I wrote this letter to my daughter five-and-a-half months before she was born.
Your name is most likely ———. An Armenian name that rolls off an American-English tongue. If you choose to pronounce the vowel in the “—” you can glide right into your Yiddish last name. Your Jewish last name. You are Jewish.
Your Jewishness comes from me. Here is the story of how that Jewishness came to me, as I understand it now:
Your grandfather Mordechai was born in Toronto in 1964 to two Jewish parents: Philip Nathan Shulman of Toronto and Ziva Sirkis of Petah Tikva, Israel. Both of them were born in 1930. (Philip may have been born in 1931. Can’t quite grip the memory.)
The origin stories of Philip and Ziva tell two prongs of the greater Jewish story in the 20th century. Jews’ ancient DNA traces back to the Middle East but circumstances the likes of which you can guess forced Jews to spread out all over the place. Many peoples have similar histories. In the briefest of terms: some of those Jews traveled to Spain and North Africa — the Sephardic (“Spanish”) Jews — and lived there long enough to build an independent culture. They preserved Biblical Hebrew but also forked their own language, Ladino, from Spanish. Splendid Sephardic music and customs survive today, but not as a dominant force in the tapestry of Jewishness. The inquisition in the late 15th century dealt a blow to the Sephardic Jews so damaging that they never recovered.
Other Jews did not venture so far. What would be called Mizrahi (“Eastern”) Jews stayed in the Middle East, with large populations in Iraq and Iran. Many were Persian subjects. Later on, many were Ottoman subjects, including those who remained in the Holy Land. These people held onto their Jewishness as minorities under Muslim rule. Middle Eastern Christians were not so different, except that Christianity does not have the same ancestral blood-line component that ties a people to land. These Jewish communities survived even past the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which signaled the final crumbling of a bygone era of dominance and prosperity in the Islamic world. Now, none of those countries have any Jews at all.
Another group of Jews split the difference and ended up in Europe. These Ashkenazi (“Ashkenaz” refers to a location, mostly forgotten) Jews, as with the other groups, developed a culture and a language — Yiddish — that reflected their new home. Yiddish is a Germanic language written in Hebrew characters. Ashkenazi food applies the laws of Kashrut to the stodgy ingredients of Eastern Europe. Ashkenazi music sneaks elements of an old Eastern modality into a framework of Western harmony, played on Western instruments.
One can tell two stories of the Ashkenazi Jews leading into the twentieth century.
Many Jews found a natural home in Germany. German culture foregrounded the life of the mind and was the academic and intellectual epicenter of Europe. Jews had, for thousands of years, refined the art of studying, writing, and arguing. It was a perfect fit. One can revere the myriad accomplishments of Jewish scientists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and one should, but many of those scientists were just as German as they were Jewish, at least in terms of how they comported themselves as thinkers and writers. So too the authors and musicians. In fact, conditions for Jews in Germany, as ironic as it sounds from our perspective now, were so good that assimilation and secularism became natural, inevitable processes. A person like Albert Einstein was Jewish but without much connection to Judaism as a religion or Jewishness as a dominating culture or a civil order. It is hard not to shed a tear when you consider what could have been if Germany had not lost its mind, if the Jewish-German intellectual alliance had persisted. I might have been composing this message on another planet, on a machine powered by nuclear energy, in another language.
But back to 1880, where an opposite story was unfolding a bit to the east. The Jews of Poland and the Russian Empire did not assimilate; they held on to Yiddish, they dressed in the modest black garb you can still see in Brooklyn and Jerusalem, and then kept at arm’s length the “official” cultures of the kingdoms and nations that contained them. Russian/Lithuanian/Polish/Ukrainian culture just didn’t commute with the Jews the same way German culture did. That separation created tension and tension, if not dispelled, leads to predictable outcomes. The pogroms. Fear and violence. The new idea infecting the heads of young fiery men — nationalism — could not stomach the existence of the Jews, a nation-within-a-nation whose very belief structure denies the load-bearing fictions meant to bind a nation together. These Jews had it rough.
We can reap many lessons from the divergent stories of the Ashkenazi Jews separated by the Germany/Poland border, but some of those lessons have to wait as others screamed to the forefront when Europe went up in flames. The Holocaust is the most sinister and black of the tragedies of World War II but hardly the only one. Germans suffered under English bombs. Japanese soldiers subjected Chinese people to impossible brutality. Russia sacrificed unfathomable numbers of men to defeat Germany. The United States unleashed two nuclear weapons on Japan. And yet none of these tragedies reveals the infinite evil within humanity the way the Jewish Holocaust does. Assimilated Jews: murdered. Unassimilated Jews: murdered. Religious Jews: murdered. Secular Jews: murdered.
You are alive, growing in your mother’s womb, because your Ashkenazi Jewish ancestors had the foresight or caution to leave Europe earlier than most. Your great-grandfather Philip’s ancestors lived in the Russian empire but chose to leave for North America. They avoided the Bolshevik revolution and the Holodomor that followed. They avoided the Holocaust. Hitler rose to power in 1933, when Philip was two years old. It was the right decision to leave. Why Canada? I do not know an exact, personal reason. But there were not so many options. The list of tolerant, democratic societies was not long a hundred years ago. The United States was most Jews’ first choice, but the US, in spite of its values, imposes quotas and restrictions on immigrants around that time, including specific quotas by race. The US set an “acceptable” number of Jews and refused to take in more.
Meanwhile, a bolder, bigger-thinking group of Jews worked on a more aggressive plan: the establishment of a Jewish nation in their ancestral homeland. Most of the earliest Zionists were assimilated, cosmopolitan German-speaking Jews who were plugged-in enough to world affairs to even consider the possibility of a move so bold. Some of those Jews had set up successful careers in European countries but were willing to leave all that behind because of 1) the fear of the festering antisemitism and the bubbling violence they detected outside of “enlightened circles;” and 2) the pride that stirred in the hearts of tons of young men of all backgrounds: the hope for some kind of national unity, divorced from monarchical and imperial forces. Daniel Sirkis, your great-great-great-grandfather, was such a Jew, from Lodz, Poland.
Daniel had lived through the pogroms and the Great War. But something told him, in the 1920s, that the world had changed. I cannot imagine the pain and difficulty of the decision; I pray such a decision will not be forced on me and our family. The Sirkis family left Poland for Palestine. (Ziva, your great-grandmother, was born to Mordechai Sirkis and Bella Palatnik. A wing of the Palatniks (a Polish Jewish family too) immigrated to Brazil, where we still have much family.) In the early 1920s, the land of Palestine — a tiny strip surrounding the ancient city of Jerusalem — was controlled by the “British Mandate.” The Arabs (mostly Muslim) living there had been Ottoman subjects until the Empire collapsed in the wake of WWI. Under British rule, the newly-named “Mandate of Palestine” supported a mix of Arabic, English, and Hebrew (Jews had always lived there, and the earliest Zionists had come to the land generations before). The truth is, despite the layers and layers of history surrounding Jerusalem, Palestine was something of a backwater in a dwindling empire. Arab nationalism cropped up much later than European nationalism, and the urban Jews who moved across the continent to resettle in the desert not only traveled over distance, but also across time — the world in which they landed still operated in a much older order, nothing like the national and bureaucratic economies that had picked up momentum in Europe and North America.
The earliest Zionists were ideologues with grand visions of what the State of Israel could be. But an enormous population of Jews became “Zionists by default” — they, despite not being political or ideological, were forced to the land of Israel because they had no other choice. Europe became uninhabitable to Jews, and North America closed its door. It is a fact as simple as it cruel.
I count us as lucky that Philip’s wing of the family made it to North America well before the door closed. I commend Ziva’s grandfather for uprooting his family a nearly twenty years before Hitler invaded Poland. Your Jewish ancestry holds both sides of the fate of the Jews who survived the Holocaust. Today, about half of the world’s Jews speak English and the other half speak Hebrew. America and Israel.
From a religious perspective, there is so much wrong with what I am doing right now — writing on Yom Kippur, focusing on heinous sins that happened to my people rather than atoning for sins I have myself committed. Good thing, then, that I am not religious!
And yet, I am wearing a napkin-thin white shirt; the Internet’s off; I am fasting and as noon approaches I am getting hungry. Judaism is a religion, indeed. But Judaism is only part of being a Jew. The religion itself comprises civil laws governing the mechanisms of the day-to-day, plus transcendent moral philosophy and spirituality. Your great-great-great-great-grandfather’s generation retained hundreds of years of Jewish Orthodoxy — apparently we are descended from an important Polish Rabbi “haBach” — but then in just a couple generations so much of that tradition has wilted away, replaced by the secular capitalistic norms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I eat pork; I do not go to shul. My mother, your grandmother, is not Jewish, which disqualifies me from Orthodox legitimacy unless I undergo a conversion ceremony, despite my bris and Bar Mitzvah. If our ancestors knew of this, they might label the outcome a failure. But of course I take a different view.
Jewishness is more than anyone can define in a sentence. It is more than anyone can define using words at all. It contains, it does not “be.” I see Jewishness as an enormous and complex computer program with human beings as interpreters. Many of us choose to “comment out” all but a few blocks of code. But I have never met a Jew who renounced his or her Judaism. We always keep the embers smoldering so that you may recover as much or as little source code as you choose, as you weave your tapestry of identities. Yom Kippur stands at the center of Jewish tradition because of its holiness and ritual. But, consider another reason for its centrality and for its curious way of rekindling dormant Jews for just a single day of the year: Yom Kippur, the “day of atonement,” is a holiday that offers a specific mechanism for forgiveness. A way to wash away the muck that clogs up our hearts. Forgiveness as a force softens the brutality that defined the ancient world (the world into which Judaism was born) and still persists within all of us. “Good” can mean “strong” but it can also mean “kind.” Why? How? The Jews, in creating the rituals of Yom Kippur, crystallizing forgiveness into a specific action, invented the spiritual technology that elevated humans beyond the impulsive, violent beasts of our ancient past. Forgiveness is not weakness, though; “mercy” is not the antonym of “power.” God Himself is strong and vengeful in the Hebrew Bible.
You will be born into a time of unmatched political stupidity full of moral inversions. One such inversion is the fetishization of weakness. It is a secular outgrowth of Christianity’s overemphasis on the plight of the victim. Ironic children attempted to rebel against the Christian Western Order but instead recreated its ugliest faces under the auspices of an academic bureaucracy. I pity these children and feel some sympathy for them but I will admit that it is good that they hold weakness in such high regard, for it makes them weak, and their targets are often Jews. At the same time, the Jewish understanding of the balance of strength and mercy gives us something to draw on. It is why we will be OK.
I can atone for the sin of writing on Yom Kippur — there is still time today, and if I have to wait a year, so it shall be. But I would not forgive myself if I did not pass on a little piece of Jewishness. Shreds of the religion, the best faces of the culture, some history. Decide for yourself which seeds you will nourish and which you will stow away. You owe it to the long unbroken chain of Jews before you not to be so arrogant as to think you can extinguish the flame on the basis of disagreements with this or that point. Jewishness is bigger than you or me, bigger than any person can ever understand. You are lucky to inherit it and I will be proud to see what you do with it.
Love,
Jacob (Dad?)
Oct 12, 2024 Los Angeles