Rumors

I wonder if my ancestors in the shtetl ever dreamed that one day their progeny would be light-haired and light-eyed and really into rollerblading. (Who could have predicted rollerblading, really. Whomever it was would have had to have a great sense of humor.)

I wonder if my ancestors imagined that their descendants would live a privileged life in Los Angeles going to posh carnival-esque movie premieres sponsored by the Disney Company, a morally questionable multinational corporation founded by a man who was long-rumored to hate Jews (although from what I can tell he mostly just hated leftists and unions). 

I wonder what my ancestors would think if they knew that the books that made me fall in love with reading and thus precipitated my entire life's path would be written by a self-proclaimed anti-Semite, the author Roald Dahl. (To be fair I read them before the truth was widely known. But I should have guessed from THE TWITS.) 

I wonder if my ancestors could have pictured me with terror-induced insomnia at age ten, imagining that every overhead plane was a Nazi bomber coming to obliterate everything I held dear. (My ancestors shouldn't have let me read so much Holocaust fiction.)

I wonder if they thought the children of their children's children would stop worrying that people hated us and wanted to hurt us, that anti-Semitism would one day disappear. I wonder if they'd agree that Jewishness in diaspora might be inextricable from that feeling of being threatened, of sudden comeuppance, that heavy burden of history pressing down on little blonde children as they rollerblade along the Pacific Ocean. 

Theodore Adorno once said, "Anti-Semitism is the rumor about the Jews." It's also the story that we keep telling about ourselves.