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I never knew my great-grandparents. On my mother's side, I think they had all died before I was born; possibly my mother's last grandfather died when I was a baby. On my father's side, my grandfather's parents died before I was born, I believe. I know that my grandmother's parents lived until I was about a year -- I have a picture of them looking at me in my carrier on someone's kitchen table -- but unsurprisingly, I don't remember them. I do know that they left Europe -- on my grandfather's side, Austria and Poland; on my grandmother's, Romania, or, what is now Moldova, a town that appears in the lists of communities annihilated by the Nazis -- in the 1920's, while the leaving was good. She came with his family; her family stayed behind, or, of course, left by another road, not of their choosing, and never came back. My great-grandmother's youngest sister survived, moved to Israel, remarried to another survivor. Them, I remember, and I remember the tattoos on their arms, from which I would avert my eyes.

I keep hearing people say they wish they were surprised by the loathsome, ugly, latent anti-Semitism that's been oozing out into the light the past few days. It must be naivete, but I am surprised. I would not be surprised by up-front bigotry, but I really had it in my head that people who have Issues with Jews and Judaism tended to be pretty blunt about it (whether they had ever met a Jew or not). Right? I mean, people who use verbal "Jew", who think it's okay to call someone a kike [a word I had to brace myself to type], them I can handle. This stuff about "things that make me uneasy about Jewish culture (outside of the religion)", and "I can get where people are coming from who say that Jews 'whine' too much about the holocaust to this date. ... None of the other groups who were killed in the holocaust expect the German government to pay them money for the horrible things that happened back then" ... it boggles my mind. I am honestly baffled. And what I hate almost as much as the fact that it's there in the first place is that I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it, which means that any number of you could be quietly thinking the same thing and I'd have no idea.

If you think we -- Jews practicing and not, female-line children who still go to shul and male-line children who are not Jews per Jewish law but are still products of generations (and would have been Jewish enough for the SS, I'll point out) -- if you think we should, as a group, "get over it" or "move on" or "stop whining"? ... Look, when I am tired of listening to people bitch about things, I have been known to say so, but they are things that on the scale of human experience are hangnails compared to locking a mass of humanity in an oven and burning them to dust. There are times when I think fixating on the past is detrimental to the future. This is not one of those times; and at those times, that is my reason for thinking it, and not because I'm tired of hearing people moan about something in the past that I wasn't even responsible for. "It's not my fault" is nothing. It's nothing.

So. To return to the subject: if you think we as a group need to quit our bitching -- I don't like ultimata, so I won't say if you think X we can't be friends anymore, but ... but.

Well. synecdochic had better, more organized thoughts than mine this morning, so actually, having brought it up, I'm going to bounce you over to her. And then say this:



The woman in this picture is me. The infant is a four- (five-, now) month-old baby cousin. We are the great-granddaughters of Jews who either left Romania when the leaving was good, or didn't. Our great-grandmothers had at least two more sisters and I believe one brother; a family of four or five. Our generation, now that this baby is in it, numbers five. [eta: No, wait, I've left out some people. Let's think again. My great-grandmother had five children. Of these, three survived to adulthood; one had four children, and the other two each had three -- that is, my father had a brother and a sister and seven first cousins. Counting down from the oldest to the youngest, those ten grandchildren of my great-grandmother have children in the numbers: two, two, none, three, two, one, one, two, none, none. So my great-grandmother has thirteen great-grandchildren; but my great-great-grandmother has fourteen great-great-grandchildren, which, when you've had four or five children, is just not that many. Is my point.]

There should be more of us, filling in the 30-year gap between myself and this baby, shouldn't there?

"Get over it", indeed.