Goodbye to All That

For generations, the Jews of Caracas had idyllic weather, prosperity, and vibrant communal organizations. Things have changed under Hugo Chávez.

By Vox Tablet

During a recent trip to Bogotá, Colombia, where I’d lived for years, I discovered that the wealthier parts of the city were filling up with an odd sort of super-refugee. The new arrivals were mainly rich Venezuelans fleeing an increasingly chaotic situation in their home country: oil execs booted out by nationalization, industrialists frustrated by the corrupt and now hostile business environment, successful entrepreneurs and others displaced by a newly minted Russian-style oligarchy loyal to Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez. These transplants, many of them Jews, were arriving in the Colombian capital and prospering because they had tremendous skills and valuable international connections—and because they were coming with their social and business ties intact. Their first complaint was invariably about what they called “the security situation” in Caracas. That they found Bogotá to be an island of safety and peace by comparison was alarming.

Through some of these new Colombians, I was introduced to a man named Alan Vainrub. In 2005, Vainrub’s parents sat him down in their spacious apartment in Caracas, on the lush lower slopes of Ávila mountain, to talk about his future. Vainrub, then 23, held an engineering degree from the local Universidad Metropolitana and was happily employed at Procter & Gamble. He had designs on an overseas MBA, after he’d gained more work experience. But Vainrub’s father, a doctor, told him that the domestic political situation was getting worse under Chávez; by the following year, Vainrub’s father said, there might be hundreds of upper-class Venezuelans applying for business degrees, all looking for a way out.

Vainrub was in no hurry to leave. After all, he was the comfortable heir to one of the great flowerings of the Jewish postwar diaspora, third- and fourth-generation Venezuelans with education, social clout, and roots. Jews had first arrived in Venezuela from Curaçao, a haven from the Inquisition, in the 19th century. “Turcos”—the catch-all term for anyone of roughly Middle-Eastern coloring or north African descent, regardless of their religion—had been arriving in the country since the 1900s. And a long tradition of lenient immigration policies—especially after World War II, based in part on the need for expertise and manpower to exploit the country’s single most important resource, oil—meant that Europeans, Iberians, Chinese, Russians, and other Latin Americans were all welcome there. Venezuelans came in all colors and had intermarried for centuries, fashioning a fully mestizo culture brewed from the descendants of indigenous people, Spanish colonials, African slaves, and 20th-century immigrants. Jews were a tiny, accepted minority. People called each other affectionately demeaning nicknames, instead of epithets: mi vieja, mi gorda, mi negra.

But by the time Vainrub’s father sat him down, the Jewish community of Caracas, which once numbered in the tens of thousands, was in precipitous decline. The major cause of this decline was the 1998 election of Chávez—now the longest-serving head of state in the Western hemisphere. After surviving an ouster by coup in 2002, and pushing through constitutional reform to end presidential term limits, Chávez, who declared his recent battle against cancer won, now openly projects his rule into the middle of the 21st century. He has proclaimed the next 10 years to be the Bronze Age of the Bolivarian Revolution, a hybrid of populism and socialism soldered onto a Napoleonic personality cult. The Bronze Age is to be followed by an intermediary Silver Age, and then concluded, beginning in 2031, with the Golden Age of the Bolivarian Revolution.

Over the years, as Chávez’s brash populism has been buoyed by income from Venezuela’s vast, nationalized oil reserves, an object of his political manipulation has become the Caracas elite—“estos ricachones,” roughly translated: those fat cats, as he has dismissively referred to the upper class. In 2004, Chávez made his first official visit to Tehran and struck up a personal friendship and diplomatic alliance with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, whom he welcomed to Venezuela this month. This came after decades of political tutelage from another Holocaust denier, the Argentine ultra-nationalist Norberto Ceresole, who died in 2003 but who managed to instill a conspiratorial, amalgamated view of Jews in his pupil. Chávez has seemed to find in anti-Zionism, and later anti-Semitism, a valuable political tool, one that enhances, or makes more precise, his love of straw-man rhetoric and open hostility toward the United States, first against the bellicosity of George W. Bush and then against President Barack Obama, who remains an avatar of “imperialismo yanqui,” which has abetted “las oligarquias” in Latin America.

And so in 2006, Alan Vainrub entered Harvard Business School, hoping to return to Venezuela after graduation and rejoin the Jewish community of Caracas. But the intervening five years have made that dream seem foolish, if not suicidal. As the reality of Chávez’s durability has set in, nearly half of Venezuela’s Jewish community has fled from the social and economic chaos that the president has unleashed and from the uncomfortable feeling that they were being specifically targeted by the regime.

In this significant migration I saw the seeds of a story of dispossession and loss unlike any other in the hemisphere, a tale spanning five generations—from Europe to Israel to the Americas and back. What I found was at stake for people like Vainrub, his sister, his parents, his Caracas-born grandmother, and her German-born Jewish parents, was the very idea of a “Venezuelan Jew”—a patriotic, Latin-inflected, Holocaust-surviving, entrepreneurial, cosmopolitan, privileged, devout, convivial, passionate, Merengue-dancing, carefree, and idiosyncratic species. How dangerous must a situation get for a Jew to cast off the identity he had constructed for himself and his family as a person rooted in a particular place? I asked this question of everyone I met: What is your limit? When do you leave? On the one hand, there was the Jewish leader who made religion his measure. “I won’t stop being Jewish,” he told me. “If by staying I can’t be Jewish, then I’m not staying.” But many more seemed to have the tolerance of community association President Salomón Cohen Botbol. Just three weeks before I met him, Botbol’s oldest son, who had graduated from high school, had been kidnapped—allegedly by ransom-seeking delinquents. Understanding the situation of what they call “secuestro express,” Botbol said, meant he knew that the assault would be no more than a few unpleasant and costly hours—“the scariest of my life,” he said, but nothing out of the ordinary. An arrangement was made—Botbol declined to offer the details—and the family resumed its life. “In this case it wasn’t traumatic,” he said. “But there are traumatic cases.”

Wasn’t finding your son in mortal danger reason enough to abandon a sinking ship? “I’m not thinking of leaving,” he answered.

***

On Dec. 2, 2007, the day a constitutional referendum was held to abolish term limits, the Chávez government raided the undisputed hub of Jewish life in Caracas, the Colegio y Centro Social, Cultural y Deportivo Hebraica, the site of the main Jewish school and club. It was the second such invasion. This time, masked and armed police piled over the walls as elementary-school children arrived for class. The government claimed it was acting on a vague, anonymous tip that the club was harboring weapons, or was a front for Mossad. In both cases, the raids were officially declared “unfruitful.”

Continue reading: Inside the Jewish islands

It’s unnerving, on a gut level, the juxtaposition of these accounts of survival (and, inevitably, also some stories of not surviving) with recipes for comfort food. Recipes Remembered includes traditional preparations of foods like kreplach, noodle kugel, and gefilte fish; dishes that were family favorites (Romanian survivor Gita Rothman contributed a sour cream strudel with loukoum filling), and recipes from lost homelands. Some of the foods featured became unforgettable because the people consuming them were starving; others didn’t become staples until long after the war.

From Hersh’s description of Polish survivor Regina Schmidt Finer’s recipe for kluskies, or potato dumplings, as “the little black dress of potato dishes” to former New York City Mayor Ed Koch’s blurb extolling, “All the recipes in this book are wonderful!” Recipes Remembered is characterized by a kind of generic uplift, familiar from other earnest attempts to balance the horrors of history with survivors’ astonishing fortitude and to translate that into hope for the future.

Hersh’s book is not the first to explicitly tie recipes to Holocaust remembrance. In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy From the Women of Terezin, edited by Cara de Silva, came out in 1996, and Holocaust Survivor Cookbook: Collected From Around the World, which Joanne Caras self-published, came in 2007. Both books turn to recipes as authentic artifacts from the same painful chapter, and they champion them as a means of remembrance and testaments to survival. De Silva contributed her own laudatory blurb to Recipes Remembered, while Caras has argued for the superior authenticity of her own book, which she describes as “a world mitzvah project.” (Like with Hersh’s Recipes Remembered the proceeds from Caras’ book went to Jewish charities.)

Hersh’s version certainly has the greatest reach, and its popularity is a sign that, amid no shortage of carefully packaged ways to Never Forget, people are hungry for something that offers tangible insight into the experience of Holocaust survival and fresh ways to consider their own relationship to it. And in some ways Recipes Remembered is a fitting tribute, making the point that memories live on through the senses and imbuing the storied experience of Holocaust survival with relatable specifics: Meeting a future spouse in a displaced persons camp. Being sheltered and ultimately saved by a kind priest. Poppyseed cookies. As Hersh explains in the introduction, putting together the book was a process of discovery. “They became ‘my’ survivors,” she writes, noting that she spoke to every contributor, creating “my connection to the past and my reason to optimistically embrace the future.” She explains that her project was driven by curiosity and a general desire to pay tribute to the survivor community, rather than a specific personal connection to the Holocaust.

There’s no question that there’s awkwardness to a book that celebrates food against the backdrop of a historical trauma in which millions of people were starving. But as I paged through it, I found the specific source of my discomfort harder to pin down. It’s certainly not that I’m worried about ruined appetites. Some of the meals we remember most vividly may not have been remarkable in and of themselves; it’s the experience of them that resonates and turns even basic flavors into the kernels of indelible memories. If anything, struggle sharpens one’s senses, and hardship, or even just stories about it, can actually make certain foods more palatable, deepening our experience of eating. Here, though, it’s hard to pay attention to the recipes in light of the heartbreaking stories being presented with them. In this complicated cookbook, is the food supposed to be beside the point?

Here’s Hersh, introducing a story of survival from Hanna Kleiner Wechsler, a preface to her recipe for strawberry-filled blintzes:

Those willing to share their stories have an amazing spirit, an outlook on life that inspires and a perspective we can all benefit from. Hanna began our conversation by saying, “If you overcome this, you can do anything. There are seven wonders in the world, I consider my survival the eighth.” After speaking with her, and getting to know her well, I would have to agree!

It’s also a little strange to find that the survivors’ stories, as Hersh imparts them, feel like recipes themselves. They follow a formula, each starting by taking stock of where a person has come from, moving on to account for his or her losses, and then concluding with a tally of how many children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren have resulted from that one survival. “From this sorrow that I went through,” says Polish survivor Sonya Oshman, leading into a recipe for spaghetti with onion and tomato sauce, “God compensated me with two wonderful children and four beautiful grandchildren.” It’s clear from these standard finishes that Hersh asked for that tally, which is poignant by definition, but frustrating in its blanket use as a happy ending to a rather grim equation. The aura of optimism here is genuine, and arguably necessary to make the pairing of stories and recipes at all palatable. But as an editorial voice, the life-affirming tone makes the book feel a little canned—and evasive.

Despite the book’s cheerfulness, it’s clear that the pleasure of its recipes is meant to be derived largely from their difficulty—not the level of skill required to prepare them, but the fraught histories that cling to them. As delicious as these dishes may be, they’re meant to be appreciated because of what the people who prepared them lived through. That readers will synthesize these threads of cooking and remembering is the not-so-subtle hope behind all the warm sentiment.

It’s hard to imagine an uplifting cookbook coming out of other historical traumas, ones perhaps less well digested by the culture at large. I suspect that a “Holocaust cookbook” (as I perhaps inevitably began to refer to Recipes Remembered) is only permissible after enough years have passed and we’ve moved through more straightforward kinds of reckoning and commemoration. But while the format of this act of remembrance is novel, its tone is not. The book’s earnestness makes me want to roll my eyes, not because I think we’re past the point of needing a push to remember the Holocaust but because we still need one badly, and Recipes Remembered seems to promise a kind of complexity that it doesn’t deliver.

Regardless of how carefully we outline the narratives for others, we don’t have full control over the stories and facts that stick to our treasured dishes, or the recollections that surface as we prepare and share and savor them. Though all of us survive in some way because of food, the stories that live on do so because we choose to keep telling them. And unlike the care and precision required to bake a perfect honey cake, those stories tend to hit harder when they don’t follow a recipe.

CORRECTION, October 18: In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy From the Women of Terezin was published in 1996, not 2006. This error has been corrected.

Just minutes from the affluent seaside town of Carmel, this is where Drew and Myra Goodman, two transplants from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, started selling organic raspberries in 1984. Their company now draws produce from 36,000 acres of farmland spread across six states and five countries, washes and wraps it in recycled plastic containers, and ships it across the continent. Today, Earthbound is available in three-quarters of supermarkets in the United States. If you’re buying organic baby spinach at a Whole Foods in December, chances are it’s from Earthbound.

Myra Goodman, an unlikely organic pioneer, is the face of this agricultural behemoth. The Brooklyn-born daughter of Holocaust survivors, she is an effusive talker, leaping from tales of her childhood to the well-rehearsed story of Earthbound’s founding and back again, peppering the narrative with details of her Rosh Hashanah dinner (“We said all the prayers. We didn’t blow the shofar.”), Drew’s weekly basketball game (“the longest running pickup game in the history of the Valley”), and her support group of local empty-nesters.

Reared in Manhattan, she grew up on East 86th Street, a block away from her future husband. The pair attended the same private high school, the now defunct New Lincoln School, but didn’t meet until they had both relocated to the West Coast for college—she to Berkeley, Drew to Santa Cruz. Their first date occurred when Drew gave Myra a lift to Berkeley for a Grateful Dead show at the Greek Theatre and then invited himself to stay over at her apartment.

“He took me out to dinner and he ordered two entrees,” Goodman recalled. “And then he came back to my apartment. That’s how it started.”

Earthbound’s founding has an equally serendipitous quality. After graduation, the couple moved to a small house in the Carmel Valley and began raising raspberries. Later, they added baby salad greens to the mix, trucking them up to restaurants in San Francisco. Business got so busy that Goodman began washing and bagging enough lettuce to last the couple through the week.

At the time, there was no equipment to aid that process. So, the Goodmans turned to Myra’s father, Mendek Rubin. Born to an Orthodox family in Jaworzno, Poland, in 1924, Rubin was known for his ingenuity: Family lore has it that he developed ways to parcel out precious food rations and conserve heat during his years in Nazi captivity. After the war, Rubin landed in Brooklyn, where he applied his mechanical aptitude to the jewelry business, eventually developing several patents that improved clasps and fasteners for bracelets. “For 14 years, every bangled bracelet in the whole wide world was my father’s snaps,” Goodman said.

But the horrors he endured during the war never left him. When Goodman was young, her father would wake her in the middle of the night to show her where the family gold was hidden. “My dad, with his inventive mind—it was very complicated,” Goodman said. “It was like you open this, and put your hand in, there’s a trap door, and you go like this and you pop this up. You’re 6, and it’s two in the morning and it’s dark, and you’re being told that if the bad guys come and your parents are killed, you hide, and then you come and find the gold to escape. This is how I was raised.”

Rubin eventually helped his daughter and her husband set up a small assembly line in their living room to process salad. He rigged a 4-ounce weight to a bicycle bell to announce when the bags were filled. “It was a Dr. Seuss-kind of thing,” said Goodman. The technological innovations that followed will be featured next year in an exhibit on food history at the Smithsonian in Washington.

The company’s scrappy beginnings have become central to Earthbound’s marketing lore, helping deflect some of the criticism they’ve attracted over the years from folks who hold fast to the notion that the only true organic food is locally grown on a quaint family farm.

“They’re very smart in using that story for their marketing and their image,” said Samuel Fromartz, who profiled the company for his 2006 book Organic Inc. “But it’s not a fictitious story. It’s truly what happened to them.”

The Goodmans like to say that organic farming is “scale neutral,” that there’s nothing inherent to the growing of food without synthetic chemicals that mandates it be done on modest acreage. They proudly point to the millions of chemicals Earthbound has avoided applying to fields, the post-consumer recycled packaging it uses, and the company’s widespread use of biodiesel fuel as evidence of their commitment to sustainable principles.

“If there was more regional food, and there was more food that was a completely closed system, less dependent on fossil fuel and used less packaging, that would be awesome,” said Goodman. “But that is going to happen slowly. We’re able to make a really big impact. It’s not perfect. But it’s so much better than buying something conventional.”

Traveling by train to Budapest, Hungary, from Vienna in the summer of 1980, Pfeifer was questioned by a female customs official who entered his compartment and asked him politely if he had anything to declare. Pfeifer replied that he did not, but the official looked inside his bag, where she found several dozen photocopies of a review of the memoir Seven Thousand Days in Siberia by Karlo Stajner, published in a Hungarian-language Yugoslavian newspaper. An Austrian-born, Croatian Communist, Stajner had traveled to Moscow in 1932 with dreams of building the international socialist revolution. But like so many others, he became a victim of the cold realities of Stalinist paranoia and was condemned to the gulag.

“I’m going to take away this dirt,” the border official told Pfeifer.

“I draw your attention to the fact that this is not dirt,” Pfeifer calmly replied in Hungarian, a language he’d had learned while living in Budapest from 1938 until fleeing for Palestine in 1943. “This comes from the official paper of the Socialist Youth of Yugoslavia,” he said, in which bristling critiques of the Soviet system were not uncommon.

Thus began Pfeifer’s troubles with the Hungarian Communist regime. (He would later discover from Austrian diplomats briefed about the circumstances that it was his use of the phrase “I draw your attention” and not “I beg to draw your attention” that drew the customs officer’s ire.) Pfeifer was taken off the train and brought to the customs station, where a higher-ranking officer informed him that he had “provoked” the official and would be deported back to Austria. Told that the Hungarian government would pay for his return ticket, he replied: “Finally, at 51 years of age, the Hungarian state pays something for me? Very good.”

Until his final deportation from the country in 1987, Pfeifer acted as a courier between Hungary’s dissidents and the West. “Through Karl Pfeifer we obtained real, normal contact with the democratic, liberal, outside world,” Attila Ara-Kovacs, a Hungarian dissident, said in a 2008 interview for an Austrian documentary about Pfeifer’s life, Somehow in Between. “This contact was very important for us. It naturally changed our lives.”

Pfeifer’s courier work started in May 1979, when a friend in Vienna asked him to deliver medicines to acquaintances in Budapest. Meeting those Budapest acquaintances, a group of sociologists, Pfeifer remarked that Hungary, then practicing a form of “goulash communism”—which allowed for a small degree of private enterprise, greater personal liberties, and easier travel to the West—was “quite free for a communist country.” Afterward, one of the sociologists, Tamás Földvári, took Pfeifer outside and said that his impression of Hungary was false. For instance, he said, workers in rural areas who complained about conditions were targeted for physical violence by the secret police.

Back in Vienna, Pfeifer got in touch with the editor of the social democratic newspaper Arbeiter Zeitung, or Worker’s News, who expressed interest in having Pfeifer publish dispatches from Hungary. Writing under the pseudonym Peter Koroly, Pfeifer began traveling back and forth to Budapest, banging out stories on his Hermes Baby typewriter about everything from the country’s periodic economic crises to the tide of young men refusing military service.

In 1982, two years after that first deportation from the Hungarian train, Pfeifer became editor of Die Gemeinde, or The Community, Vienna’s Jewish newspaper. Pfeifer, whose youthful energy belies his 83 years, told me recently at a Vienna café that this assignment changed his situation, “insofar as for the Austrians it was very uncomfortable” that he be denied entry to a neighboring country. Pfeifer sent a letter of protest to Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, an assimilated Jew who nonetheless had former Nazis in his Cabinet. “I said, ‘Look, Waffen SS men, Arrow Cross men”—from the far right Hungarian party—“can go to Hungary. They get a visa, and I have family that are survivors and I cannot get in. It’s against human rights.’ ” Soon after sending the letter, Pfeifer got his visa.

Because the Hungarian regime of János Kádár was trying to present itself as practicing a more reformed version of communism, it tolerated Pfeifer entering the country. But that didn’t stop authorities from deporting him three more times over the ensuing years. “The more they did it, the more I hated their guts,” he told me. The last straw was a 1987 meeting in Budapest with a high-ranking official from the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, who informed Pfeifer that the Hungarian government would no longer allow him to meet with any members of the opposition. Pfeifer responded that, as “a modest Austrian journalist and not a Hungarian policeman,” he did not know whether the Hungarians he interviewed were members of the opposition. “Would you be so kind as to give me a written list and I promise you I won’t meet anybody on the list?” he asked. This sly retort led to Pfeifer’s last expulsion. When Hungary opened the archives of its Communist-era secret police following the democratic transition in 1991, Pfeifer discovered that he had a 100-page file in which regime agents accused him of “ideological subversion,” an allegation that today makes him “incredibly proud,” he told me.

Anti-Semitism was not, at least initially, a major concern for Pfeifer in his early journalism about Hungary. “I was of the opinion that this problem had more or less solved itself in the people’s republics,” he recounts in the documentary. “Whereby I was terribly wrong.” In 1982, he decided to report on the 100th anniversary of the “Tiszaeszlár Affair,” an incident involving the disappearance of a young Christian girl in a northern Hungarian village that had led to a Jewish blood libel, pogroms, and the formation of a political faction called the National Anti-Semitic Party. Meeting with a high-level official in the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, Pfeifer was told, “We won’t allow you to import anti-Semitism from Austria to Hungary. We have solved this problem once and for all in 1945.”

Living under regimes that denied the particularly Jewish aspects of the Holocaust and the continuing evils of anti-Semitism within their own societies, the people of the Eastern Bloc did not experience, in the same way Western Europeans did, the decades-long, postwar process of atonement and recognition for the crimes committed against their Jewish populations. This is the battle for historical truth that Pfeifer has fought for decades.

***

Born in the Austrian spa town of Baden bei Wien to Hungarian parents in 1928, Karl Pfiefer fled with his family to Hungary following the Nazi Anschluss of 1938. In Budapest, Pfeifer was recruited into the Hashomir Hatzair socialist Zionist youth movement. Paradoxically, he believes that the anti-Semitism he experienced as a young boy saved him from a far worse fate. “Somehow, one has to be thankful for Austrian anti-Semitism,” Pfeifer says with a chuckle in Somehow in Between. “Of the 180,000 [Austrian] Jews, 120,000 fled thanks to Austrian anti-Semitism.”

Things were not much better in Budapest. “In Hungary, people had illusions,” he says in the film. Every morning, students in his Jewish school rose to recite a nationalistic poem, which went something along the lines of, “I believe in one homeland. I believe in one God. I believe in a divine justice. I believe in the resurrection of Hungary.” That “resurrection” was a not-so-thinly veiled reference to the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, the post-World War I agreement that broke up the Austro-Hungarian Empire and left about a third of ethnic Hungarians living outside the Hungarian successor state and that remains a curse word among latter-day Hungarian nationalists. “I always said it the other way round,” Pfeifer recalls in Somehow in Between. “I do not believe in one God. I do not believe in divine justice. And I certainly do not believe in the resurrection of Hungary.” Pfeifer’s ardent Zionism and disavowal of Hungarian identity led to fierce fights with his father, who beat him repeatedly.

Continue reading: “Nazi tones,” a controversial suicide, and the new Hungarian right. Or view as a single page.

The skinny young guy sitting next to me says, “It’s me. I did it. When we got on the plane, I talked to my wife on my cell, remember? She told me she was on the way to the beach with our daughter and the baby. I’m sitting here with my safety belt buckled, and all I can think about is, why the hell am I going to Italy? Instead of spending Saturday with my wife and daughters, why am I flying six hours, including a connecting flight, for some hour-long meeting my boss said was important? I hope the plane breaks down. I swear, that’s what I thought; I hope the plane breaks down, and look what happened.”

As we re-enter the terminal, a big woman wearing a flowered dress and dragging a suitcase the size of coffin goes up to the skinny guy and asks him where we’re coming from. “Who cares where we’re coming from,” he winks at me, “the main thing is that we’re on our way home.”

A few hours later, when I get on the small, crowded replacement plane that will take me to Rome on my way to Sicily, I’ll walk down the aisle and notice that the skinny guy isn’t there. Throughout the flight, I’ll picture him on the beach in Tel Aviv building sandcastles with his wife and daughter, and I’ll be jealous.

I also have a wife and little boy waiting for me in Tel Aviv. From the start, this trip was really inconvenient for me too, and it’s becoming less desirable with every minute of delay. On Saturday evening I’m supposed to take part in an event at the small Sicilian book festival in the town of Taormina. When the organizers invited me, I agreed to go because I thought I could take my family with me, but a few weeks ago, my wife realized that she had a prior work commitment, and I was stuck with my own promise to attend the festival. The trip, originally planned for a week, would be shortened to two days, and now it turns out that, due to the supernatural powers of a skinny young guy who wanted to play in the sand with his kid, half of those two days would be wasted in airports.

Because of the delay, I miss my connecting flight from Rome to Catania, in Sicily. When I finally make it to the island, it’s another long ride to Taormina, and by the time I arrive at the hotel, it’s already dark. A mustached reception clerk gives me the key to my room. Lying asleep on a small couch in the lobby is a cute little boy, about 7, who looks just like the reception clerk, minus the mustache. I climb into bed with all my clothes on and fall asleep.

The night goes by in a long, dark, dreamless instant, but the morning makes up for it. I open the window to find that I’m in a dream: Stretched out before me is a gorgeous landscape of beach and stone houses. A long walk and a few conversations in broken English punctuated with a lot of enthusiastic arm-waving reinforce the unreal feel of the place. After all, I know this sea very well: It’s the same Mediterranean that’s only a five-minute walk from my house in Tel Aviv, but the peace and tranquility projected by the locals here is something I have never encountered before. The same sea, but without the frightening, black, existential cloud I’m used to seeing hanging over it. Maybe this is what Shimon Peres meant back in those innocent days when he talked about “the new Middle East.”

This is Taormina’s first book festival. The people on the organizing team are extremely nice, and the atmosphere is relaxed; this festival seems to have everything but an audience at the events. Not that I’m passing judgment on the city’s residents: When you’re in the heart of a paradise like this, in the middle of a hot July, would you rather spend the day at one of the most beautiful beaches in the world or in a mosquito-riddled public garden having your mind numbed by a wild-haired writer speaking strangely accented English?

But in the harmonious atmosphere of Taormina, even a small audience isn’t considered a failure. I think that these pleasant people, who speak such a lovely, melodious Italian and live in such gorgeous surroundings, would accept even boils and plagues with an understanding smile. After the event, the mild-mannered English translator points to the dark sea and tells me that during the day you can see the Italian mainland from here. “You see those lights there?” he asks, pointing toward a few flickering pinpoints. “That’s Reggio Calabria, the southernmost city in Italy.”

When I was a kid, my parents used to tell me bedtime stories. They’re both Holocaust survivors, and during the war, the stories they were told by their parents were never read from books because there were no books to be had, so they made up stories. As parents themselves, they continued that tradition and, from a very young age, I felt a special pride because the bedtime stories I heard every night couldn’t be bought in any store; they were mine alone. My mother’s stories were always about dwarves and fairies, while my father’s were about the time he lived in southern Italy, from 1946 to 1948.

His fellow members of the Irgun wanted him to try to buy weapons for them, and after asking around and pulling a few strings, my father found himself at the southernmost tip of Italy, from which you can see the Sicilian coast—Reggio Calabria. There he rubbed shoulders with the local Mafia and, in the end, persuaded them to sell him rifles for the Irgun to use to fight the British. Since he had no money to rent an apartment, the local Mafia offered him free lodgings in a whorehouse they owned there, and that, it seems, was the best time of his life.

The heroes of my father’s bedtime stories were always drunks and prostitutes, and as a child, I loved them very much. I didn’t know yet what a drunk and a prostitute were, but I did recognize magic, and my father’s bedtime stories were filled with magic and compassion. And now, 40 years later, here I am, not far from the world of my childhood stories. I try to imagine my father coming here after the war, 19 years old at the time, to this place that, despite its many troubles and dark alleys, projects such a sense of peace and tranquility. Compared to the horrors and cruelty he witnessed during the war, it’s easy to imagine how his new acquaintances from the underworld must have appeared to him: happy, even compassionate. He walks down the street, smiling faces wish him a good day in mellifluous Italian, and for the first time in his adult life, he doesn’t have to be afraid or hide the fact that he’s a Jew.

When I try to reconstruct those bedtime stories my father told me years ago, I realize that beyond their fascinating plots, they were meant to teach me something. Something about the almost desperate human need to find the good in the least likely places. Something about the desire not to beautify reality, but to persist in searching for an angle that would put ugliness in a better light and create affection and empathy for every wart and wrinkle on its scarred face. And here, in Sicily, 63 years after my father left it, facing a few dozen pairs of riveted eyes and a lot of empty plastic chairs, that mission suddenly seems more possible than ever.

Translated by Sondra Silverston

The leading figure behind the halakhic ruling is Shmuel Eliyahu, the chief rabbi in the northern city of Safed. Eliyahu began agitating against renting to Arabs in Safed in October with a 400-participant conference titled “Quiet War: Combating Assimilation in the Holy City of Safed.”

Since then, Eliyahu has drummed up support among dozens of rabbis across Israel to condemn real estate deals with non-Jews. His ruling cites the books of Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy to call on Jews not to sell or rent to gentiles to prevent intermarriage and to protect Jews from “sinful influence.” But Eliyahu’s arguments aren’t all biblical: The edict also notes that “following the sale or rental of one apartment, the price of all the neighboring apartments declines even when the buyers or tenants are nice at first.”

Signatories include the chief rabbis of Eilat, Bat Yam, Holon, Dimona, Ashdod, Maaleh Adumim, and Meitar—a mix of religious and secular cities, and almost a third of Israel’s 126 municipal rabbis, who are appointed by councils made of local rabbis, synagogue leaders, and representatives from the municipal religious council. These rabbis receive their salary from their municipalities, which in turn are funded by the Ministry of the Interior and by the Ministry of Religious Affairs. According to David Rosen, an Israeli rabbi based in Jerusalem who works on interfaith dialogue for the American Jewish Committee, these rabbis supervise kashrut, register marriages, appoint local rabbis, and preside over the local beit din, or religious court.

In an interview Sunday evening with Israel’s Channel 2 News, Eliyahu appeared in a white dress shirt, a wide white yarmulke, and frameless spectacles. Asked about comparisons to the Nuremberg Laws, which included a prohibition against renting to Jews, Eliyahu explained that Israel’s Arabs aim “to flood Israel with Arab refugees.”

“No Jew said he wanted to throw the Germans into the sea,” Eliyahu said. “But the Arabs have been declaring for 70 years that this is their goal.”

Mordechai Negari, the rabbi for the settlement of Maale Adumim, said he signed the letter because Eliyahu “is fighting the holy war on behalf of our daughters.” He continued: “We must keep our Jewish identity. You know the percentage of intermarriage in America? Eighty percent. This is what we need in Israel?”

Eliyahu’s Safed is a mostly Jewish city of 30,000, and it is one of the four holy cities in Israel, along with Jerusalem, Hebron, and Tiberias. It is also home to Safed College, where 550 of the 2,600 students are Arab, according to a college spokesman. Those Arab students come from neighboring Druze, Christian, Muslim, and Circassian villages, and those who live far away rent apartments and rooms in Safed. The spokesman said that in response to Eliyahu’s call, Safed College is trying to find space in the dorms, which house 130 students, and that the student union helps Arab students find apartments.

Meanwhile, much of the media attention has been focused on Eli Tzvieli, an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor who has lived in Safed for 60 years and happens to live next door to Eliyahu. Over the summer, Tzvieli rented rooms in his apartment to three Arab students of the Safed College, which is within walking distance of his home. But Tzvieli soon realized he got more than he bargained for. His neighbor, the rabbi, visited and offered to buy out the students’ lease so they would leave. Tzvieli refused. Tzvieli said he began getting phone calls and even an anonymous threat to burn down his building. Someone posted placards on his door accusing him of “returning the Arabs” to Safed, in reference to the 12,000 Arab residents, including the family of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who left the city in Israel’s 1948 War for Independence.

“I see them as people,” Tzvieli said of his tenants. “They are residents of Israel; they don’t do anything against the state. They are nice boys. If I can help them with their studies, I will.”

Tzvieli is hardly alone in rejecting the edict. In a statement released last week, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial museum condemned the rabbis’ letter as “a serious blow to the fundamental values of our lives as Jews and people in a democratic state.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also condemned the ruling last week in Jerusalem. “How would we feel if someone would say not to sell an apartment to Jews?” he said. “We would be outraged. These things cannot happen, not to Jews and not to Arabs.”

Two prominent ultra-Orthodox rabbis who Rosen termed “the nonagenarian chief honchos of ultra-Orthodoxy,” are also rumored to be against the edict. Yosef Shalom Eliashiv, a leading ultra-Orthodox posek, or arbiter of Jewish law, reportedly said of Eliyahu and his supporters, “There are rabbis who must have their pens taken away from them.” Rabbi Aharon Yehuda Leib Shteinman, another prominent ultra-Orthodox rabbi, also did not sign the letter, and as a result, some of the signatories are backpedaling. At the same time, hundreds of other rabbis are also signing on. In a similar spirit, Lehava, an anti-assimilation organization, set up a hotline last week for callers to snitch on people who rent or sell property to Arabs, so that their names can be made public.

Eliyahu is unapologetic. “The rabbi will continue to serve his loyal public and to help the people of Israel, wherever they may be, to continue to help in the process of returning to Zion,” Eliyahu’s aide, Mor Dahan, said. “The base of the state of Israel is to build a Jewish house for the people of Israel in the land of Israel.”

The edict is a small part of a larger widening gulf between Israel’s 20-percent Arab population and its Jews, highlighted by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s proposal to redraw the borders of Israel around an exchange of Jewish settlements in the West Bank for major Arab cities like Umm el Fahem. The increasing tension was highlighted last May when Haneen Zoabi, a member of the Arab Balad party, joined the Mavi Marmara, which was bound for Gaza despite an Israeli blockade.

In Safed, Arab students say it has gotten more difficult to find apartments since Eliyahu began his campaign. Mohamed Ganaim, a 22-year-old law student from the nearby Arab town of Sakhnin, said religious Israeli students at Safed College began demonstrating after Eliyahu announced his edict.

“They said ‘death to the Arabs’ and started throwing stones at the Arab students’ houses,” Ganaim said.

Ganaim moved to Safed last year and said he never used to have a problem with his Jewish neighbors. In fact, he said, religious Jews often asked Arab neighbors to turn their lights on and off on the Sabbath, when it is forbidden for Jews to work.

Tzvieli said he will continue to rent to Arabs above the protests of his vocal neighbor. “This is already a matter of principle,” he said. “I think it is forbidden for us to create a rift between ourselves and the Arab population. It’s not human, and it isn’t appropriate to Judaism at all.”

Daniella Cheslow is a freelance writer and photographer based in Jerusalem.

The event, called “Training teacher-trainers: European Holocaust History, Human Rights, and Tolerance Today,” featured just one session open to the public, held on Monday morning. The speakers at the opening session were U.S. Ambassador Anne E. Derse; State Jewish Museum (Tolerance Center) head Markas Zingeris; diplomat-historian Alfonsas Eidintas; and two senior Jewish-American dignitaries, AJC director of international relations Andrew Baker, and Washington Holocaust Museum outreach director Stephen Feinberg. The controversial right-wing Jewish MP Emanuelis Zingeris, himself a signatory of the Prague Declaration, made a characteristically dramatic entry halfway through and spoke briefly. Finally, a vice-director of the museum invited the assembled to coffee and politely reminded everyone that the following sessions were closed to all but invited participants.

None of the speakers made any acknowledgment to the silently seated leaders of the Jewish community, who were not asked by the organizers to say a word of greeting. And not one of the speeches managed to mention the essential facts of the sobering history: The Baltics had the highest percentage of Jewish deaths in Holocaust-era Europe—around 95 percent—because of the massive local collaboration, which in this part of the world entailed serving in many cases as the actual murderers. Nor did they mention that during 2010, a Lithuanian court legalized public swastikas. That the permit for a neo-Nazi parade was taken out by a member of parliament. That the foreign minister claimed a foreign Jewish plot is behind new dual-citizenship proposals. That zero progress is made on enabling the safe return of 89-year-old Holocaust survivor Rachel Margolis, one of the Jewish partisan veterans under special prosecutors’ sham investigation. It was as if a grand new field of “Lithuanian Holocaust Studies” could gain international acceptance while shirking each and every one of the painful issues with impunity.

Conspicuously absent at the conference were the foreign ambassadors in town, from Britain, Estonia, Finland, France, Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. NATO envoys for these seven countries here last week sent a formal letter (organized by the British embassy, rumor has it) to Lithuanian authorities protesting the recent Holocaust denial in the press by an Interior Ministry specialist (who has since resigned). The letter also made bold reference to the broader issue: “Spurious attempts are made to equate the uniquely evil genocide of the Jews with Soviet crimes against Lithuania, which, though great in magnitude, cannot be regarded as equivalent in either their intention or result.” The Polish ambassador added his own eloquent letter.

And from the United States? Utter, painful silence.

***

In the diplomatic community here, the codeword for this saga is “The $64,000 Question” (even though the operative currency is the euro). Back in April, Hannah Rosenthal, the United States Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, announced during a trip to Lithuania that “the U.S. Embassy in Vilnius has received a 63,572 Euro grant for International Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research to develop a Holocaust education program with the Lithuanian Ministry of Education and other partners.” As the sum is identical to one applied for by the U.S. embassy from the International Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research, it is assumed that the ITF is the source of the funding.

An October query from DefendingHistory.com to the American embassy elicited an Orwellian response from a senior embassy official: “Disbursement information about USG public diplomacy grants is not public” [italics mine]. Then, on November 21, the Tel Aviv-based Association of Lithuanian Jews, the world’s most active association of Holocaust survivors from Lithuania, released to the media its letter to the U.S. ambassador, which included the warning that “it would be a huge and painful blow to Holocaust Survivors, and to the memory of the victims, if even one single euro were granted to those engaged in pursuing and promoting this antisemitic revisionism under the guise of local Holocaust education.” The letter went on to ask the embassy to release “all details of disbursement of this grant without further delay to clear the air.”

On the day of the conference opening, Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office, which focuses on bringing war criminals to justice, preventing their posthumous rehabilitation, and on defending the historical narrative of the Holocaust, wrote in the Guardian: “For Washington to ignore a blatant distortion of the historical events of the Second World War only emboldens those invested in outright denial of the Holocaust.” While the U.S. Embassy in Vilnius, the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum, or the American Jewish Committee could have been expected to stand firm against the historical record being revised by the right-wing leadership of the Baltic states, and with the Holocaust Survivor community to which it has been loyal in the past, it is hard to ignore the frightening possibility that they have all, on this particular occasion, been duped. By whom? A highly polished state-sponsored effort to win Western and foreign Jewish acquiescence to the obfuscation of the Holocaust and the legitimization of that obfuscation, in history and education alike. All that’s needed is for a handful of foreign dignitaries and the American Embassy to be bamboozled once, and that alleged conceptual support will be cited until the end of days.

***

It is not too late to turn this frightful fiasco into an inspirational success. On the last day of the conference, and with future events planned under the same grant, some bold welcome correctives can be enacted. Here are six for starters:

1. Invite a group of Holocaust Survivors―including Rachel Margolis―to sit in the front row, and invite them to meet at length with the educators being trained.

2. Tackle today’s hard issues up front—including the Prague Declaration, the ongoing Lithuanian investigations against Holocaust Survivor resistance heroes, and the recent law in effect criminalizing the Western narrative of the Holocaust by threatening two years in prison for those who would deny the notion of two equal genocides—instead of sweeping them under the rug.

3. Exclude the state organizations that campaign for the “Genocide and Resistance Research Center of  Lithuania” and the “International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania” (the so called red-brown commission, from which Yitzhak Arad and Sir Martin Gilbert resigned on principle, leaving it with no credibility in serious Holocaust studies circles).

4. Give the Jewish community of today’s Lithuania a primary role in Holocaust education. Have these educators meet real living Jews of various generations. Enable, most urgently, the fine young educators attending the conference to get to know prewar Lithuanian Jews at the last moment in history when this is possible, thereby fostering the inter-community harmony and understanding that comes from genuine dialogue.

5. Use grant funds to bring to Lithuania ample copies of essential books in English on the Lithuanian Holocaust. Virtually all the history teachers in question read English, and there is no reason why they should not have access to the same materials that their counterparts in the West use to study this subject. Among these for Lithuania would be Yitzhak Arad’s The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, Karen Sutton’s The Massacre of the Jews of Lithuania, Efraim Zuroff’s Operation Last Chance, and published primary sources such as Kazimierz Sakowicz’s Ponary Diary.

6. Make certain the sessions are never again closed to the public.

Dovid Katz is chief analyst at the Litvak Studies Institute and a research associate at University College London. He is the author of Lithuanian Jewish Culture and the website DefendingHistory.com.

Not long ago, Berkovitz applied for Section 8, a subsidized housing program for low-income New Yorkers, only to be denied on the grounds her income from Social Security was too high. Seven months ago, her monthly food-stamp allotment of $57 was reduced to less than $15. After a $96.50 Medicare deduction, Berkovitz receives just over $1,300 each month, a sum that barely covers her needs, which include 24 pills a day. Berkovitz doesn’t fall below the 2010 federal poverty line, but she lives a meager existence, absolutely dependent on the financial support of government programs and Jewish service organizations.

One of an estimated 38,053 Holocaust survivors in the New York City metropolitan area, according to 2010 projections by Selfhelp Community Services, Berkovitz also counts as one of 4,947 survivors categorized as “near poor.” Selfhelp, which, along with a host of other aid organizations, assists cash-strapped survivors, says that 15,855 survivors in the metropolitan area live below the federal poverty line.

With all the Holocaust museums, educational curriculums, and movies, the fact that survivors continue to struggle well into old age is a tragic irony. Survivors reap very little material benefit from their veneration in the culture at large. While their past is often invoked as a cautionary tale, their present all too easily gets lost in the shuffle. In the immediate post-World War II period, survivors were the focal point of Jewish philanthropic efforts, a claim historian Hasia Diner uses to debunk the alleged “myth of silence” among American Jews after the Holocaust. But while basic services, like jobs and housing, were enough to refresh people’s lives, aid slowed to trickle as survivors aged. Rehabilitation went only so far.

The question of what the descendants of Holocaust perpetrators owe to survivors treads a fine line between moral and material restitution. The moral imperative to, essentially, force countries like Germany, Austria, Poland, and Hungary into a lifetime of apology led to the creation of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany in 1952. Since then, Germany has provided nearly $60 billion to pay individual compensation as well as group social service programs. More than half of Selfhelp’s $7 million annual budget comes from Claims Conference funding.

But the Claims Conference, which budgeted nearly $115 million nationally in 2009 to fund direct compensation payments, social service programs such as home care and food programs, and Holocaust education and research initiatives, is an imperfect system. “There are competitive claims,” Ronald Zweig, a historian at New York University and the author of German Reparations and the Jewish World: a History of the Claims Conference, told me. “The Claims Conference wants to use the money for institutions, for the future, but survivors say, ‘We are the Holocaust.’ ”

Helen Berkovitz, like many needy survivors, feels entitled to whatever she asks for. The Claims Conference allocation system, which indirectly funds programs like psychological counseling and social function, doesn’t affect survivors in the same way as hard cash payments. A few years ago she asked the Claims Conference for a one-time donation to pay for a trip to Auschwitz, where her parents died. After a series of petitions, she says, she was denied.

Depending on the type of camp a survivor endured, plus its geographical location and duration of stay, a survivor might be eligible for monthly payments of 291 euros, or around $400, from the German government through the Claims Conference’s Article 2 Fund. Currently, only 9 percent of U.S. survivors receive Article 2 Funds. The rest of the direct payments are earmarked for emergency use only.

In the New York metropolitan area, the Claims Conference supports 10 organizations, which provide the bulk of support. They range from small Orthodox associations, like Borough Park’s Bikur Cholim, to the vast Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, which dispenses funds through 25 Jewish Community Councils.

Selfhelp attends to around 5,600 Holocaust survivors every year in the five boroughs and Nassau County. Since its founding in 1936, Selfhelp’s mission has been to help émigrés from Nazi Germany and, after the war, to remain the “last surviving relative to Holocaust survivors and other victims of Nazi persecution.” It provides everything from laundry and transportation to subsidized health care and financial advice, as well as community-building programs throughout the year and emergency cash assistance to cover utilities, medical bills, food, and clothing. In addition to the natural effects of aging, survivors suffer from a multitude of psychological and social debilities, often stemming from what the vice president for Nazi Victim Services at Selfhelp refers to as the “big black hole” existential question, “Why am I here, and why is my brother not?”

These are questions that face caseworkers across all survivor aid organizations, like Miriam, a client coordinator with the Council of Jewish Organizations of Flatbush, part of the Metropolitan Council network, who visits Berkovitz every couple weeks. (Miriam declined to give her last name.) The visits often delve deeper than banal conversation and become reminiscences. On a mid-December day, Miriam sat across from Berkovitz and teased out her life story. Berkovitz’s survival is likely familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of the Holocaust, but what has happened to her since often goes unnoticed.

In 1944, the 15-year-old Berkovitz and her family were relocated from Dej, a rural town in what was then northwestern Hungary, to a ghetto on the forested outskirts of town, along with 8,000 other Jews. In June of that year, the ghetto was liquidated, and the residents were herded onto trains bound for Auschwitz.

At the camp, Berkovitz was separated from her mother by Dr. Josef Mengele. She remembers crying for her mother and asking a Polish woman where the guards had taken her parents. The woman, she says, pointed to the smoke billowing from the crematoria, darkening the sky. Berkovitz remembers thinking the smoke was going up to God. Housed in a children’s barrack for eight months, Berkovitz was eventually sent to work in a Siemens factory in Nuremburg. There she fused platinum for airplane parts until her liberation in May 1945. It took the ragged teenager four weeks to return to Dej, now in Romania.

For the next two years, Berkovitz worked as a maid in Klausenburg, a nearby town, before marrying another survivor. The couple left Hungary, spent some time in a displaced-persons camp in Hamburg, and finally settled in Israel, in a small farming community near the Gaza Strip. Without education or money, she and her husband worked as farmers. Berkovitz later attended hairdressing school outside the settlement.

Like other settlers in 1967, Berkovitz, her husband, and their two children left for the United States. The family moved to Borough Park but found that extended family ignored requests to meet. And in New York, misfortune piled on. Berkovitz failed her licensing test to practice hairdressing. The language barrier was insuperable. And the wig-making store she opened in 1973 folded two years later, unable to compete, she says, with Russian immigrants selling cheaper products. Not long after, her husband, who worked at a Queens bakery, was paralyzed in a hit-and-run, leaving him incapacitated and in need of personal care until his death in 1999. Five years after the accident, possibly as a result of stress, Berkovitz suffered a heart attack, forcing her to send her husband to a primary-care facility on Staten Island, where she visited each day.

The final indignity came when, in 1959, Berkovitz had registered for reparations, hiring a Tel Aviv lawyer to manage the process, giving him power of attorney, and then never seeing the 34,000 marks (roughly $8,500) she was owed.

Berkovitz can trace these lines that led her to near poverty, but she can’t explain them. And she’s not alone. On any given day, Miriam, a boisterous 58-year-old daughter of Holocaust survivors, might visit up to 10 clients, checking in and chatting, often absorbing unwieldy stories from the war years. While caseworkers provide a comforting presence and find quick-fix solutions to improve quality of life, they sometimes represent the result of Claims Conference allocations, money that survivors feel could go directly into their pockets.

“I’m old, but I’m not meshuggah,” Berkovitz says. “Why does Bikur Cholim need 60 people on staff? They come and tell jokes and they need a salary?” To some extent, Miriam is spared from this complaint, and Berkovitz quickly notes her appreciation of the time Miriam spends chatting.

“There’s a tremendous amount of resentment,” Miriam concedes. “Because they did go though a terrible time, they do feel they should get a bit more, and we’re not doing enough for them. Fair enough. Unfortunately, the money is just not there.”

Following Miriam on her rounds makes the point clear. On an overcast late January day, Miriam moves at a quick pace, scurrying from her car to a client’s front door with determined urgency. She mostly visits women. Today, she’s here to visit Sylvia Goldstein, an 87-year-old Auschwitz survivor. The front door of Goldstein’s building is cracked and grimy; the screen is flecked with white paint. Inside the second-floor apartment light filters in through heavy curtains, leaving the dining room in semi-darkness. Unpacked boxes stuffed with clothing and other belongings fill the room like furniture.

Incapacitated and confined to a reclining chair, Goldstein’s husband, who also survived the Holocaust, needs assistance from two part-time attendants, paid from meager savings. Still, what he needs is a medical, mechanized chair, a $1,000 item that is beyond their budget.

But in order for Miriam to get a chair for Goldstein’s husband, she needs to know where he was during the war. Individual monetary requests for medical equipment require documentation proving a petitioner survived the Holocaust, even if the survivor is already recognized and receiving aid.

Goldstein brings a handful of papers, and she and Miriam try to piece things together. But although Miriam speaks fluent Yiddish, it’s nearly impossible for her to straighten out the survivor’s fractured tale. The dates don’t add up, and Goldstein can’t lucidly state where her husband spent the war years. After nearly 20 minutes of fruitless back-and-forth, Miriam hastily gathers her things and says goodbye, but not before taking a pitying glance at Goldstein’s husband lying motionless in the next room. He looks frozen and stares vacantly at the wall.

One of the harshest self-criticisms for impoverished survivors is that they feel as though they failed at their second chance at life. While they may have raised a successful family, the need for organizational support only prolongs their identity as survivors. Berkovitz, who unquestionably considers herself poor, expects little out of life. When a friend–also a survivor–died, she said others had to chip in $50 each toward a burial.

“My girlfriends are always crying about money,” she said, sitting at her kitchen table, a blistery January wind blowing outside. “Sometimes you get tired from all the crying. I don’t want to think I need more. But I can’t go ask because I’ll feel like a beggar.”

Josh Tapper is a journalist living in New York.

Two years ago, determined to do something different, Borden—whose father is Jewish—began taking pictures of Holocaust survivors after the idea came up in conversation with a friend. “When I went online and looked at bodies of work, there were people that had done portraits of survivors but they seemed to be portrayed as victims or as objects, old people with aged skin,” he said. Borden has taken a more naturalistic approach: He shoots his subjects—whom he has found through survivor organizations and by posting advertisements in Jewish newspapers—in their homes, using natural light and few special effects. Each photograph is also accompanied by a short note handwritten by its subject about his or her experience as a survivor. Borden has now photographed about 160 survivors, in England, Australia, and Israel. This month, he is coming to New York. “I think we’re just going to carry on doing it until there aren’t any more survivors,” he said.

The series-in-progress does not yet have a clear destination, though the project’s manager, Miriam Hechtman, said she aims for it to become traveling exhibit and a book. For now, some of the photographs appear on Borden’s website; others appear below for the first time.

Hechtman, who is also working on a documentary about Borden’s project, began traveling with him in Israel. Asked whether she had noticed any commonalities in the homes of the survivors she visited, she said, “I saw a lot of photos.”



She has stiff competition, to be sure, but Margolis’s recent experiences are almost too surreal and painful to be believed. After the war—during which her parents and brother were murdered—Margolis decided to rebuild her life in her native city of Vilna (now Vilnius), the capital of Lithuania. For more than 40 years, she taught biology at Vilnius University. After the Soviet Union collapsed and Lithuanian democracy permitted it, she helped found the city’s only Holocaust museum and became one of its stalwart presences, returning to Lithuania to lecture each summer even after relocating to Israel in the mid-1990s.

Now, at 88, Margolis is being defamed as a war criminal. Her crime? Surviving the Vilna ghetto to join the anti-Nazi resistance in the forests of Lithuania.

Margolis is one of a group of elderly survivors who have become pawns in a sinister game of Holocaust obfuscation by local authorities in the Baltic states—which, though they are among the smallest nations in Europe, had the highest rates of Holocaust genocide in Europe. A more complex phenomenon than Holocaust denial, obfuscation does not deny a single Jewish death at the hands of the Nazis. Instead, it uses as a starting point the idea that the Nazi genocide was not a unique event but rather a reaction to Soviet “genocide” (and antecedent to further Soviet genocide) in which the same elements of Lithuanian society that often sided with the Nazi invaders were persecuted and imprisoned by the Communist regime, whose officials included Jews.

The “double genocide” movement has gained the support of government and political parties in the Baltic states and Eastern Europe, which have invested substantial treasure to persuade the entire European Union to accept the equality of the Nazi Holocaust and Soviet crimes. Their biggest success has been the Prague Declaration, issued from a conference on “European Conscience and Communism” in June 2008, which demands that Europe “recognize Communism and Nazism as a common legacy”; that Communism be assessed “the same way Nazi crimes were assessed by the Nuremberg Tribunal”; that a single “day of remembrance of the victims of both Nazi and Communist totalitarian regimes” be declared, thus effectively eliminating Holocaust Remembrance Day; and that European history textbooks be “overhauled” so that “children could learn and be warned about Communism and its crimes in the same way as they have been taught to assess the Nazi crimes.”

Signs of the movement’s success are visible throughout Lithuania. The Museum of Genocide Victims on Vilnius’s central boulevard mentions the word Holocaust only sparingly and glosses over events at a place called Ponar in Yiddish (now known as Paneriai), where 100,000 unarmed civilians, some 70,000 of them Jews, were murdered, mostly by local Lithuanian militia. Instead, Lithuania’s Holocaust museum is devoted entirely to Soviet crimes. At a recent exhibition on the Ukrainian famine, a huge poster featured a woman telling visitors: “In Auschwitz we were given some spinach and a little bread. War is terrible, but famine is even worse.”

Two years ago, on Lithuania’s independence day, neo-Nazis marched down the capital’s central boulevard chanting “Juden raus,” or “Jews out,” and brandishing a specially modified Lithuanian swastika. (It has since become illegal in Lithuania to display Nazi or Soviet symbols.) Only after heavy pressure from local embassies—including those of the United States and other Western powers—did the country’s leaders condemn the march, a week after it occurred. This year, on March 11, “Juden raus” was replaced by the slogan “Lietuva Lietuviams,” or Lithuania for Lithuanians, and it is not a fringe movement. The permit for the march was issued to Kazimieras Uoka, a signatory on Lithuania’s March 11, 1990, declaration of independence and a member of parliament from the country’s ruling coalition, the right-wing Homeland Union Lithuanian Christian Democrat Political Group. Top officials said not a word until the Norwegian ambassador, Steinar Gil, protested on March 19, noting that 50 members of the country’s parliament had protested a gay-rights march but not one objected to the neo-Nazis. The country’s prime minister, Andrius Kubilius, replied on March 23, saying, “There are skinheads and neo-Nazis in every country, and they sometimes take a walk or chant something.”

Local authorities and government agencies have also instigated campaigns of slander and legal threats against elderly Jewish Holocaust survivors whose experiences fighting in the forests with Communist-backed partisans against the Nazis would appear to threaten the viability of the “double genocide” theory.

“The only good Jew for them,” said Berl Glazer, 85, believed to be the only elderly Orthodox Jew left in Lithuania, “is a dead Jew.”

***

It took Shmuel Shragge, an 84-year-old former truck driver, three sentences to sum up the perversion of history that it has taken me—a Brooklyn-born professor who settled in Lithuania to set up the Yiddish-studies program at Vilnius University—close to a decade to understand.

Shragge and his wife, Basye, 81, a retired medical doctor, are among the last of the prewar tribe of Litvaks, the Jews of Lithuania, whose seven centuries of history include some of the greatest achievements of European Jewish culture. On a recent visit to their modest, immaculate Soviet-era apartment in Kaunas, once known as Kovno and now Lithuania’s second-largest city, Shragge revealed what was for him one of the most horrific memories.

He stood up, walked across the room and picked off the top sheet of a stack of plain white paper. Before sitting back down, he abruptly tore the piece of paper in two and let the halves glide down to the floor. “That was one of the first atrocities I saw right at the beginning, before the Germans came, in the hours and days after war broke out here on June 22, 1941,” he said. I looked up at him, confused.

“The Soviet army was fleeing the German bombardment,” he explained. “But it would be some days before the Germans arrived. They took a young Jewish girl on the street and sawed her in half, like that piece of paper, and left the two halves to rot in the middle of the street, near the center of the city.”

Who was “they,” I asked? “They are the local Lithuanian ‘freedom fighters’ who were wearing the white arm bands of the Lithuanian Activist Front, who got the Holocaust going here by starting to murder Jewish civilians throughout the country before the Germans even arrived. Today they are honored as ‘heroes against the Soviets’ as if the Soviets were running from them.”

But maybe these first Holocaust murders were directed against Jews who had been sympathetic to, or collaborators with, the Soviet occupiers who had taken over Lithuania a year before? “Oh no, those guys ran away together with the Soviet army,” he answered. “The massacres of Jews started with old rabbis and young women as the main targets.”

Today, Shragge said, relations with his Lithuanian neighbors are excellent, though he added that there is a lot of anti-Semitism in the country. I asked him who the anti-Semites are. “The big shots,” he said. “The government, editors, professors, television people. Instead of wanting to understand what actually happened and to teach it truthfully to young people today, they are obsessed with mixing everything up and claiming that Nazism and Communism were equal. But you only have to scratch them to hear that all Jews were Communists and got what they deserved, and that Communism was the real genocide here.”

Since independence, the Lithuanian government has avoided returning prewar communal property, making it arguably the only country in the European Union to fail to enact restitution to the Jewish community. However, egged on by Emanuelis Zingeris, an ambitious Jewish member of parliament and a member of the dominant right-wing party, the state has also been toying with ideas to develop the Vilna ghetto as a Jewish-themed tourist park. Supporters of the project call it “Fragments.” Opponents, principally in the Jewish community, dub it the “Dead Jew Disneyland Park.” The state has also funded Jewish-themed statues, cultural events, and plaques designating historic buildings.

Lithuania’s contradictory “Jewish affairs policy”—which it shares with its Baltic neighbors, Latvia and Estonia, and with right-wing nationalist factions in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary—originates in the desire to airbrush the Holocaust out of history. This wish is intimately intertwined with Eastern Europe’s special kind of anti-Semitism, which maintains a love for Israeli, American, and other Western Jews, as well as for the prewar Jewish heritage but loathes present-day Jewish communities. At the heart of that loathing is the sin of memory: Local Jews know that the few Jews who survived usually did so thanks to the Soviet Union, while local nationalists sided with Hitler and carried out much of the killing.

The presence of so few local Jews is, in part, what has made it so easy for the double genocide theory, and its corollary of Holocaust obfuscation, to take root. Ignored by both the Jewish and Western worlds—with the important exception of the Simon Wiesenthal Center—the double genocide movement has begun to spread to major international organizations. Last July, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe issued the Vilnius Declaration, which included a number of the most noxious elements from the Prague Declaration. The declaration takes the assumptions of the double genocide movement as a given by referring to “two major totalitarian regimes, Nazi and Stalinist, which brought about genocide.” Moreover, it calls explicitly for a combined “Europe-wide Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism,” which, observers point out, would inevitably replace Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Shamefully, the United States was among the nations that voted for ratification of this deliberate distortion of history, which is intended to whitewash the crimes of local right-wing elements in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust by eliminating the memory of the Holocaust itself. When I spoke to several visiting U.S. congressmen and senators during their visit to Vilnius for the conference, it was obvious that they did not have the vaguest idea about the implications of U.S. approval of the declaration. Among them were Senators George Voinovich and Benjamin Cardin, who had spoken out forcefully in support of the Jewish position on restitution of communal property and against anti-Semitism. But the bigger issue, the revision of European history to delete the Holocaust, went unnoticed.

***

Holocaust obfuscation is the perverted product of the attempt to encourage the states of the Baltics and Eastern Europe to confront the history of World War II—including local collaboration with the Nazis. In the late 1990s, as part of their European accession bids, Eastern European states found themselves pressured by NATO and the European Union to commemorate the Holocaust. In response, the three Baltic states each set up “red-brown commissions,” panels charged with studying both Soviet and Nazi crimes. The Lithuanian commission, with the Orwellian name the “International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania,” has the most notorious history of all. Housed in the prime minister’s office, the commission succeeded in attracting Israeli Holocaust scholar Yitzhak Arad, who is the founding director of Yad Vashem, a Holocaust survivor, and a hero of the anti-Nazi partisan resistance.

In joining the group, Arad was given assurances of academic independence. But in April 2006, the Lithuanian daily Respublika called Arad a war criminal for having fought with the anti-Nazi Soviets. Within months, the state’s prosecutors began an investigation into Arad. After an international outcry, part of the investigation was dropped in the fall of 2008. Prosecutors issued a statement calling on “the public” to provide more evidence, citing an anonymous “expert historian” who attacked a book Arad had published in 1979. Observers were puzzled. Arad quit the commission and is now listed on its website as having his “membership suspended.” In protest against the entire enterprise, another member of the commission, British historian Martin Gilbert, resigned.

But this turmoil at the commission was only the beginning. On May 5, 2008, following demands made earlier that year in the daily Lietuvos Aidas, state prosecutors sent armed police to look for two Jewish female Holocaust survivors, both veterans of the anti-Nazi partisan resistance. One, 87-year-old Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, is a librarian at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute.

The other was Rachel Margolis. As a researcher at the local Holocaust museum, Margolis had made a sensational rediscovery of the diary of a Christian Pole named Kazimierz Sakowicz, who witnessed thousands of murders at Ponar. Sakowicz reported that the volunteer killers were mostly locals. For this discovery and the subsequent publication of the diary in 1999 (Yale University Press brought out an English edition in 2005), Margolis had become a target of hatred for those who adhere to the ideology of a “double genocide.”

Both women had been incarcerated in the Vilna ghetto, and both lost their parents and siblings in the Holocaust. Both escaped the ghetto on different dates in September 1943, and both joined Soviet-sponsored anti-Nazi partisans in the forest. It was this last fact that enabled prosecutors to allege in “pre-trial investigations” that the two women should be considered war criminals for having fought with the Soviets.

Like Arad, Brantsovsky and Margolis were investigated for war crimes without any charges or specific allegations, just innuendo based on published Holocaust memoirs. “At least the anti-Semites finally began to read our memoirs,” Margolis told me.

The defamation campaign against Lithuanian Holocaust survivors reached a peak at the end of May 2008, when prosecutors told the media that the two women could not be located. This gave rise to Internet posts claiming “the Jews hide their own criminals.” But Fania Brantsovsky works at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University, a minute’s walk from the presidential palace, and Rachel Margolis is easily reachable in Rechovot. Both were found in minutes during the course of reporting this piece.

When confronted, chief prosecutor Rimvydas Valentukevicius, from the Division of Special Investigations at the Prosecutor General’s Office of Lithuania, told Swedish journalist Arne Bengtsson: “We are investigating criminal activities, which could be crimes against humanity. The information has to be checked. It is a normal procedure. I see nothing political in that. Why is there so much interest in them? Is it only because they are Jewish?” In reply to this oft-repeated prosecutorial rejoinder to press inquiries, Shimon Alperovich, 81, chairman of the Jewish community of Lithuania, wrote in a widely circulated public letter: “The prosecutors in Lithuania do not cease to persecute anti-Nazi Jewish partisans. The Prosecution Service’s claims that ‘hundreds of witnesses are being questioned’ are belied by the fact that only Jewish names are ever heard in the media: Yitzhak Arad, Fania Brantsovsky, Rachel Margolis, and others.”

Thankfully, there has been one fortunate wrinkle to this story. For those who believe in double genocide, it is important to have a paper trail of investigations into “Soviet Jewish partisans” to “equal” investigations into Nazi war criminals—and, in Lithuania, this effort has recently gone spectacularly wrong. For the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western embassies in Eastern Europe began to honor persons hounded by state prosecutors. The Irish ambassador, Donal Denham, boldly hosted a reception at his residence within weeks of police questioning Brantsovsky. Then-U.S. Ambassador John Cloud issued Brantsovsky a certificate of honor. The British and Norwegian ambassadors recruited Brantsovsky to lead walks through the former Vilna ghetto for the Lithuanian capital’s diplomatic corps. The president of Germany awarded Brantsovsky the Federal Cross of Merit last October. Within minutes of the award’s presentation, Lithuania’s main Internet news portal published a vicious attack calling Brantsovsky a mass murderer.

The state’s prosecution service will neither charge nor clear Rachel Margolis for her “crime” of surviving the Vilna ghetto, putting her in a legal limbo, which in effect makes it impossible for her to visit the country where she was born and where her parents are buried. “Tell your readers,” she told me, “that the anti-Semites will never succeed to turn history upside down, because the free world knows the truth. They know who the Nazis were and they know who the victims were. It’s really very simple.” She adds one more thing, from her home in Israel: “Tell them that I want to return once more to see my hometown, Vilna.”

Dovid Katz is the research director of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute and a cofounder of the Litvak Studies Institute. He is the author of Lithuanian Jewish Culture and the website HolocaustInTheBaltics.com.

Opening in New York City this week, the resulting documentary, Four Seasons Lodge, chronicles the day to day rhythms and occasional dramas that unfold over the course of a summer, and includes the reminiscinces of those who chose to share their wartime memories. Jacobs speaks with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the making of the film, a few of his favorite characters, and what got left on the cutting room floor.

There was a moment, back in the 1970s, when Ehud Havazelet thought he was about to find an answer to his biggest question in life. It was Holocaust Week at Ramaz, the venerable Manhattan yeshiva, and the rabbis had appointed Havazelet—a sophomore, often scolded for not working to his ability—head of the student committee organizing the event. A well-known rabbi was invited to share his wisdom about the Shoah during the week’s series of discussions, and Havazelet grabbed the first available opportunity to sit the man down in an empty classroom and ask his question. “This is what I’ve always wanted an answer to,” he recalls having said. “How could God have let it happen?”

The rabbi—“who was revered,” says Havazelet, “for his liberality and his ability to talk to kids”—replied simply, maddeningly, “Sometimes we can’t ask God certain questions.”

“It was a turning point,” Havazelet explains. A few years later, he stopped wearing a yarmulke, stopped keeping kosher, and stopped praying. “Something in me said, ‘Not good enough! That’s it, so long!’ In my Orthodox upbringing, with the 613 mitzvot God gave us by which to lead our lives, down to which shoe to put on first and what to say—the words themselves—when we saw a rainbow, or a widow, there was an answer to everything in the day-to-day. But when it came to the biggest question I knew, it was not to be asked. This—what? Complacency? Posturing? Censoring?—gave me a last push toward the gate.”

But he never stopped questioning how the Holocaust could have happened. Thirty-odd years later, his third book (and first novel), Bearing the Body, represents not so much an attempt to find an answer as an argument for the need to keep seeking one even if you expect never to discover it. In the process of doing so, Havazelet says, you stumble across other questions that are equally as important.

The book is a gripping narrative about a father’s shattered relationship with his two grown sons—one living, one very recently dead—and a brother’s efforts to understand the mystery of his sibling’s death. It comes a decade after Havazelet’s last publication, the award-winning collection of linked short stories Like Never Before, and, like that book, it ultimately explores the emotional maladies suffered by those who survived the Holocaust—and the ways in which those maladies can be passed down, almost like congenital diseases, to the children of the survivors.

In this case, Sol Mirsky passes on his intense sense of alienation to his sons Nathan and Daniel. Sol uses silence to shut out anyone who is close to him. His only connection to his past—his “unending months” at Auschwitz; his childhood in Poland—is shared with strangers, in the form of a meticulously archived correspondence with other survivors, about their losses. In one of them he writes, “Nothing [will] ease the heartache…. I understand, believe me I do, that to ease even a little the pain would be more unbearable, for all we have is what to remember and what loss to feel.”

In contrast to his epistolary empathy, Sol exchanges very few words with his sons, and he never reveals any emotion. Nathan recounts having snuck into his father’s office (he was about nine at the time) and rifling through the letters on his desk. Sol caught him mid-act but said nothing, only gave him a withering look. In his own effort to stave off intimacy, 36-year-old Nathan smokes pot, drinks alcohol, forces sex upon his girlfriend—or simply cheats on her—and inwardly rails against the one person to whom he reveals parts of his true self—his therapist. One day, returning from his shift as a resident in the emergency room of a Boston hospital, he finds a letter from Daniel, whose relationship with Sol is even more troubled than Nathan’s (“He hated my brother,” Nathan tells the therapist—though by the time he says that, readers know better than to trust Nathan too much). Daniel, it turns out, had mailed the letter from San Francisco the previous week—just before he was murdered. Nathan takes it, unopened, and boards a plane for California, hoping to discover something about his brother’s death.

He learns more, it turns out, about his life, which he had largely ignored. For years, Nathan had kept Daniel at arm’s length, occasionally wiring money when asked, but never wishing to know what the money was for nor who, exactly, his brother had become. When he arrives at Daniel’s apartment—with Sol, who insists on going along, despite the reluctance of both father and son to travel together—he meets Abby, Daniel’s live-in girlfriend, and her six-year-old son Ben. The book unfolds mostly through the shifting perspectives of these four characters, with Daniel’s voice occasionally chiming in.

Havazelet, 52 (“going on 90″), doesn’t consider himself a Jewish writer, but rather a writer who happens to be Jewish. “Like being male, it’s vital to who I am,” he says, speaking from his home in Corvallis, Oregon. Born in Jerusalem in 1955, at the age of two he with his family moved to Brooklyn. His grandfather was a rabbi at Borough Park’s Young Israel synagogue, which lent his family had something of a high profile in their Orthodox community, as did their august religious lineage, which included the founder of Hasidism on one side to a disciple of the Vilna Ga’on, who started the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, on the other. His entire schooling, until his undergrad studies at Columbia University, occurred in yeshivas.

Though he always wanted to be a writer, he lacked, he says, the discipline and encouragement to pursue writing as a career, so after college he chased a different dream, enrolling in Boston’s Berklee School of Music. Almost immediately he realized that he didn’t belong there. “But,” he says, “I stuck with it for long enough to learn how to sit down and shut up, and slowly, in the back of my mind, something occurred to me: that maybe I’d grown up a little and was ready to start writing.”

His first short story collection, What Is It Then Between Us?, came out in 1984 and garnered high praise from critics, but it was a full decade before he completed his second, Like Never Before. “Constant editing,” he explains, “tumult in my personal life; the form developed slowly—that is, I had no idea what I was doing.” The collections vary in significant ways: What Is It Then Between Us? follows a wide range of characters—a drug addict in his thirties, an ailing resident of a nursing home, a young girl with an abusive father—and veers from first-person narrative to third, from the present tense to the past. There are hardly any Jewish characters in the book. Like Never Before, on the other hand, centers around one man, David Birnbaum, parsing his Orthodox upbringing and his complicated familial relationships. Each story is a complete tale unto itself, but together they build to a stunning, hallucinatory conclusion. As with the new novel, the book offers no resolution, and its protagonist (autobiographical, says Havazelet, but no more so than the protagonist’s sister or mother or father, all of whom contain echoes of himself) is sympathetic while not necessarily being likable.

Havazelet, with “a genetic predisposition to worry every word to a near-death state,” is a slow writer—and his pace, he suggests, may have cost him a measure of fame—but this last novel took longer than he expected, due to a serious illness he’s reluctant to discuss, though its fingerprints are all over the new book. From the double-entendre title to Nathan Mirsky’s profession, to a scene in which Sol spends a couple nights in a hospital and finds himself drawn, as he is to few others, to a young boy with an unidentified life-threatening disease, the author’s experience of illness has informed the novel’s themes and imagery. And the question at the center of the book, which hearkens back to the question the young Havazelet asked the rabbi who came to his school, is ultimately formulated in terms of illness: How do people live with the pathology of the Holocaust? How do they keep going when they carry their memories like a sickness within them? And what happens when that sickness becomes an inherited disease?

These are the questions that form the crux of the novel. “I wanted to ask,” Havazelet says, “What do you do if you have made what in normal circumstances would be cowardly choices”—as Sol Mirsky does—”and you hate yourself for it, and you spend your whole life hating yourself, and you try to atone but because of your self-hatred and your inability to relieve yourself of that hatred by honestly talking about it to anyone, you pass it all on to your kids? That’s really what this book is about.”

On its own, the joke rings a little silly and stale, but alongside the movie’s other stereotypes—Von Crolock’s horny, homosexual son; a bumbling scientist; and his equally befuddled assistant, played by Polanski—the Yiddish-spouting vampire deftly sends up notions as old as the Blood Libel. Nearly four decades later, Polanski is releasing his version of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, with Ben Kingsley, that master of ethnic disguise, as Fagin. But the usually fearless auteur has Kingsley approach the “merry old gentleman” and leader of Oliver’s pack of London pickpockets cautiously.

Polanski sounds like the perfect director to tackle a cunning and complex Jewish villain. After The Fearless Vampire Killers, he moved onto Rosemary’s Baby, in which Rosemary, played by Mia Farrow, seeks advice from Dr. Abraham Sapirstein, a Jewish obstetrician played by the perennial pushover Ralph Bellamy. Turns out the genial doctor is also a witch who’s in league with Rosemary’s husband, her neighbors, and Satan. Much of Rosemary’s Baby, and of Polanski’s work in general, is built on those kind of deadpan inversions. Even when portraying Jewish suffering in The Pianist, Polanski shows the instincts of a sadist. It’s defiantly chilly—think of the early scene when a Nazi guard tips a man in a wheelchair off a balcony—and maybe the least sentimental vision of a Holocaust survivor on film.

There’s a cold breeze blowing through Oliver Twist, too. Polanski films the dark alleys of London in all their brutality, and shuns the novel’s redemptive coincidences—but he also reveals a gentler heart. Oliver starts the film with a quiet stream of tears, and keeps them coming. The sympathy extends to Fagin, as well. In an interview with The New York Times, Kingsley promised a more human take on Dickens’ notorious swindler than previous adaptations, notably David Lean’s 1948 film. That version starred Alec Guinness with a deep, creepy rasp in his voice and an absurd beak based on the George Cruikshank illustrations that accompanied Dickens novel when it was serialized in Bentley’s Miscellany in 1837. “I think we have to destroy the stereotypes and replace them with archetypes,” said Kingsley, who strived “to present the Collapsed Father.” Collapsed is the operative word: sporting a bad comb-over, hobbling with a cane, and speaking in a high-pitched, not-quite-Cockney accent, it’s hard to see how Kingsley’s Fagin climbs the stairs, let alone commands a flatful of boys or a killer as vicious as Bill Sikes.

The film is careful to align Fagin not with Sikes or the Artful Dodger—two generations of orphans he ushered into crime—but with that latecomer Oliver. Played by Barney Clark, Oliver spends much of the movie looking for a home, and settles happily enough in Fagin’s abode before crossing the path of Mr. Brownlow, who offers him posh real estate. When Oliver disappears, Fagin fears the boy may “peach” to the police, yet it’s also clear the old man genuinely cares for him, and maybe even sees some of himself in Oliver. In a scene dreamed up by screenwriter Ronald Harwood, Fagin heals Oliver’s wounds with a balm passed on from father to son—placing Oliver, it would seem, next in the family line. The novel never admits such sympathy—if Fagin loves Oliver, it’s for his innocent face: Who would ever pick such a sweet boy out of a lineup?

The only scene which reveals the true darkness in Fagin’s heart comes early on, when Fagin is admiring his private stash of jewels—think of it as a pension plan—and catches Oliver watching him. Immediately, Fagin lunges at Oliver with a pair of scissors (not a breadknife, as in the novel) threatening circumcision, even castration. The scene’s genuinely terrifying, if a little overdone, but at least it reminds us that Fagin is not simply the good old granddad he appears to be. Still, for most the film, it’s Fagin who seems emasculated.

The problem with Kingsley’s performance is not anti-Semitism—if you can look past his prosthetic proboscis, still generous but significantly smaller than the one on Guinness, the only obvious sign of Fagin’s origins is a late scene where, in response to a slew of bad news, he quietly repeats “Oy” a half-dozen times. The situation is quite the opposite: Polanski and Kingsley have transformed Fagin into a victim, depriving him of the scheming malevolence that makes him captivating as a character. Kingsley’s Fagin needs a hug—and he gets one in the next-to-final scene, when Oliver comes to visit him in his prison cell.

Kingsley and Polanski are right to be wary of playing into anti-Semitic tropes, but there’s a difference between depicting a villainous Jew, someone whose evil traits are based in stereotypes, and a Jewish villain, whose background and villainy coexist but are unconnected. To see the difference, one need only watch Ron Moody in Oliver!, Carol Reed’s still-impressive adaptation of Lionel Bart’s musical. Some chide Moody for trafficking in gay stereotypes, but it takes some effort to read his performance that way. What’s far more striking is his wicked charm, welcoming Oliver to his home only to scream at another boy, “Shut up and drink your gin!” when he complains about the sausages. (In case you were wondering, Fagin, in the book and the films, does not keep kosher.) While Guinness uses Fagin’s Jewishness to make him more repulsive, Moody makes it part of Fagin’s charisma, channeling a slight Yiddish accent in “Pick a Pocket” and “Reviewing the Situation.”

The second song, in which Fagin reconsiders but ultimately rejects the honest life, marks Lionel Bart’s only obvious effort to humanize the character, even forgive him—and yet, it never turns him into a casualty of the world the way Kingsley does. The musical’s Fagin knows he could forsake his life of crime but keeps choosing otherwise, even in the final reprise of “Reviewing the Situation.” If Fagin’s a victim, it’s of his own choices, not his circumstances. Kingsley, on the other hand, has imagined an elaborate backstory for Fagin (“brought up by his grandparents, who did not speak a word of English”), going as far as to compare his childhood in London to Polanski’s perilous wanderings in wartime Poland. Like Brody in The Pianist and like Oliver, Fagin simply isn’t in control of his life. When he plots with Bill Sikes, it’s hard not to wonder who’s really in charge.

Neither David Lean nor Lionel Bart had the heart to send Fagin to his death. Lean’s version ends with Fagin’s capture (and the mob’s applause), while Bart, who clearly likes Fagin too much to think of killing him, sends Fagin off into the sunset with the Artful Dodger. But Kingsley plays the final scene in prison, roughly adapted from Dickens’ novel, for all its Oscar-mongering pathos, and the final shot shows the gallows that awaits him. Attempting to avoid one array of stereotypes, he winds up feeding a whole other set: Jews as victims of history rather than agents.

Dickens professed shock when his depiction of a “very old shriveled Jew, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair” earned him the ire of England’s Jewish community. In 1863, Eliza Davis, the wife of a banker who had bought Dickens’ London house three years before, accused the usually “large hearted” author of encouraging “a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew.” If Jews took offense, Dickens replied, then “they are a far less sensible, a far less just and a far less good tempered people than I have always supposed them to be.”

But Dickens had the daunting task of imagining a Jewish character in what was then a relative vacuum. Polanski’s Fagin enters into a quite different climate: fiction, film, and television are full of assorted depictions of Jews—nebbishes, hipsters, devils, and ordinary folks in between. If anything, The Pianist earned Polanski the right to create a Jewish villain not mired in stereotypes but nonetheless racy, in all senses of the word.

How did Hiding and Seeking come about?

We started out making a totally different film about survivors, my parents and their cohorts, and how come some of them kept faith after the Holocaust. Every one of them, I ask, “You went through every conceivable horror. And yet you still say, ‘God is just in all His actions and merciful in all His ways.’ How?”

Well, for years I was looking. If I could just find that one survivor who could explain it to me and make sense of it all…but I realized there is no answer. That was a kind of epiphany. If we cannot defend our core beliefs against such obvious questions, how can I fault anybody for not believing the way I do? It knocked down one of the barriers that had separated me from outsiders.

How did those barriers go up in the first place?

We had just arrived in America. I was going to public school in Schenectady. My new friends are telling me this wonderful custom: You take a sheet, cut out holes, and go around with a big shopping bag and people give you nosh. It sounded good. My father came home when I was in the middle of cutting up the sheet, and he asked me what am I doing. I tell him, I’m going out with my friends, it’s Halloween and he tells me, “Bist a yiddish kind“—you’re a Jewish child, and this is not an activity for Jewish children.

I didn’t know really what it meant to be Jewish; it was the first time I realized it limited what I could do. And I remember sitting on the stoop, crying. I saw my friends with their bags, having this great time. A few weeks after that, my father gave up a subsidy from HIAS that we are getting as new immigrants. We moved to Bed-Stuy.

And that was a different environment?

Survivors who had just gotten here, they started building these modest schools named after the towns that were destroyed in the Holocaust. Most of my teachers were survivors, most of my classmates were children of survivors. And yet the Holocaust was never discussed at all. At all. It was like the third rail, you know: You touch it, you die. It couldn’t be absorbed into the usual theological explanations of life.

In his New York Times review, Dave Kehr compared your approach to secular humanism.

The term is simplistic. It implies that your values come from sources totally unconnected to your religious values, and I don’t think that would be accurate. On the other hand, I can’t say that my humanistic values are totally from the religious upbringing I received.

Brooklyn College was really my first contact with the outside world. Until that time, I had been totally surrounded by this cocoon. This was in the Vietnam era, and people were trying to fight for peace, human rights, profound things. And when I saw these people, whether I agreed or didn’t agree with them, I sensed that they were trying to improve the world in their own way. It opened up my eyes to the possibility of goodness in those in whom I had been led to believe goodness wasn’t possible.

What made you want to share this realization with your children, now that they’re adults?

My sons, as much as they’ve been raised by me, they’ve also been raised in the insular yeshiva world. We have texts that soar to beauty and social justice and embracing compassion for all humanity, but there are also teachings that go in a different direction. The one phrase that my father says in the film, “Tov sheb’goyim harog,” is a pretty horrible statement: Even the best goyim deserve to be killed.

Filmmaker Menachem Daum with his sons, Tzvi Dovid and Akiva

I understand we’ve been traumatized for so many thousands of years and persecuted. But I was reading Rabbi Kook recently and he writes that every derogatory depiction of other religions and other people in our own religion is a mountain that we now have to climb over if we’re serious about reaching God. Which is profound; he’s acknowledging we have such teachings but we can’t accept them uncritically. We have to struggle with them.

So the film is about this struggle?

Our previous film, A Life Apart, was an attempt to humanize haredim to the outside world. This film, Hiding and Seeking, is an attempt to humanize the outside world to haredim. I cut people slack if they had a sense of “We’re better than them.” That seemed harmless, a little chauvinistic. But after 9/11, I realized that this is  dangerous and can’t be tolerated.

In theory, the Talmud mentions the righteous of the nations. But unless you actually meet someone, it’s just an abstraction. I didn’t know what we were going to find in Poland. I was hoping we would find somebody from that family that hid my father-in-law, but we were really, in a way, led on this trip to fulfill some unfinished business. I’m not telling my sons to naively drop their defenses and assume all people are good. But we can’t keep living in the past and allow hatred of the past to enslave us.

The last quote from Akiva is ambiguous and troubling.

My son was saying, “Okay, you showed me there’s a few good people in the world, there’s a few exceptions. But there’s a lot of not-good people, and most of them if they’re given an opportunity to do it again would.” Oren and I had this disagreement whether to include this, or just let people think that everything was resolved. A note of reality spills cold water in people’s faces.

That’s why I wonder if you feel that you accomplished your mission.

I don’t think my son would have acknowledged there’s a good few people before. He would have said, “All goyim, all Poles are evil.” We made a dent in his armor, so to speak.

It’s a difficult road. I want my sons to raise their children as proud of their heritage, their religion, proud of who they are, and almost being uncompromising. If they went to public school, watched the same movies, listened to the same music, there would be less of a barrier, but that would basically bring an end to this way of life that I value. So remain true to your traditions, but incorporate in that a sense of connectedness to the rest of mankind. I’m asking them to do a little tightrope-walking.