I learned about the afterlife in pre-school, from a boy named Brian: “When Jews die they go to hell, where they are stabbed by the devil with giant forks and knives.”
* * *
I first read sections of Anne Frank’s diary when I was eight, sitting on the floor of my school library. I did not get very far, distracted by too many details of daily life, bored by the presence of adults. But I read Anne Frank’s diary several times throughout the years.
* * *
My parents didn’t believe in organized religion so we only went to synagogue on the high holidays and on rare Friday nights when my grandmother guilted my mother into driving into Chicago to go to Temple Beth El. We lit candles on Chanukah, even though my mom said the only reason Jews celebrated Chanukah with such fervor was because after World War II they became afraid their kids would be so jealous of Christmas that they would convert.
And then there really would be no Jews left.
* * *
We learned Christmas songs for the Holiday Sing at school. My mom said it was okay for us to sing “Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer” but not “Away in A Manger.” Other Jewish parents complained, too. The music teacher added “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel” to the program, but we still sang “Silent Night”.
* * *
At the Brownies induction ceremony at the Botanical Gardens I refused to say Jesus’s name in prayer. I didn’t know I was doing something subversive, but afterwards everyone was mad.
A few weeks later, the troop leaders left me at the roller-skating rink two towns over when my mom didn’t pick me up at 6 p.m. She arrived at 6:30 and found me sobbing. She said the troop leaders told her the wrong time on purpose because I wouldn’t say Jesus’s name. I wasn’t in Brownies anymore after that.
* * *
My mother’s grandmother came from Poland when she was 16, my mother’s father from Russia when he was five. My father’s family is from Russia and Romania. Everyone was in the U.S. well before World War II, settled in and around Chicago. I come from working-class folk and criminals.
* * *
I preferred When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, by Judith Kerr. I had a teddy bear named Oatmeal. I did not like the idea of Hitler playing with him.
* * *
My twin brother, Mike, and I raced up from the basement to tell my parents about a funny show we’d watched on TV—the story of the first man and woman on earth, a lady named Eve and a guy with a more ordinary name that had already escaped us.
“Adam,” my parents said, their voices weary. We were astounded that they had guessed correctly so quickly.
They enrolled us in Sunday school at Temple Beth El because we were growing up ignorant. We went for one year, until they got tired of driving back and forth to the city every weekend.
* * *
The kids from the next block threw rocks at our house until we came outside.
Luke had been my best friend for a few weeks the summer we were six. We used to climb the pear tree in my front yard and eat the fruit long before it was ripe. That day, he stood there silently while his brother and sisters and all the other kids we’d known forever called us dirty Jews and Jesus killers. Lori and Steve pushed four-year-old Emmy forward.
In her little baby voice, she called us kikes.
* * *
During the 2016 presidential election, I played a self-soothing game of disaster preparedness. Plans for the future included The Mass Walking Migration to the Great Republic of California, for when those of us who need to avoid death or imprisonment leave our homes for a country that wants us. Another option was to walk to Mexico, though that only works if Mexico will have us. Walking—because of course there will be no fuel. I envisioned abandoned cars littering the interstate and many Hoovervilles along the route. It was a diversion that helped me manage stress. I did not fully believe that just months down the road, having such a plan would seem not only reasonable but, on some days, imperative.
* * *
As a child, I spent most Saturdays at the library, selecting a stack of ten novels to read before my next visit–the maximum number of books you could check out at once. Paperbacks were in the metal racks at the front of the children’s section, with hardcovers to the left and a cart of new releases in the center. By the windows were stacks of older books dating back decades. In every section there were books about the Holocaust. I read them all. They merge and meld into a seamless story of kids in wartime.
The genre taught me about the betrayal I would have felt when my friends join the Hitler Youth, about living in the attic of strangers to avoid death in a camp, about pretending to be goyim to cross borders. About Kristallnacht. About clearing murders. About emigrating to the U.S. About being turned away by the U.S and dying in a camp.
The genre says “We will never go back,” and “This kind of hatred was stamped out by the entire world.” The genre explained my Jewish history to me but tended to render invisible the suffering of other races, cultures, and religions.
* * *
Someone burned a cross in my cousins’ front yard. My parents only told us because we were going to visit and they had to explain the black scorches on the lawn.
This was how I learned about the Ku Klux Klan. I did not understand why people who believed in God would burn a symbol of their religion to show their hatred for other people. I understood that the KKK was the American version of Nazis and that they had existed for longer, hated even more people, and operated in secret instead of as part of the government.
* * *
A local radio DJ played a song spoofing the theme to The Flintstones, called “The Flintsteins.” Some of my sixth-grade classmates thought it was very funny. Our teacher made them stop singing it because it wasn’t nice to Jewish people. They asked me later how it could be mean if it was true.
* * *
The best Holocaust book I ever read was Bright Candles, by Nathaniel Benchley, about non-Jews in the Danish resistance. It made me want to be a covert operative, helping the persecuted.
* * *
We lived on the North Shore of Chicago, where Jewish girls were called Jewish American Princesses, or JAPs. This meant we were rich and spoiled and bitchy. I hated this because I wanted to be a boy. I was not into unicorns. I was not into rainbows. I hated my ballet shoes. I wore overalls every day, scowled when smiled at, and loved Tom Sawyer.
I had no problem being Jewish but I did not like anyone making assumptions about what kind of girl I was based on my religion, especially when, given my druthers, I would have lived on the streets with the urchins from the movie Oliver!
* * *
In the novel Chernowitz, by Fran Arrick, bullies add “witz” to Bobby Cherno’s last name because they think it’s funny to make him sound more Jewish. At the end of the book, when the bullying becomes bad enough that the community must confront it, the whole school watches films about the Holocaust in the auditorium. Some kids cry and run out at the sight of the naked, emaciated concentration camp survivors, but the main bully remains unaffected. Later the same day, he again hisses “Jew” at Bobby under his breath.
* * *
My parents got divorced. My father moved to New York and married an Italian woman. Once, after I’d known my new family for a few years, my step-sister referred to a deli platter as a “Jew plate.” When I objected, my step-mother said my step-sister had plenty of Jewish friends and this was not an offensive term. I never told my father.
* * *
We moved from the suburbs to the city. Ninth-grade me donned combat boots and shaved everything but the bangs off my head punk-rock-style. I spent Saturday nights at Belmont and Clark—milling around in the Dunkin Donuts parking lot and hanging out at Medusa’s, an all-ages dance club. I don’t know exactly when I gleaned that the swarms of boys with shaved heads were racists. My friends thought I was naïve for not knowing sooner, considering I was Jewish.
But some of those boys were adorably sweet-faced even when they were trying to seem furious. I didn’t know what the American flags on the arms of their jackets meant. Wouldn’t they be wearing Swastikas if they were Nazis?
* * *
In the logic of Chicago-area racists, circa 1990, real Nazis—the kind who wear Swastikas—wanted to kill anyone who was not white. Given the means, they would gas blacks and Jews. After that came White Power, which meant wanting to form all-white societies and all-black societies, with race-mixing being illegal. Finally, White Pride meant you thought white people were the master race but you didn’t want to go out and kill anyone.
If you were adept, you could identify the levels and subgroups by the colors of their bomber jackets, their suspenders—the thin kind called braces—and their boot laces. White, red, yellow–maybe they were White Pride or maybe they had sent a guy to the hospital or maybe they had killed a Jew. True Nazis wore tiny Swastika pins on their jackets.
* * *
It was tough to distinguish anti-racist skinheads from racist skinheads, because they all hung out together on Belmont—and they were all likely to head over to Halsted to harass gay men.
* * *
Skinhead logic: If you were white and got mugged or otherwise assaulted by a black person, then you were morally obligated to defend your race by any means necessary—including banding together to fight in an eventual race war. Skinheads were Chicago street gangs for white kids.
* * *
The first Gulf War officially began the week I turned 17. Mike and I joined a group called Chicago Area High Schools Against the War.
Student Council affixed yellow ribbons to every tree on our massive campus.The line put forth by those who favored ribbons was that they were an expression of support for the troops. We believed the ribbons’ real purpose was to generate support for the war effort itself by making it cheerfully retro.
* * *
We took down the ribbons. And then, in the parking lot of a strip-mall across the street from school, five or six metalheads grabbed us. Jim, the ringleader, was guy who made me roll my eyes whenever he spoke. His conversation was invariably nonsensical and peppered with observations about my body. Now he and his posse were upset because some of them planned to join the Marines after graduation, and what we had done offended their love of country.
They shoved Mike around and pinned my arms behind my back. Jim called me a bitch and demanded I defend my anti-war stance. He asked me what kind of Jew I was if I didn’t care that Saddam Hussein was dropping bombs on Israel in retaliation for the U.S. bombing Baghdad. I was caught between fight or flight; my thoughts weren’t clear. I yelled that I wasn’t a Zionist. “I will fuck you up the ass with a yellow ribbon tied around my dick!” Jim screamed. He called me a kike, a Jewish bitch.
I don’t remember how we got away.
* * *
Jim showed up at my locker after school. His fist raced toward my face. He might have swerved or I might have ducked—maybe a little bit of both—and he punched the locker just to the right of my cheek, still screaming. “I will fucking kill you, you kike bitch! I will fucking kill you and rape you when you’re dead!”
* * *
Kate’s older brother, Dan, was in reform school—some place called “the island.” When he came back from the island, Dan joined the KKK. I never saw him in a white sheet. I don’t remember talking to him about race. I don’t remember talking to him at all. What I do know is that Dan was beaten regularly by his father until his early teen years.
When Kate was young, Dan once filed all his fingernails into points and scratched her. Later, he had children with a punk-rock girl who turned out to be part-Jewish. The story goes that when he found out, he threw up. And then he used her Judaism—and her deceit—as a reason to beat her up regularly.
* * *
Joanie, an anti-racist skinbird—as the girls were called—wasn’t exactly my friend, but when I was a freshman and she was a junior, we both hung out at Wendy’s after school and she always included me in conversations. She knew about communism and art and revolution. Her attention made me feel honored and singled-out. I had it in my head that she was Jewish, perhaps because of her prominent nose or her unabashed intellectual curiosity.
Joanie showed up on campus my senior year to say hi to her little brother, a sweet ninth-grade dirthead named Patrick. I hadn’t known they were related but I knew her brother was Irish—which meant Joanie was not Jewish. I was still making this minor internal recalibration when I noticed the tiny Swastika pin on her bomber jacket.
It was hard to make my voice work but I asked her why she was wearing it.
“I was mugged by some black guys.”
“I don’t understand. How does that turn you racist?”
“Because it proves I was wrong.” She told me that black people were animals and then launched into other rhetoric I’d heard before. Mud people, racial pride, Jews own the media, master race, etc.
I realized she had no idea that I was Jewish. For her, my incredibly Jewish last name was not a tip-off, just as her Irish last name hadn’t indicated anything to me. I wanted to tell her that I was Jewish and had always thought she was, too, and that maybe this meant something. But I said nothing.
* * *
For months, I had a recurring nightmare in which Joanie popped up from underneath a table at Wendy’s and slit my throat.
* * *
There were no skinheads at the College of Santa Fe, but Fred, a member of the residential life staff, displayed a Swastika on a shelf in his room in my dorm. It was the size of an armband, affixed to a base and visible from the hallway when his door was open—which it was most every night when he played cards with students. The story went that he had participated the year before in a theater department production of Good, a play about the Holocaust by Cecil Phillip Taylor, and the Swastika was a memento. I asked Fred himself and he repeated the same rationale. I told him that I was Jewish and found it hard to accept this, that the Swastika in his doorway made me not want to come to him for a new lightbulb or to borrow the dorm broom.
He told me I had no reason to be upset or worried. It was a theater memento. Nothing more.
* * *
On Yom Kippur, I went with another Jewish student to Fred’s room and asked him to take down the Swastika in deference to the High Holy Days. We had a group of friends with us so I thought Fred might bend to our will—but he said he would not take it down. I said he was being hurtful, and that if the themes of Good were meaningful to him, this should matter. A guy playing cards turned to me and said “It’s not our fault that all the Jews jumped into the ovens to die.”
Fred kept a Bugs Bunny whiteboard on the outside of his door. We drew a Star of David necklace on that rabbit in green dry-erase marker every day for months until he took the board down. The Swastika stayed where it was. Finally, I went to the dean. Fred was told to keep the Swastika out of the front area of his dorm residence, which was technically a staff office.
* * *
I landed in New Mexico thanks to Richard Bradford’s Red Sky at Morning, a World War II novel in which a family of rich Southerners ride out America’s involvement from the relative safety of their summer home in Santa Fe, re-imagined by Bradford as Corazon Sagrado. The teenage Josh Arnold learns the ways of the locals–how to eat spicy chile, what part of town flood, where the artists live, how to point politely with his chin instead of his finger–and a bit about the mysterious religious rituals of Catholic sects in the mountains.
When I moved here I learned about Penitentes, who engage in a form of self-flagellation that scares outsiders, and about crypto-Jews, descendants of Spanish Jews who were forced to convert during the Crusades. I learned about the Japanese-Americans held at internment camps on the outskirts of town, and the many soldiers–American and German–treated at Bruns Army Hospital, on the abandoned grounds of which my college was built.
* * *
I wrote a poem for workshop about the time the kids threw rocks at our house. It was a sestina and came across as chant-like, even prayer-like, with its repeating end words: kids, rocks, friends, kikes. My classmates did not like it. They were mad at me for writing a formal poem–and enraged by the lies they said I had told.
“Children do not think this way. Children do not hate.”
* * *
Our student newspaper ran a one-panel comic about Hitler that asserted that if young Adolph just hadn’t dropped out of art school, he might not have enacted mass genocide in Europe. A wild-eyed Hitler wielding a paintbrush wore a Nazi uniform while behind him a line of naked, emaciated concentration camp prisoners snaked to the horizon.
Everyone said I just didn’t get the joke, that I was taking it personally when it wasn’t aimed at me.
* * *
Mark, a candidate for president of the Associated Student Government, asked if he could count on me to secure him the Israeli vote. I told him I wasn’t Israeli and that I didn’t think there were any Israeli students on our small campus. “I need you to round up the Jews for me,” he insisted. I told him to fuck off. He did not win.
Later that semester, Mark’s campaign manager asked me why the Jews in Nazi Germany got on the trains like lemmings. “Why didn’t they stay and fight?”
At a party at the end of the semester, Mark’s vice-presidential running mate drunkenly asked me:
Did you know that Jews owned Hollywood and the media? and
The Holocaust hadn’t been as bad as people said.
* * *
In a formal performance review, a boss told me my “New York personality” might be appropriate elsewhere, but in Santa Fe being “so New York” was alienating. I told her I was from Chicago.
“You know what I mean,” she said.
* * *
I read an article by a Jewish woman who was certain that the reason people asked her so often if she was from New York was that they were trying to determine her religion. This rang true for me, so I mentioned it to my new boss, Brenda, who had worked in Manhattan for a while. I thought she would get it, even think it was funny, but she didn’t think the New York Question had anything to do with my being Jewish.
“You just have a pronounced urban flair,” she said.
Years later in a meeting, a freelance designer I’d never met before laughed at everything I said and repeatedly asserted that I must be from New York, despite my insistence that I was not. “You sound just like Woody Allen!”
When Brenda finally heard enough, she said, “Jennifer is from Santa Fe, born and raised.”
* * *
Racists are marching in the streets of the United States. This is not underground. They have permits.
Just like Chicago skinheads of old, the disparate groups that have banded together under the heading of “alt-right” disagree on exactly what it means to hate. Are they racist if they wave Swastikas and Confederate flags while brandishing guns and torches? Or is their armed demonstration free speech? Maybe Nazis today are just dumb teens blowing off steam, being a little rebellious against the PC culture. Maybe they are grown men disaffected by poverty, lack of education, and fear. Despite their stockpiles of guns and friends in the federal government, the proud Aryan brethren of today don’t seem convinced of their innate power.
They get upset when we call them Nazis as they stand under Swastikas, their arms extended in Sieg Heil!
* * *
Since World War II, Jews have been taught to fear our deaths at the hands of Nazis who rise up after hiding in plain sight for years, waiting for their hate to become acceptable again. We are taught to be vigilant in order to prevent it. This is the message of every Holocaust book I ever read. These are the nightmares of clearing murders, of men with torches, of leaving all my toys behind, of dressing in as many layers of clothing as possible to escape in the night.
The specter of another Holocaust has never seemed out of the question to me, nor to most Jews I know. This may seem preposterous to people who didn’t know about the Nazis at my high school, about the KKK operating not just in the South but in Chicago—devastating to people for whom the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, revealed the depth of hate that festers in their country, in their neighbors, and even in their family members. The rest of us were not surprised.
* * *
As the Trump administration imposes anti-immigration measures and repeals DACA, and as self-proclaimed white nationalists come and go from his senior administration—and demonstrate in the streets—I’ve been managing stress by deciding what kind of person I am.
If it comes to it, will there be time to escape? Are my outlandish plans actually feasible and am I strong enough to carry them out? Who will hide me in their attic? Would I punch a Nazi—or a United States soldier—if one came in the night for my immigrant neighbor?
Would my neighbor punch a Nazi for me?
* * *
When I was a kid, the greatest injustice of the Holocaust wasn’t that Anne Frank had to spend time in a concentration camp. People suffered; she suffered with them. I tried to suffer as well—to feel the humiliating injustice of working hard labor all day only to go to bed starving, sleeping stacked like corpses in bunks with no blankets, wondering if God would ever save them. I wanted so badly to be able to save them. Reading these books—reading again and again Anne’s descriptions of Peter Van Daan and his parents, of her sister, Margot, of Dussel the dentist—was an effort to summon them back from the dead.
What truly devastated me about Anne Frank, as I read curled-up on the couch in the comfort of my suburban living room, was that she died of typhus just a few months before the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. She fought so hard to leave a record of herself, and she made it so close to the end.
How could she not have survived?
Jennifer Levin is a staff writer for Pasatiempo, the weekly arts and culture magazine of the Santa Fe New Mexican. Her fiction has appeared in The Iowa Review, Twelve Stories, and Freight Stories. She holds a BA in creative writing from the now-shuttered College of Santa Fe.
Cover image from Children’s Drawings from the Terezin Ghetto.
