the exile within

Libraries have always been tricky for me. I have to prepare my body, which I consider to be a pretty sensitive biological system, to an extended period of concentration with little to no stimulation in the way of food and beverage. This does not come naturally. On the upside, periodically sneaking behind bookshelves for a quick fix of sugar is a good way of keeping the brain juices flowing. A banana in my laptop bag is my safety net. 

This time it is the Tel Aviv Main Library, Beit Ariela, that will be challenging my hypoglycaemic tendencies. I fuel on a tall espresso, and pass security. This place has gained a prominent place in my childhood memories: my father would bring me and my older sister here to the children’s library. We would sit in a heap on the carpet for story time, or wrap bulky, black headphones around our heads with much relish to listen to music while our little fingers played with the spiral bendy cords. Libraries, as opposed to the playgrounds and schools, were very safe places to be in. You would hardly ever get bullied by anyone. 

The Community Notebooks are stored in the Ahad Ha’am library upstairs. As I browse the shelves to see what’s there, a woman with a heavy Russian accent greets me: “you cannot walk around here. Tell me what you’re looking for and I will help.” I tell her of my little quest, and she disappears into an adjacent room. Opposite the information counter, I see a glass casing labelled “Haifa, 1985″. Inside is a book entitled “Pessach Haggadah in Memory of the Holocaust”. There are two pages on display: on the left, a picture of a striped black and white concentration camp uniform arranged in a cross with a yellow Star of David is adorning the following Hebrew quote from the Haggadah (literally, “the telling”, a Talmudic account of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, as read on Passover each year around the dinner table): “In every generation a person is obligated to regard himself as if he had come out of Egypt, as it is said: ‘You shall tell your child on that day, it is because of this that the Lord did for me when I left Egypt.’ The Holy One, blessed be He, redeemed not only our fathers from Egypt, but He redeemed also us with them, as it is said: ‘It was us that He brought out from there, so that He might bring us to give us the land that He swore to our fathers.’”

It is perhaps less obvious for some that the road from biblical Egypt to modern-day Israel goes through the Nazi Holocaust in Europe. But politically speaking, there never was a stronger link. Suffering and its assumed derivatives, righteousness and entitlement, have become the pillars of Zionist identity. Interesting that this particular juxtaposition should be displayed in a room named after Ahad Ha’am, whose Zionist sentiments ruled out exclusive nationalism as a recipe for disaster and a corruption of the Jewish spirit. The Zionist leadership did not need the Holocaust to promote its goals, the anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia in 1904 and in Palestine in the late 30’s were reason enough for those keen on developing militant Jewish nationalism. But for an entire nation to brace itself through decades of war and struggle without public critique of its foundations - that takes serious ideology. As does lobbying the UN to support a partition plan that offered 56% of the land to 33% of its inhabitants (Palestinian and European Jews). This ideology is counter-racist in its core, and, in the 20th century, is finally forged by the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust: the Jews, just like the average anti-Semite suggests, are special. They are not like any other people. They have always been, and always will be, persecuted. The Enlightenment and emancipation of the Jews in Europe, in fact, were seen by Theodor Herzl as adverse affects that only made the Jew stand out as primitive and backwards, a supposedly unshakeable and unchanging image (the same image that would later be attached by secular Jewish migrants to the indigenous Arab population in Palestine). At the same time as Herzl lobbied for a national home for Jews in Palestine, he would also entertain notions of mass conversion of all Jews to solve a supposedly inevitable situation: the clash between the inherently anti-Semitic gentile and the ever wandering, destabilising Jew. The historical narrative of Mizrachi Jews originating in today’s Iraq, Iran, Yemen and Morocco, has been either excluded or adjusted to fit European Zionism. Mizrachi migrants to Palestine were either banned or discouraged from speaking Arabic and wearing traditional dress. In Egypt during the 1950s, the Israeli secret service has famously had to plant bombs in Jewish synagogues in Cairo to “encourage” Jewish migration to Israel. What emerges is a frightening vision of a club anxious to summon its arbitrary membership before shutting the doors forever. Like every other club that has attempted to do the same throughout history, Israel, as a Jewish national home, remains anything but safe, for Jews and non-Jews alike. 

Browse as I might, I cannot find my family’s names in any of the records for Warsaw. When my paternal great-grandparents migrated from Poland and Russia, they quickly lost all connection with their families there. All that remains are a few faded monochrome pictures. I will have to find another way.