• British Prime Minister David Cameron called Gaza “a prison camp” and advocated an end to the blockade while addressing a group of Turkish businessmen. [Haaretz]

• Six Israeli and one Romanian solder died in a helicopter crash in central Romania, where they were participating in joint military drills. [JTA]

• Oliver Stone apologized for his remarks yesterday about Jewish control of the media and clarified that the Holocaust was—indeed—“an atrocity.” [NYT]

• Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (author of Nextbook Press’ Betraying Spinoza) has a great essay on the brothers Singer (yup, there was another!). [The Book]

• Ian Buruma accuses Israel’s critics of holding it to a double standard. [Project Syndicate]

Nice song for a summer day:

Now, leaving aside Grant’s reputation as a corrupt, passive chief executive, Jews may think of his notorious General Order No. 11, which in 1862 expelled all Jews in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky on the grounds of halting the black-market cotton trade. (The order was quickly rescinded; Lincoln condemned it.)

But actually, notes J.J. Goldberg, Grant ought to be remembered as, yes, good for the Jews! Grant was probably only vaguely aware of the order. Beyond that:

• Grant made the first nomination of a Jew to the presidential cabinet, asking close friend Joseph Seligman, a Wall Streeter, to be his first Treasury Secretary; Seligman turned him down, but remained a close adviser, with access unprecedented for a Jew.

• In response to anti-Semitism in newly sovereign Romania, Grant appointed as U.S. consul Sephardic attorney Benjamin Franklin Peixotto, who had just finished a stint as national head of B’nai B’rith.

• Grant was the first U.S. president to attend services at a synagogue (Adas Israel in Washington, D.C.—which, I think I’m obligated to add, is my family’s congregation).

Now might be a good time to mention that historian Jonathan Sarna is writing a book all about Grant and General Order No. 11 … for Nextbook Press.

General Grant, The $50 Bill, and The Jewish Question [J.J. Goldberg]
Who’s Buried in the History Books? [NYT]

Earlier: Adolf Lincoln?

Herta Müller Wins the Nobel Prize in Literature [NYT]

Radauti is the town from which my father’s parents emigrated to the United States before World War I, but this, for me, was not supposed to be a roots trip. Nor was I consciously fulfilling the tradition of visiting the tombs of my ancestors around the time of the High Holidays.

I was here this time to work on a project called (Candle)sticks on Stone, an exploration of the varied and evocative ways that women are represented in Jewish tombstone art through depictions of Shabbat candles, which I hope eventually to turn into a book.

The project, which is supported in part by a Jewish women’s studies grant from the Hadassah Brandeis Institute, includes making a photographic documentation of Jewish women’s tombstones in Radauti and in several other nearby towns, including Siret, Botosani, and Gura Humorului. The older tombstones in these and other Jewish cemeteries in parts of today’s Romania, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, and Poland form an astonishing collection of ornate sculptural design. Many cemeteries have disappeared; in many others the stones are eroded and crumbling. But those that remain comprise wonderful examples of vivid local stone-carving that fuse local folk art and Jewish iconography.

The wide range of carved symbols represent names, professions, personal attributes, or family lineage. There are lions, birds, stags, bears, snakes, and imaginary beasts; there are flowers, grapevines, garlands, and geometric patterns; there are the pitchers of the Levites, the crown of the Torah, and the hands of the Cohanim raised in blessing; and there are powerful symbols of death: the hand of God plucking a flower or breaking off a branch from the Tree of Life.

Here and elsewhere, candles and candlesticks are common symbols on Jewish women’s tombs, because lighting the Sabbath candles is one of the three so-called “women’s commandments” carried out by female Jews—and the only one easily represented in visual terms. (The others include observing the laws of menstrual purity, or Niddah, and that of Challah, or burning a piece of dough when making bread.)

Many are simple, schematic silhouettes, but here in the heart of Eastern Europe they also take on extravagant, elegant forms: carved candlesticks braided like loaves of challah; candlesticks that look like leafy plants, candlesticks flanked by grapevines and griffins, candlesticks that look like flowers, candles that are broken to symbolize death. Above them, on many of the tombstones, are the carved hands of women, held up in a pious gesture to bless the flames.

A primary aim of my (Candle)sticks on Stone project is simply to present these carvings as examples of art. The older stones, from the 18th and early 19th century in particular, are unique examples of sculptural skill and imaginative design: it is often possible to discern the hand of individual, if now anonymous, Jewish stone masons or their workshops. And while later stones, often carved according to stenciled templates, present a more uniform appearance, their style and format still varies greatly from town to town.

Another aim is more reflective. As a Jewish woman who has almost never lit the Shabbat candles in my home, I also cannot fail to consider what this representation means. Candlesticks on stone are a formalized shorthand for “Jewishness” and “gender.” But they also spell tradition.

Ruth Ellen Gruber is the author of National Geographic Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe and Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe.

Fertility Clinic Suspects’ Homes Raided [JPost]
Is Romania Human Egg Scandal A Case of Anti-Semitism? [Haaretz]

Now—can you believe it?—some people are upset! The Center for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism has asked Romania’s general prosecutor to investigate Mazare for breaking a Romanian law that, yes, bans the wearing of Nazi uniforms, as well as for instigating a child to break same law. (For most of World War II, Romania’s right-wing and anti-Semitic government was allied with the Nazis; government forces killed as many as 380,000 Jews in territories that came under Romania’s control, a fact the government formally acknowledged in 2004.) The Reuters story reports that the mayor’s action “outraged Jewish and pro-democracy groups.” While that’s no doubt true, we prefer not think of such events in such narrow terms, or to assert proprietary claims over them. The Nazis may have been bad for the Jews—particularly bad, even—but they were bad for everyone else, too, and we are confident that this event outraged groups of all sorts. Including, we hope, residents of Constanta, Romania.

Outrage As Mayor Goose-Steps In WWII Uniform [Sky News]

Gregor von Rezzori

Rezzori would devote his writing life to this curious nostalgia for a world he had never really experienced, and whose protracted death throes it had been his misfortune to experience—in the unhappy role of “flotsam of the European class struggle.” In contrast to his elder sister, born four years earlier, “before the general proletarianization of the postwar era, in a world that still believed itself to be whole,” Rezzori had been, as he put it, “a true son of the era of universal disintegration.” His writings concern the fate of people like himself, belonging to “a dying and largely superannuated caste,” and forced to live amid the ruins. He made it through the two world wars intact and found a comfortable place for himself in the new world, which he occupied with the great ambivalence of an exile from a place to which there can be no return. He wrote radio scripts and screenplays, acted in films, married an Italian countess, and wrote a series of German-language novels whose reputation has steadily waxed with the passage of the years. He died in 1998, having outlasted “the short 20th century,” as the historian Eric Hobsbawm called it, referring to the great class struggle that divided Europe until 1989. He has found in NYRB Classics, which reissued The Snows of Yesteryear and published his 1979 novel Memoirs of an Anti-Semite in 2007, a devoted steward of his legacy.

Part of what lent that lost world its golden aura was the deference it gave to German-speaking servants of the emperor, such as Rezzori’s family. Amid the wild palimpsest of peoples deposited by centuries of conquest and migration in Eastern Europe—Romanians, Ruthenians, Hungarians, Armenians, Bulgarians, Germans, Poles, Greeks, Turks, and Jews—the Austrians assumed the role of “cultural compost,” the self-deprecating term that Gregor’s father used to name the virtual monopoly on political, cultural, and economic power held by a city-dwelling German minority in the east. The city to which the Rezzoris returned in 1919 was now part of the new state of Romania, in which the Rezzoris found they were “taken over by another class to which we deemed ourselves superior but which, in fact, treated us as second-rate citizens.”

On the one hand, losing their place at the top of the racialized caste system that had permitted the many nations of Eastern Europe to live together in peace was, “for the class to which my parents belonged,” he wrote, “a fall into chaos, into impotence and deprivation, hopelessness and squalor.” Then again, “humiliation merely aggrandized, as humiliation suffered by the kinds of people who considered ourselves members of a class of masters,” will often do, the family’s threadbare pretensions to greatness:

We felt excluded, but on the other hand, our isolation made us feel out of the ordinary and even that we belonged to a chosen elite. The myth of lost wealth rankled in us but also made us arrogant. All our efforts were directed at not being deemed declassé.

This disappointed upbringing, spent in “cannibalistic solitude” among hostile strangers (a short distance from the Dniester River, the border across which the bloody birth pangs of a new proletarian utopia were taking place), made Rezzori an acute witness to the psychological condition of the Germans between the wars. Something new and dire had been unleashed into the world by the carnage of the Great War. “A species of men arose from that ghostly landscape of bomb craters and trenches whose bestiality was unconstrained,” Rezzori wrote. “A free field was given to the Hitlers and Stalins to come.”

Whereas the Rezzoris fled the loss of their privileges into self-devouring neurotic obsession (the exhaustive exposition of which makes up the bulk of The Snows of Yesteryear), other Germans responded more actively. Aggrieved at the loss of their position, morally adrift in a world in which the old traditions and hierarchies had been destroyed, thirsting for a return to greatness, inured to mechanized violence, fearful of the Bolshevik menace from the East, and even more fearful of morally subversive elements within, certain elements of the German people went on a search for scapegoats. They readily found them in the Jews.

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite is in many ways the fictional counterpart to The Snows of Yesteryear, sharing with it a social, geographical, and cultural setting, and many individual anecdotes. A loose collection of five long thematically linked short stories, the book follows its protagonist, Arnulf, through a series of episodes in which he finds himself engaged with Jews as friends, rivals, employers, business partners, persecutors, and above all, lovers—first a middle-aged Jewish shopkeeper, then the orphaned daughter of a Viennese professor, and lastly, in a short-lived second marriage, a Jewish woman who was nonetheless, as he puts it, “truly the most goyish shikseh he had ever encountered.” Arnulf is emphatically not a Hitlerite monster, or a Nazi street brawler, but, like Rezzori, a well-bred Austrian from a civil service family in the former Bukovina. He exhibits, without apology, the social snobbery of his class, but none of the racial resentment of the Nazis. He is a believer in settled hierarchies, fixed institutions, and people who know their place in the world:

The specifically Jewish quality in Jews had never repelled me so much as the attempt—doomed from the start—to hush it up, to cover it over, to deny it. The yiddling of Jews, their jittery gesticulation, their disharmony, the incessant alternation of obsequiousness and presumptuousness, were inescapable and inalienable attributes of their Jewishness. If they acted as one expected them to act, so that one could recognize them at first, one was rather pleasantly touched. They were true to themselves—that was estimable.

The 19-year-old Arnulf’s contempt for those who refuse to know their place is transparently a compensation for a man who has lost his own place. He moves to Bucharest after the war and finds himself working as a window dresser for a cosmetics company—”a hod carrier, an out and out menial, for mostly Jewish shopkeepers.” He finds himself woefully unprepared for the job. Stuck amid the ups and downs of the commercial cycle, Arnulf learns empathy for the Jews. “Their hereditary milieu was the world of open possibilities, in which a man could just as easily become a Midas as get stuck in the lowliest form of donkey work,” he says. “I now understood their restlessness, their anxieties, their messianic expectations, the abrupt change from immeasurable arrogance to shamefaced self-debasement.”

Rezzori has a remarkable lyric gift that he uses to describe the wide expanses of Bukovina. In a series of beautiful set pieces, he evokes the vanishing world of Germanic chivalry, already in its last stages of degeneration into the debased kitsch that the Nazis would exploit, the emerging commercial melee of post-war Bucharest with its Armenian and Jewish shopkeepers and its red light district; and shabby-genteel Vienna, where he socializes almost exclusively with Jewish artists and musicians. He is a great hit at their parties, telling Yiddish stories and jokes he has learned on the streets of Bucharest, Czernowitz, and Lvov. Later he accidentally finds himself caught up in the surging crowds celebrating the Anschluss that brought the rump state of German Austria into the Third Reich. He is on his way to meet his girlfriend, whom he plans to marry. “The morbid, rhythmic stamping of their feet hung like a gigantic swinging cord in the silence that had fallen on Vienna,” he writes:

What the hell are we marching for? I asked the man beside me.

“Anschluss,” he barked.

Well, that literally meant “connection,” and that was exactly what I was looking for.

Should a book about the deadliest hatred of the 20th century, particularly one by a German, be so mordantly funny, so cheerfully alive? But this, of course, is how people live history. They are inattentive and self-absorbed; they worry about their next sexual conquest while the conquest of the world is being planned in distant chancelleries. Memoirs of an Anti-Semite is a horror story precisely because it so resolutely refuses to feel like one. The story it tells is of a passive, attenuated complicity, which is all the more harrowing for its passivity—for without this passivity which encompassed all but a heroic, and mostly destroyed, few, none of the worst crimes of the Nazi regime would have been possible.

Both The Snows of Yesteryear and Memoirs of an Anti-Semite close with a similar note of ambivalence. Though each in its own way ruthlessly exposes the complicity of imperial German nostalgia with history’s greatest crime, both books retain a connection to that lost world, and much distaste for the new one that took its place. In the epilogue to The Snows of Yesteryear Rezzori returns to the city of his youth, now known by its Ukrainian name of Chernovtsy, in 1989. It is a place whose racial ferment was settled once and for all in 1945, with a massive ethnic cleansing (the Jews were the first to go, to unmarked mass graves, or to extermination camps, during the war itself) that left a racially homogenous Ukrainian city behind. He finds the buildings all meticulously preserved, but the spirit of the place—”its restlessly vicious, cynically bold and melancholically skeptical spirit”—expunged. The post-war settlement had imposed decades of continuous peace on the continent. But at what cost? At no cost that can easily be quantified, but one that is nonetheless real, and which it is the job of our artists to recall.

Berkowitz, who still lives in the borough where he was born and raised, is pale, intense, and remarkably youthful looking. He has been passionately involved in the labor movement for most of his life. Immediately after the war, he followed his father, Harry, and his brother, Pinky, into the furriers’ union, but he soon took a job with the Progressive Party as a mimeograph machine operator and shipping room worker, and got caught up in the excitement of political activism. After becoming a professional printer and working at low-wage jobs for a few years, he organized the workers of a non-union shop and joined the Amalgamated Lithographers of America, Local 1. He worked as a union printer for thirty-three years until his retirement in 1988. He’s continued his activism in the years since, working mostly on issues (such as the fight against privatization) at Co-op City, the vast below-market housing complex in the Bronx where he resides. His partner of thirty-five years, Susan Joseph, is also a socially conscious citizen, and together they are members of Veterans for Peace. A lifelong socialist, he’s intensely critical of religion, and certain that God is a foolish and dangerous product of people’s imaginations. I wanted to know how he could be so sure.

You’re a son of immigrants. Can you tell me a little bit about your family?

My parents came from Romania around 1920. They had lived in Galatz, a small port city on the Black Sea, just a few miles from Russia. They were very poor; their life was the shtetl life.

My father’s father didn’t work regularly and was a bit of a drinker. My father was taken into the Romanian army at a very early age. Jews were not taken in as soldiers; they were taken in as servants, and in the army he was an apprentice tailor. My mother’s father was a decorative carriage painter. I don’t know if either my father or mother had much schooling.

Was your family religious back in Romania?

They weren’t religious so much as they were practicing. Which sounds a little strange, but they had the—how should I put it?—culture and tradition of Jewish religious living. But neither of my parents was ever interested in God. Practicing in the shtetl meant, I think, community life more than religious observance.

When you were a kid, were they still practicing?

Not at all. They left it behind completely. There’s a story in my family about my brother, sister, and me asking my father why he didn’t use his tefillin, the leather straps that the Orthodox Jews put on when they daven. He said, “In the old country I needed religion. Here I need the union.”

What do you think he meant?

Well, for shtetl Jews in the small towns of Eastern Europe—where anti-Semitism was very, very strong—religious life was the protection. Being together with other Jews, you had a group. You didn’t stand alone. And as a worker in the fur trade here in New York City, to my father it looked like his protection was the union. It’s sort of ironic, but in the fur industry in those days the religious Jews were the bosses, the employers. And the workers were more inspired by the warmth they got out of unionization. They didn’t have to stand up to the boss alone; they stood with a group.

When I worked there, New York’s fur industry was centered in hundreds of mostly small shops in tall buildings along Seventh Avenue between Twenty-fifth and Thirtieth Streets. Before going up to the shops to work at 8 a.m., workers—most were Jewish, almost all were union members—filled the Seventh Avenue sidewalks, gossiping about the trade and talking or arguing about the nation, or the world. After work many drifted to the Fur Workers Union Hall on Twenty-sixth and Eighth Avenue for more of the same or to see a business agent or get something taken care of in the union’s health clinic. Unionism provided shtetl-like community and protection. So my father’s transfer from religion to the union became my attitude. I was never bar mitzvahed; neither was my brother.

In my family we have a parallel story to yours about the tefillin: My great grandmother’s sister came over to visit from Russia. She went to the supermarket with my great grandmother, and was looking at the meat. She pointed at a piece and said, “What’s this mark?” It was a USDA stamp. When my great grandmother explained that the government had inspected it, her sister said, “Great! So you don’t have to keep kosher anymore.”

Do you believe in God?

I don’t. I think that all belief in God stems from prehistory, when man’s ancestors needed explanations for things that they didn’t have the equipment to explain. We have much more equipment for explaining how the body works, how nature works, even how space works, so we don’t have to invent gods. And not only do I think it’s not practical or sensible, but I think it’s harmful, because a belief in supernatural powers takes away from action in solving problems.

What’s an example of something going on today where you see people’s belief in God being harmful?

Certainly in the way in the last decade or two where there has been a marriage between religious organizations and political activity, much to the detriment of the nation.

Like the funding of “faith-based” charities?

Yeah, and the right-wing evangelical organizations that have intervened in politics and have helped reactionary political forces with things that have little to do with stopping wars or improving the economy. The so-called family values that disregard the destruction of families by war and by economic disparity.

What about the people who really do brave and good things in the name of religion? The priests and nuns who went down to El Salvador, Buddhist monks fighting for justice, even the scores of American rabbis who are activists? To me it seems that sometimes people actually get a kind of superhuman courage or strength from their faith.

All religions have significant ethical components. They’re a part of the teachings of any religion, and there are people who sincerely respond to that part of a religious practice. The people you mentioned, the Catholic liberation priests, are not exactly coddled by the Vatican.

Do you think that the ethics your parents taught you were connected in some way to Jewish ethics or Judaism?

Not really. Well, maybe I got it without knowing it. As they had. What I did get from them was the flavor of Jewish life. I like the language; my parents both loved the Yiddish language. And I connect to the tradition of struggle. The immigrants came over from poor communities and they had to struggle here. Humanism came easy. Socialism came easy. During the first part of the twentieth century, Jewish life in America was full of unionism and aspiration for social justice. I got those things from my parents, but I don’t know if it came from their Jewishness or if it came from the way they had to struggle to earn a living.

I like the progressive history of Jews in the world and in America, going back even to the 1800s, when the Jews were big in revolutionary movements in Europe. And in union movements here in the United States and into the 1900s. I don’t know, but I really do hope it’s a reflection of the ancient ethical component of Jewish tradition or Jewish religion.

Tell me more about your connection to Jewish culture, separate from the religious tradition.

Well, the Jews have a great literature. My mother loved the stories of Sholem Aleichem. She had a complete set of his works, which she read all her life, from volume one right through twenty-eight, and then all over again.

The music that was written in New York and other Jewish communities in the U.S.—operettas, songs—I love all of that! For about a decade in the fifties I was in this group called the Jewish Young Folk Singers, which I helped organize along with my brother. Eventually it was five choruses in different parts of New York City with a total of maybe 250 singers. It was very successful, very exciting. The emphasis was on Jewish music; we did a lot of labor music. Songs of poverty. And of joy: dance music came from the same labor writers from the twenties and thirties. Many of the composers of Jewish music were laborers, workers in shops, and they wrote music on the side.

You are so passionate about your political views. How do you define them?

What I see is that the organization of society under capitalism is not equitable, and that the inequities lead to a whole lot of wrong things. So my political belief is definitely socialism. I think that socialism is achievable not by, you know, capturing the post office here on Gun Hill Road, but through all the struggles that working people have to go through, and the education they pick up in those struggles. I believe they will push society that way eventually. Even here in America.

You said socialism is your “political belief.” Do you think there’s a danger of political movements or ideologies having the same problems that you see religions having?

Yes, there is a danger. Movements and organizations that are progressive, by the very nature of their struggle, become sometimes too guarded, too self-enclosed, and too tyrannical.

I’m also wondering about the people who follow a political movement in the way you might see people following religion: blindly and without questioning. Isn’t that dangerous?

Yes, definitely. It just one of the things that has to be faced. You know, when babies start teething, it’s painful. But they’ve got to do it. And political movements can be like infants. They go through things that they have to learn how to cope with. Like: how do you take power and not abuse power?

When you were growing up in the Bronx, did you have friends who were from more religious families?

No. I never went into a synagogue, in fact, until I was well into adulthood. I don’t remember what the occasion was—probably a funeral, or a bar mitzvah or something.

Have you ever had moments when you wished you believed in God?

Never.

As an atheist, how do you cope with the knowledge of your own mortality?

Well, I’ll tell you, I guess it’s just a belief in what’s nice about what is. What I have seen, the enjoyments I have, the things I approve of—that, to me, is something to lean on. I don’t need something invented.