Tatiana's Response

For 60 and some years since the truth about Hitler's 'Final Solution' was revealed, Jews and Gentiles alike have been struggling with the Holocaust. One of the latest attempts is Tatiana De Rosnay's "Sarah's Key".

"Sarah's Key" revolves around the infamous Vel d'Hiv roundup of Jews in the greater Paris area in 16 to 17 of July, 1942, so named after the local nickname for the Velodrome d'Hiver indoor stadium where over 13,000 detainees were held in appalling conditions until transferred to camps outside the city. The children were separated from their parents, who were deported to Auschwitz. The children were to follow in the weeks to come, and gassed upon arrival without even so much as a 'selection'. Perhaps the most outrageous aspect about Vel d'Hiv is that it was a totally French operation, which exceeded the expectations of the Nazi occupiers who initiated it.

De Rosnay weaves two stories together. One is 10 year old Sarah in Paris of 1942 who locks her little brother in a closet, hiding him from the French police detaining her family. The second is Julia, who's life intersects with Sarah's 60 years later. De Rosnay's plot alternates between Sarah's efforts to rescue her brother and Julia's discovery of Sarah and a secret from Paris the summer of '42.
.
.
.
.
"Sarah's Key" is fiction but a possible, even plausible story; a gripping account of horror and tragedy .... until runs out of gas midway through the book. It’s a shame De Rosnay didn't quit while she was ahead. My advice is to open to page 175, tear it in two and toss the second half. You will end up with a shorter, but much better book. The pages in your waste bin are De Rosnay's attempt to respond vicariously through her characters. It's a guilt fest; they wallow in remorse for crimes that belong to others and to the past. The moral of the story, so she says, is despair and self flagellation. To a man, all the major players in "Sarah's Key" set a course for one sort of self destruction or another.
.

It's true that some survivors couldn't pick up the pieces of shattered lives, but the overwhelming majority chose life. They established second families on the ashes of the ones that had perished.

With nowhere to go, and no one to turn to, the remnant of European Jewry created a home in the wilderness their forefathers dared only to dream of. They remembered, they documented the crimes against humanity, they tried to build a new society in which genocide is unthinkable, but the bottom line is that they moved on.

.

The generation of the camps is passing from this world, and now it's vogue to stir the ashes. For some, modern 'new Jews' who have little or no connection to their homeland or faith, the Holocaust is the only 'Jewish' thing left that they can identify with.

But really, how do we respond to the Holocaust?

.

Some remember.....

.

some are in denial,

 

.

.

And some, like De Rosnay, accuse.

 

The Holocaust exposed a sickness of hatred and evil that has plagued mankind since Cain slew Able. 60 years later the collective 'us' is still licking its wounds. We can we can pick at it like a sore, drown in despair and sink into guilt– or choose life, choose to heal, to learn and even to forgive.

.

It's overwhelming, the Holocaust. More than half a century later, we're still groping for the right response, but unfortunately "Sarah's Key" is wrong.

A Bad Joke

A catholic priest, Protestant minister and a Rabbi walk into a restaurant. The priest asks for a glass of water. "May our Lord who turned water into wine turn this water into a bottle of fine Cabernet Sauvignon." The waiter gets the hint and brings the best of their selection. The minister orders a sardine and roll, and then blesses, "Let this sardine and roll be multiplied as the miracle of loaves and fishes." The waiter rushes off and comes back with smoked salmon and French bread.

The Rabbi observes this and orders something from the menu. When all have dined, they ask for the check. The priest refuses to pay up – all he had was a glass of water. The minister puts down a few coins for the roll and sardine. The rabbi tears the bill in half and says, "May the God who divided the Red Sea for the Children of Israel split this bill between this pair of fools."


A bad joke. Not really funny. But like any joke or story there is some truth in it, otherwise it doesn't make sense. True, there is interfaith tension. True, the Jewish stereotype is wily and greedy, not that there's any truth to the stereotype itself.
.

There is a measure of truth to William Paul Young's "The Shack". His story is about Mackenzie who grieves his 6 yr. old daughter, who was kidnapped and probably murdered in a shack in the Wallowa Mountains by the 'Little Ladykiller', a perverted serial killer. 4 years on, Mack gets a mysterious message from 'Papa', family nickname for God, inviting him to return to the same shack his daughter was killed.

The story is Young's venue to outline his views on religion. Much of Young's theology is sketchy, but he's explicit at least on one pillar of Christianity: the trinity. Mack goes to the shack, and indeed meets God, who is:
.
.


1. God the Father ("Papa") is a woman, black, fat and in the kitchen. So, there you have it ladies and gentlemen, God looks like this:

2. Jesus. He's not what Mack expected.

"Jesus?"
"Yes Mackenzie?"
"I am surprised by one thing about you."
"Really? What?"
"I guess I expected you to be more" – be careful here, Mack – "uh…well, humanly striking."
Jesus chuckled. "Humanly striking? You mean handsome." Now he was laughing.
"Well, I was trying to avoid that, but yes. Somehow, I thought you'd be the ideal man, you know, athletic and overwhelmingly good-looking."
"It's my nose, isn't it?"
Mack didn't know what to say.
Jesus laughed. "I am Jewish, you know. My grandfather on my mother's side had a big nose. In fact, most of the men on my mom's side had big noses."
"I just thought you'd be better looking."
(From "The Shack")

From this we learn 3 things:

a. All Jews have big noses.

b. People with big noses are ugly.

c. Therefore, Jews are ugly.

If Young researched his "Jewish" character of Jesus at all, he must have done it in a Reform Temple. He has Jesus frying up bacon and eggs on Saturday morning. The Sabbath may have been created for man, but pork wasn't created for Jews, and I think that even the real Jesus would have drawn the line at cooking on Shabbat.

3. The Holy Spirit is a mysterious, fidgety Asian woman.

All three claim to be One, but the story doesn't play that way, Mack having quality time with each of them at one time or another over the weekend. The closest to "oneness" are godhead family meals rustled up by Papa.

.
.
.
.
.


God (namely, God the mother) is essentially the defendant. Why do bad things happen to good people? Or namely, why did God let Mack's blameless daughter experience such a brutal fate? Papa's answer is that instead of sparing her, Jesus was there for her, sharing her suffering, comforting her. The story about Jesus and the imaginary girl is heart warming, but what about real people that are terrified and alone and in pain?

Is it fair to stack the deck by creating man with a sinful nature, and then condemning sinners to hell? The solution is a role reversal exercise, no doubt brilliant to Young's mind. Mack is commanded to condemn 2 of his children to hell, which is unbearable. He begs to take their place. "You see?", says Papa. "That’s exactly what the cross was all about." There's nothing new about this, but we didn't ask how God solves the dilemma, but why does He let it exist in the first place.


There is a measure of truth to Young's arguments, but the bottom line is that he deals with hard questions by not really answering them. His story rings true and pleasant to the ear, but falls apart the minute it hits reality. The gospel according to Young is that mankind is undergoing an educational process, Jesus was an object lesson; if we can only understand God and his plan enough, all things are resolved. I'm just wondering if a god that can be understood by humans is really God. 

You will find many interesting ideas in The Shack. Some of them are true and by sifting them from Young's inventions, the reader can reexamine himself and build a stronger foundation for his/her faith.


It's hard to pin Young down on anything other than his concept of the trinity, which leans more three than one. At very least he has done a great service for detractors of Christianity who claim it's not a monotheistic religion. The Shack is exhibit A for the commandment forbidding making an image of God. Young has made God in the image/images of man/men/women, creating his gods from racial profiles I hoped had passed from this world 50 years ago (the Negro mammy, the inscrutable oriental and the ugly Jew). In the end, Young's gods are small, no larger than his imagination, and their images limited to ethnic stereotypes.


Mack walks into The Shack and meets God – an African-American woman, an Asian and a Jew. It sounds like a bad joke; if only it were.

kissing the mirror

I didn't set out originally to write a book. I had come to a point when I needed to unravel the loose ends in my life, and the stories started to flow.

.
.
"Every time I finish a story, there is a little relief, a sense of release. In every story I give up something and in return I receive something.... With each story I am being healed and the scales fall from my eyes and the glass becomes clearer and I can see."
(from "Losing Control at a Very Basic Level")

I got the idea for the title from one of my stories. One of the girls I dated in high school told me she practiced kissing on the mirror. It struck me that it's a metaphor for those things we often do innocently, with the best of intentions, but in the end don't get us any where with God. And in a way, it's also like our human nature, sinful and self-centered. Until we realize the vanity of kissing the mirror, we will never experience the real thing with God.

Torn Between Two Women

.

Most are at least familiar with the account of Mary queen of Scots' imprisonment and execution at the hands of her cousin Elizabeth I, but a less known tale is that of the relationship that developed between Mary and her host/jailer, George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, and his wife Bess of Hardwick. Philippa Gregory breathes life into this historical footnote in her novel, "The Other Queen".

A sincere man of honor, George accepts Elizabeth's charge to hold Mary as his unwilling guest, but in the style she is accustomed. His wife Bess is less than enthusiastic about the prospect of entertaining royalty.

Two women under one roof – big mistake.

.
.
Bess is a "much married woman". She describes herself as "self-made" and has made a career of bettering herself through strategic marriages and then helping her spouses rob the Catholic Church which is being dismantled by the Protestants that have seized control of England. By marrying husbands above her station and then carefully husbanding the profits, she successively gains leverage to yet better matches in turn. George is her fourth, the crown of her achievements, joining his noble blood with her new money in a blend that mixes well with the cream of Elizabethan society.

Mary has been to the alter more than once herself, but that's where the resemblance to Bess ends. She is the product of careful breeding and carries in her person the keys to power, a "queen three times over" heiress to the thrones of Scotland, England, and France. Raised as a princess, she takes the trappings of royalty for granted and holds court even in captivity, at the expense of her hosts. Bad enough for ol' Bess that has slaved for every penny, but what gnaws deeper is having a woman said to be the most beautiful in Christendom and half her age to boot sharing her "husband the earl's" attentions.

Indeed, George the jailer is captured by his prisoner's charm and torn between Mary and his wife, the lady of the house out ranked by her guest. He's an honorable man, so there's no question of loyalty. On the contrary, he is played by both women. He tries to make Mary feel as welcome as possible under the circumstances, but she returns by exploiting his goodwill to hatch ever new plots to recruit spies and allies to overthrow her rival. And Bess for her part thinks nothing of spying on her husband and the "other queen" for Elizabeth's henchmen.

On the canvas of 16th century England's religious struggles, Gregory has painted a metaphor of those two bridesmaids of Christ; the Catholic Church and that peculiar invention, the Church of England. Catholic Mary has the pedigree and holds court in grandeur. She's beautiful and glamorous, but has the heart of a harlot and seduces men to rebellion and death. Bess is the Anglican. She serves a bastard queen, a self-made religion conceived in lust by Henry VIII and nursed with greed by Elizabeth I, robbing Catholic sacraments and Protestant reformation to cloth herself in legitimacy. She thinks she's fooled everyone, but even her own husband sees a common thief underneath the trappings of nobility.

And George is the Bridegroom. Grieved and deceived by Mary's scheming and Bess' grubbing, he turns his back in sorrow on both. As if to say, in the words of the poet in Elizabeth's court, "A plague on both your houses."
.

sgnihT llamS fo doG ehT

At first glance Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things, doesn't seem to have much in common with the Mark Twain. Besides the obvious, a whole century and half a planet between 19th century American Twain and the India's Roy, she is much younger than Twain was when he whipped out his masterpiece Huckleberry Finn (and a lot better looking).

But on second look the two are similar. Twain and Roy both grew up in the stagnant backwaters of nations torn by ethnic tension and emerging from an industrial revolution, and their hometowns are the skeletons of stories that they flesh out with friends and neighbors from their childhood. Pre bellum Missouri was and post colonial India is the frontier country of the English language, and the natives aren't above innovating with language when it serves their purpose. As Twain corrupted proper spelling to revive Mississippi Basin dialects, so Roy uses capital letters and punctuation freely to lend nuance, emphasis and irony to her story.

Like Twain, Roy employs children to tell her story. Told from Estha and Rahel's point of view (but not like Huck's matter-of-fact, first person narrative), it was a little disconcerting for me until I caught on. Embellished by the imagination of Rahel, the story gains authenticity, and the terror-to-come intensity, when seen through waist high eyes. Children are unencumbered by social restraints and inhibitions, and their darts at social injustice, the targets of Huckleberry Finn and The God of Small Things, fly true and sure.

Roy's Hannibal Missouri (Twain's St. Petersburg) is Aymanam and her Mississippi is the river Meenachal, and like Twain, her river is a silent but essential player in the plot that carries her characters to their fate. Huck and Tom's Indian counterparts are Rahel (girl) and Estha (boy), fraternal twins that are no less mischievous or precocious than their American cousins, and are employed similarly to poke fun at their betters and deflate their elders puffed up egos.

"Miss Mitten complained to Baby Kochamma about Estha's rudeness, and about their

reading backwards. She told Baby Kochamma that she had seen Satan in their eyes. nataS ni rieht seye.

.

They were made to write - In future we will not read backwards. In future we will not read backwards. A hundred times. Forwards.

.

A few monthes later Miss mitten was killed by a milk van in Hobart, across the road from a cricket oval. To the twins there was hidden justice in the fact that the milk van had been reversing. "

I couldn't help wondering if the funeral scene in chapter one wasn't borrowed from Twain's Tom Sawyer, except that instead of a beetle biting a stray dog during the service, it's a baby bat flying up an old auntie's dress. Roy's twins run away from home and cross the river to set up house far from menacing grownups, like Tom and Huck's pirate hideout on a river island. In fact, Roy's story of a family destroyed when forbidden love crosses social barriers is a chapter out of Huckleberry Finn (chapters 17 and 18, the Shepherdson/Grangerford feud)

The God of Small Things isn't one story but two; the misunderstandings and hatred that spell tragedy, and the devastation of all involved in the aftermath. The stories flow concurrently on Roy's river and converge in one day.

"Perhaps it's true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can
affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen
hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house – the charred clock, the
singed photograph, the scorched furniture – must be resurrected from the ruins
and examined. Preserved. Accounted for."

Roy is no more bound by time than she is by language. Her river doesn't flow in chronological order, but on currents of her choosing and the reader floats along with the story like her characters drifting in the stream towards tragedy. Only unlike them, you know the impending doom, for Roy spells it out in the first chapter and continues to remind you to the point of nagging throughout. This kind of foreshadowing isn't unknown, but while Shakespeare is subtle, Roy drills it in with a jack hammer. But by throwing aside time and order she hasn't diminished the tension or deflated the climax; if anything it she has tightened the noose. If you've seen the movie "21 Grams", then you get the idea of the terrifying effect that jumping between flashes past, present and future can be.

Twain and Roy share a few devices and they're exorcising the same demon, but they are sailing different rivers. Twain never once questions or criticizes slavery or racial prejudice. He pricks the absurd mentality of racism with humor and tickles the conscience. His river is flowing towards freedom and enlightenment, and he trusted the reader to come to the right conclusions and find the same landing that Huck tied up to in the end.

Roy bludgeons the reader with caste prejudice at its ugliest. Her river is polluted and poisoned by hatred and ignorance, a rancid swamp sucking humanity under like poor Sophie Mol. There's no harbor on the banks of this river, and Roy isn't navigating to the safety of fresh water. She thinks that the current is too strong and the poison is too deep. There's no hope in Roy's river.

We are being sucked under, drowning. All we can hope for is to break the surface for a fleeting moment before sinking forever.

"The Big things ever lurked inside. They knew that there is nowhere for them to
go. They had nothing. No future. So they stuck to the small things."

Arundhati Roy is an excellent writer, but her river isn't flowing like the Mississippi. Her river flows in reverse. She's like Rahel and Estha; it's like she's reading Huckleberry Finn backwards.

The God of Small Things isn't very uplifting.

Only Love

The head of the English department at the school where I teach made a curious choice for the required reading for the advanced level students.

The Color of Water by the black journalist James McBride. His mother, Ruth McBride Jordan was born Rachel Shilsky (actually Ruchel Dwara Zylska). Her father was a Rabbi that brought his family to America and made his living peddling religion and cheating the impoverished blacks in a backwater Southern town. Fleeing her abusive father, she escaped to New York and would have been vanished into the cesspool of drugs and prostitution had not she been rescued by a black man that eventually became her husband and a pastor of a church in Harlem.

I think one day I would like to write a blog about The Color of Water and about how unexpected was the choice of a Jewish woman's faith in Jesus as a message to Jewish students in an Israeli high school. But Ruth McBride came to my mind today for another reason.

A friend told me about how she came to know God only after meeting His people. At first she was drawn by their love, and then slowly and in the little things in life she began to feel God's love as well. If you hear her today, God is a real person in her life; her father. She talks to Him, pours her heart out to Him and sometimes gets mad at Him. There's real love there, and it started with the love of the people that are today her brothers and sisters.

I read not long ago this:
"I've also learned that nobody - ever - not ever one time - was argued into faith. Faith isn't ever a matter of argument. It's a matter of choice and obedience and will - stuff much sturdier in the end than mere "reasons" or just being "right" about things. Humans can't live on reasons alone.It's charity first. Take your limited understanding, feeble strength, and puny needs for validation off of it, and just be nice. That's really what it more often boils down to." (Stephanie)

It's charity, love. We can't know God through religion, we know Him through love. And we we'll never be able to explain the God we know to others with words, only with love. I think that was what I was trying to say to my daughter Maayan in "Sons or Servants"; that it's not the things we do, the religion, but the relationship itself, love, that God wants with us.

Ruth McBride grew up in a house full of religion. It was rules and laws, but also a house of abuse and selfishness. She ran away to people dissimilar in every way to herself and those she left behind, and found a home, a place where God dwells. And she found that place through love.

Desperately Seeking Koby

For me, like many English speakers in Israel, Sherri Mandell was a familiar name by the turn of the millennium. She was a kind of Israeli Erma Bombeck that wrote short and light stories for the Jerusalem Post, spinning well written tales of children and life, and always wrapping it up with a cheerful moral.

One story in particular caught my eye. It is an account of how her son's canary escapes and just when all is lost, Ibrahim, an Arab construction worker that is barely literate but with good hearing, helps them find the canary. She ended with, "Maybe this is how peace will come, I thought. Slowly. People learning to listen. One bird at a time."

Sherri wrote that shortly after the Palestinian Authority had declared war on Israeli commuters, school children and innocent bystanders; so I didn't buy her optimism. But I liked the story. I cut it out of the newspaper and saved it because it was written well and pleasant to the ear.

One spring morning Sherri's oldest son Koby cut school with his best friend and hiked down into the wadi near their settlement that is halfway between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. Search parties found the boys at dawn the following morning. They had been stoned to death in one of the caves in the canyon walls.

The Blessing Of A Broken Heart is Sherri's journey after her son's murder. We follow her as she chooses to enter that land of shadows parents fear the most, a cave so dark that "you can't even see your own hand, but have to trust that when you step, the ground will still be under you."

I say she made a choice because she could have collapsed, paralyzed by grief; but instead she decides that if Koby has been taken into the darkness, then she will follow, regardless of the pain.

"I want to feel the pain – for if I go into my pain and truly experience it, swim in it, there is a chance I will emerge on the other shore of my loss, still pained and struggling, but with a different vision. I will always be living in the land of suffering. One who enters this pain understands that death is part of life, and is here, always. Death now is something that will release me and allow me to see Koby again. Death no longer scares me."

Writing during an unparalleled period of violence and hatred, Sherri doesn't settle accounts with her son's murderers or voice her opinions. She doesn't seek revenge; she seeks one thing and one thing only – Koby. She finds faith along her way and emerges with hope; "…many of us live with broken hearts. But when you touch broken hearts together, a new heart emerges, one that is more open and compassionate, able to touch others, a heart that seeks God. That is the blessing of a broken heart."

She has gained hope, and she has been transformed from a woman that wrote well, into a writer, perhaps a great one. You can find an excerpt, "Koby's Death", on the Jerusalem Post's website. It is one of the most powerful pieces of prose I have ever encountered. Before, she wrote things that sounded nice, but didn't ring true. In The Blessing Of A Broken Heart there is sincerity, truth and meaning. That too is a blessing, but at what a price.