On Being Jewish

"Well, now that we have seen each other," said the Unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you. Is that a bargain?"

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 7

I SELDOM READ BOOKS WITH titles such as The French Identity, An Essay on Masculinity, or What It Means to Be a Woman. It was therefore with some considerable hesitation that, a few years ago, I picked up a copy of Alain Finkielkraut's cautionary essay The Imaginary Jew. Through one of those curious autobiographical associations that a book sometimes conjures up, I suddenly recalled an event I had forgotten from far away and long ago. One afternoon when I was seven, on the bus back from the Buenos Aires English high school that I had started to attend, a boy whose name I never knew called out at me from the back seat, "Hey, Jew! So your father likes money?" I remember being so bewildered by the question that I didn't know what to answer. I didn't think my father was particularly fond of money, but there was an implied insult in the boy's tone that I couldn't understand. Above all, I was surprised at being called "Jew." My grandmother went to the synagogue, but my parents were not religious, and I had never thought of myself in terms of a word I believed was reserved for the old people of my grandmother's generation. But since the epithets applied to us imply a definition, in that moment (though I didn't know it then) I was forced into a choice: to accept this vast, difficult identity or to deny it. Finkielkraut in his book tells of a similar moment and acknowledges the universality of such an experience, but his subject is not the inheritance of hatred. "I myself," writes Finkielkraut, "would like to address and meditate upon the opposite case: the case of a child, an adolescent who is not only proud but happy to be Jewish and who came to question, bit by bit, if there were not some bad faith in living jubilantly as an exception and an exile." These individuals of assumed identity, the inheritors of a suffering to which they have not been personally subjected, Finkielkraut, with a flair for the mot juste, calls "imaginary" or "armchair" Jews.

I am struck by how useful this notion is to address a question that troubles me: How does the perception of who I am affect my perception of the world around me? How important is it for Alice to know who she is (the Victorian child that the world perceives her to be) when wandering through the Looking-Glass Wood? Apparently, very important, since this knowledge determines her relationship to the other creatures she encounters. For instance, having forgotten who she is, Alice can become friends with a fawn who has forgotten it is a fawn. "So they walked on together through the wood, Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they came out into another open field, and here the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice's arm. 'I'm a Fawn!' it cried out in a voice of delight. 'And, dear me! you're a human child!' A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed."

Around this notion of constructed identity, Finkielkraut has assiduously elaborated a sequence of questions about what it means to be Jewish (or, I would add, to be Alice or a fawn), and, since every definition is a limitation, he has refused to give these questions definitive answers. Central to Finkielkraut's interrogation is the seemingly trite statement that the Jews exist, that whatever their identity may be, individually or as a group, they have a presence that not even the Nazi machinery was able to erase. This existence is not easily borne, let alone categorized. "Listen, Doctor," wrote Heinrich Heine, "don't even talk to me about Judaism, I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. Slurs and shame: that's all that comes of it. It's not a religion, it's a misfortune." The cry "Why me?" uttered by every persecuted Jew, the imaginary Jew picks up with a sigh of ennui. Using himself as an example, Finkielkraut confesses that on the one hand he broadcasts his wish to be a Jew while on the other he de-Judaizes himself, transforming himself into the "other" and becoming a messenger of his gentile companions: in this I vividly recognize myself. When his parents refer to the Holocaust, he responds with Vietnam; when they mention anti-Semitism, he points out that there are no Jewish garbage collectors in France. "Why me?" has become "Why am I not someone else?"

In this Looking-Glass Wood, the imaginary Jew has lost all sense of belonging; for this Jew there is no possible Jewish "we." The conventions of prejudice understand this "we" to mean a secret society of infamous plots and world domination; the imaginary Jew's response has been to deny solidarity, to declare, "There is no 'we,' for Judaism is a private affair" -even though today it once again widely recognizes itself as a community. But why, Finkielkraut asks pointedly, must collective expression "always remain the exclusive province of politics? Why would anything that is not T necessarily be a question of power or of state?" Why can the Jew not be "I" without either going into hiding or making claims to belonging to the slaughtered millions of the past?

These are dangerous waters. Perhaps it is not the necessity to remember the ancestral persecution that is called into question, but the illusion of heroism it so often entails. Those who profess contempt for their fellows living "in the forgetfulness of history," forget in turn that their own precarious identity rests on "the phantasm of history." On the vaporous webbing of such a past, a past that blesses all Jews with a multitudinous family far in time and vast in space, younger Jews sometimes feel they are nothing but spectators. Watching my grandmother light the Shabbat candles, say the ritual prayers as her hands drew opposing circles over the startled light, I felt no connection to the dark, ancient places of wood and winter mist and ancient languages from which she had come. She was my grandmother, but her existence started and ended in my present; she rarely spoke of other ancestors or of the place where she was born, so that in my mythology her brief, piecemeal stories had far less bearing on my life than the landscapes of Grimm and Alice.

If Judaism has a central injunction, Finkielkraut argues, it should be not "a matter of identity, but of memory: not to mimic persecution or make theater of the Holocaust, but to honor its victims," to keep the Holocaust from becoming banal, so that the Jews are not condemned to a double death: by murder and by oblivion. Even here, my connection to those horrors was vicarious: to my knowledge, we lost no immediate family to the Nazis; both my mother's and my father's parents had immigrated long before world War I to one of the colonies set up by Baron Hirsch for Jewish exiles in the north of Argentina, where gauchos with names like Isaac and Abraham called out to their cattle in Yiddish. I did not learn about the Holocaust until well into my adolescence, and then only by reading Andre Schwarz-Bart and Anne Frank. Was this horror then part of my history too, mine beyond the call of a shared humanity? Did the epithet hurled at me insultingly on that remote school bus grant me citizenship in that ancient, beleaguered, questioning, and stubborn, wise people? Was I-am I-part of Them? Am I a Jew? who am I?

Alice, a human child, and the fawn, one of the hunted, echo this last question, and like me are tempted to answer it not with words born from what they know themselves to be but with words coined by those who stand outside and point. Every group that is the object of prejudice has this to say: we are the language in which we are spoken, we are the images in which we are recognized, we are the history we are condemned to remember because we have been barred from an active role in the present. But we are also the language in which we question these assumptions, the images with which we invalidate the stereotypes. And we are also the time in which we are living, a time from which we cannot be absent. We have an existence of our own, and we are no longer willing to remain imaginary.