentioned and memorialized, I was a little offended. I thought they were holding onto something that should be remembered, but not harped on so much, because really, there was no way it would happen again. And then there was the Balkan War, when the term “ethnic cleansing” was popularized, and Rwanda, and the ethnic strife in Iraq after the second invasion. The them and us thing? It’s all around us, even — especially? — in America, still, always, never gone away. If Jews aren’t the focus now, it doesn’t mean we won’t be some other time.<\/p>\n