What is in the fine print?
Arbeit Macht Frei- work will set you free. (written on the gates of Auchwitz)
I was with my mother, my father, and my cousin Gabriel from Rome. I was not really paying attention to the couple next to us - from a side glance I could tell you that they obviously were on a first or newish date. He was muscular but pale and hipstery, she was kind of a hottie- a big breasted rockabilly Latina. That was all the facts I registered before losing interest in people watching them. My mom was telling Gabri some family gossip for the one millionth time because his grandfather - my mother's first cousin, won't tell him the dirt. At this point I could retell how "Pepino met a woman on the train, got off in Florence and had sex with her, twenty years later Olivia showed up at the door. My grandmother told my mother, Uncle Pepino just had a baby..except she already wears shoes and talks" (its funnier in Italian) Anyhoo- some mention of the 1940s were made- were they hid during the war and therefore why some people moved to Bogota, some people left for South Africa and no one ever heard from them etc... Then at another point we had a small discussion of what to order, Gabby is Kosher, we are not so he chose...etc Needless to say we were a table of Jews having a pleasant enough evening.
All of the sudden, I looked across to my father and his face was so angry and green, I had not seen this face since he grounded me when I was 14 for staying out too late with my first boyfriend. I thought maybe he was not feeling well or maybe Mom said something that I did not catch that pissed him off- but he would have just said something- no one in my family has a verbal gate. I asked him what was wrong. He grabbed my forearm really tightly and said, " I am offended by this young man's tattoo" I looked next to me and there it was: "Arbeit Macht Frei" Underneath it was a Jewish star. Then my father says, "If I were 20yrs younger I would punch this guy in the face" "Your grandfather was there!" He meant my mother's father not his. Again I was struck by how much more emotion stirred up in his face than hers. She was only momentarily panicked and then returned to enjoying her cousin.
I started to feel upset in a weird way- my brain tried to make sense of the situation. Gabri being used to extreme politicking and protesting his country immediately decided that it was not an anti-semitic statement but a fascistic statement. But mom, weirdly unaffected- considering she is the survivor, said "thats bullsh*t he is just a stupid misguided putz"
My dad was boiling. I started to feel more nervous. My father has never ever hit another person ever! He never had to when he was a kid because his older brother took care of him. He was threatened a couple of times when was in the south in the 60s but he threatened back his way out of it.
How now at 66 in a Williamsburg restaurant could I witness my fantastically unmacho Dad hit another person. He's a Doctor- he took an oath to heal- he is the one that remains calm- but I could see this strange hurt in his face. It was something personal, something that had nothing to do with me. It was something he had not worked out and perhaps never will but he was alive during a time that I was not. I remember in Kavalier and Clay ( one of my most favorite books ever- please read it!) I was struck by the parts of the book that wrote about Jews in the US during WWII and how they were in someways denialists feeling like acknowledging the war was gosh and on the hand suffering a terror of the unknown about to strike them. Some had family over there. Some managed to bring people here- and the stories were simply unbelievable. It created a generation of guilty living Jews who managed to escape the horror and live the American dream. I wonder if my father's fantastical nightmare somehow exceeds my mother's reality. Or maybe he just was pissed and there is no determining.
All is know is that what perhaps disturbed me the most was that there is a chance that this person tattooed his arm and has no idea how truly upsetting it was. Work did not set anyone free. Is this boy somehow a ramification of the continuing conspiracy theory that the Holocaust was a myth. Is it a statement against GWB and his politics concerning the loose connections between democratizing Arab nations and supporting Israel? I don't know. I am not a knee jerk Zionist nor am I the kind of Jewish person who maintains tradition in her life. I just live my life aware of my history and that sometimes it makes me different. But last night I felt genuinely threatened and I did not like it- I did not like remembering that I could die for hate. Its different from 911 or traveling through India as an American during wartime, or getting stuck in the mud in the middle of the night in a jungle in Costa Rica (tee hee- I almost forgot about that!).
It's personal.
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