people in Israel, where any mention of it may be met these days with bored indifference: it is stale history, the new generations say, as wearisome as those dreary old survivors and their nightmares. Even worse, say too many young Israelis, most of those survivors had been sluts or cowards.
“
What?
Snot-nose bastards. What do
they
know about it?”
“Bravo! Yes! Correct!” A young Zionist kibbutznik, full of himself to bursting: “So who’s not sick of all this shit about the Shoah, right? Okay? So never again no more kvetching, okay? The survivors say, ‘Forgive the unforgivable,’ okay? So we forgive those people.” He points rudely at the Germans. “Let them sit in their old Nazi shit for a thousand years, okay? But in Israel we are home and we are staying, and all those Arabs can go fuck themselves while we move on.”
If that kid has moved on, Olin is thinking, why is he so angry? Why has he spent good money on this pilgrimage into the past which by the looks of him he can’t afford? He shakes off Anders, who is chuckling into his ear again: “So now we move on, we go ethnic-clean, okay? Croats, maybe? Those Croats might be very nice today.”
“Some of us can never move on,” intones the melancholy Rabbi Glock, who for a thin man has too much tremble in his chin. And Earwig snarls to no one in particular, “You sucked it up in your mother’s milk, that hate.” Which hate? Olin wonders. For all the sincere good will, there are so many old hates in this hall. Earwig, for instance—who does this guy hate most? Nazis? Catholics? Georgie Earwig? The human species? Who had his mother been, and where?
Swooping in to tidy up her point, the Israeli professor wishes to register her solidarity with the young kibbutzniks. (Being young at heart herself, is what she means, says Anders.) Yes, it is time to move on. All those wars and massacres, those genocides, those hordes of refugees walking endless dust-choked roads to nowhere, scouring the earth for the last food and water—aren’t these never-ending tragedies of our own time dreadful enough without clinging to the Catastrophe of fifty years ago?
Dr. Anders Stern, setting levity aside, interrupts his esteemed colleague to protest. The Shoah was different from anything before it, a realm of horror so far exceeding past insanities as to risk escaping human history altogether. In the end, he says, all this race business is meaningless. “
Jewish
blood? What is it, really?”
The American Israeli is up again. “After so much, he wants to know what’s Jewish blood?”
Professor Schreier raises hand and voice. “Understand, Dr. Stern, I don’t mean to exempt Israel from criticism. To judge from our record in Palestine, we have learned very little from our own great tragedy. It’s all very well to observe Holocaust Day and blow that siren; I myself have cried, ‘
Never
again!
’ on the street corner in Tel Aviv—”
The American Israeli: “So what side are you on, lady? You a
real
Israeli or just some kind of a jihadnik—?”
“Hey, let her finish!” calls another man. “Look where we find ourselves these days with our homegrown apartheid!”
Adina nods and frowns at the same time. “That apartheid analogy is anti-Semitism, too, of course. True, our leaders invite it—”
“Right on, Prof!” bawls Earwig. “And when your bullet-headed politicians run out of cheap tricks and your swarthy inferiors are still standing in your way, what happens then? The Final Solution to the
Ay
-rab Question?”
The audience turns on him in a body, pointing fingers at his face.
Who is this guy anyway?
Another voice:
All you damned Jews in the Diaspora—!
Earwig cringes comically in this wave of denunciation, even summons it with the cupped fingers of both outstretched hands, as in
Bring it on, you sons-of-bitches, let’s see what you got.
“Diaspora, my ass-pora,” he jeers. And it is now, in the ensuing uproar, that he turns and enlists Olin with a
“
What?
Snot-nose bastards. What do
they
know about it?”
“Bravo! Yes! Correct!” A young Zionist kibbutznik, full of himself to bursting: “So who’s not sick of all this shit about the Shoah, right? Okay? So never again no more kvetching, okay? The survivors say, ‘Forgive the unforgivable,’ okay? So we forgive those people.” He points rudely at the Germans. “Let them sit in their old Nazi shit for a thousand years, okay? But in Israel we are home and we are staying, and all those Arabs can go fuck themselves while we move on.”
If that kid has moved on, Olin is thinking, why is he so angry? Why has he spent good money on this pilgrimage into the past which by the looks of him he can’t afford? He shakes off Anders, who is chuckling into his ear again: “So now we move on, we go ethnic-clean, okay? Croats, maybe? Those Croats might be very nice today.”
“Some of us can never move on,” intones the melancholy Rabbi Glock, who for a thin man has too much tremble in his chin. And Earwig snarls to no one in particular, “You sucked it up in your mother’s milk, that hate.” Which hate? Olin wonders. For all the sincere good will, there are so many old hates in this hall. Earwig, for instance—who does this guy hate most? Nazis? Catholics? Georgie Earwig? The human species? Who had his mother been, and where?
Swooping in to tidy up her point, the Israeli professor wishes to register her solidarity with the young kibbutzniks. (Being young at heart herself, is what she means, says Anders.) Yes, it is time to move on. All those wars and massacres, those genocides, those hordes of refugees walking endless dust-choked roads to nowhere, scouring the earth for the last food and water—aren’t these never-ending tragedies of our own time dreadful enough without clinging to the Catastrophe of fifty years ago?
Dr. Anders Stern, setting levity aside, interrupts his esteemed colleague to protest. The Shoah was different from anything before it, a realm of horror so far exceeding past insanities as to risk escaping human history altogether. In the end, he says, all this race business is meaningless. “
Jewish
blood? What is it, really?”
The American Israeli is up again. “After so much, he wants to know what’s Jewish blood?”
Professor Schreier raises hand and voice. “Understand, Dr. Stern, I don’t mean to exempt Israel from criticism. To judge from our record in Palestine, we have learned very little from our own great tragedy. It’s all very well to observe Holocaust Day and blow that siren; I myself have cried, ‘
Never
again!
’ on the street corner in Tel Aviv—”
The American Israeli: “So what side are you on, lady? You a
real
Israeli or just some kind of a jihadnik—?”
“Hey, let her finish!” calls another man. “Look where we find ourselves these days with our homegrown apartheid!”
Adina nods and frowns at the same time. “That apartheid analogy is anti-Semitism, too, of course. True, our leaders invite it—”
“Right on, Prof!” bawls Earwig. “And when your bullet-headed politicians run out of cheap tricks and your swarthy inferiors are still standing in your way, what happens then? The Final Solution to the
Ay
-rab Question?”
The audience turns on him in a body, pointing fingers at his face.
Who is this guy anyway?
Another voice:
All you damned Jews in the Diaspora—!
Earwig cringes comically in this wave of denunciation, even summons it with the cupped fingers of both outstretched hands, as in
Bring it on, you sons-of-bitches, let’s see what you got.
“Diaspora, my ass-pora,” he jeers. And it is now, in the ensuing uproar, that he turns and enlists Olin with a
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