Being Jewish: Burden or Privilege?

In her Holocaust novel The Postcard, French novelist Anne Berest explores her family’s response over three generations, which can be summed up one word: denial.

Experiencing Judaism as a dark star that kept returning, “circling back like some bizarre constellation surrounded by a halo of mystery,” Berest, her mother, and grandmother try to sever their connection with the Jewish People.

While they don’t defect to another religion, Berest and her ancestors hide their Jewish identity.

Devastated by pain, Berest’s grandmother Myriam, a French partisan, loses her entire family in Auschwitz. She retreats to the French countryside. In the postwar years, she marries a non-Jewish man and raises her children without religion in what she hopes will be “a new world without links to the old one.” Her daughter Lelia, Berest’s mother, follows a similar path, as does Berest herself.

But as hard as they try to tamp it down, the family’s Judaism keeps rising to the surface.

Author Anne Berest

In one of the book’s most striking scenes, Berest recalls herself as a child asking her mother what being Jewish was all about. Her mother’s answer is to show her photographs of concentration camp inmates. Berest is traumatized.

“My eight years of life aren’t enough to have given me any kind of mental resistance. I feel physically attacked by them, wounded,” she writes.

Not surprisingly, Berest becomes an anxious adult. “To me, death always feels near. I have a sense of being hunted. I’m afraid of telling people I am Jewish,” she writes.

Many young Jews today who lack a positive connection to being Jewish are, like Berest and her foremothers, fearful of their Jewishness.

Keep Your Jewish Identity Under Wraps

In some ways Berest and her clan remind me of my Aunt Evelyn who, unlike the other adults in my family, grew up without Judaism and was deeply uncomfortable with her Jewishness.

She was raised in an assimilated home in Budapest by upwardly mobile Jews. Like Berest’s grandmother Myriam, she experienced the horrors of World War II, confined to the Budapest ghetto. She kept her war stories to herself and the trauma of those terrible years never left her.

Evelyn and her mother survived, and her father, a diabetic, died in a Hungarian labor camp after he was denied access to insulin.

In the postwar years Evelyn attempted to distance herself from her past, particularly her Jewish identity that proved so caustic. She reestablished herself in Manhattan in the shadow of Lincoln Center, believing that distinctions based on religion were no longer relevant.

Evelyn enjoyed people, especially children, but she had no intimate friends. Like Myriam, she “didn’t want anyone to get too close.” She was especially discomfited by people who seemed to her too Jewish.

When my sons visited she insisted that they tuck in their tzitzit strings and exchange their yarmulkes for baseball caps, primarily out of concern for their personal safety. For Evelyn, Jewish identity was best kept under wraps. “It’s no one’s business,” she’d say.

“You don’t have a Jewish nose,” she’d tell me when I was young. She was probably thinking that if and when the Nazis return, I’d be able to hide.

The Berest women all married non-Jews and took their names. Evelyn married a Jew but blurred her identity by changing the family surname from Schwartzman to Black. She was pleased when my parents continued the ruse by giving my brother and me ethnically cleansed first names. It also pleased her that neither of us was too “Jewish-looking.”

“You don’t have a Jewish nose,” she’d tell me when I was young. She was probably thinking that if and when the Nazis return, I’d be able to hide. She was ready. Evelyn kept wads of cash under the floorboards of her closet—to bribe her way to safety.

For years, I thought these were the bizarre quirks of an eccentric old woman. Now I realize that she had suffered terribly from Holocaust-related post-traumatic stress disorder.

Evelyn wanted the Holocaust to be remembered. It was she, not my parents, who told me about the camps and the Zyklon B showers, when I was far too young to hear such things.

Jew By Choice

With the current wave of virulent Jew-hatred making one’s Jewish identity a potentially dangerous liability, my understanding – and compassion – of Evelyn and Myriam has deepened. While the urge to run away and hide is powerful for some, a wide swath of Jews, particularly in Israel, are choosing the opposite course and drawing strength from our traditions, our faith, and from each other.

Many Jews are embracing their Jewish identity and deepening their appreciation of the meaning and beauty of their heritage.

Jews are showing up in shuls across the US and holding each other up in loving embrace. Look at the nearly 300,000 who traveled to Washington DC to stand against hate and stand together with the Jewish people.

Wearing a Star of David has become an emblem of Jewish pride. For IDF soldiers tzitzit have become part of the fighting uniform and they are praying. On army bases daily prayer services are packed with both religious and non-religious soldiers.

Jews are also leaning into kindness, donating to soldiers and evacuees. Some are even coming to Israel to pick crops in the Gaza envelope.

I do not judge Jews like Myriam Berest or my Aunt Evelyn, who viewed being Jewish as a dark weight to push away. But it is gratifying to see so many Jews choose a different path in response to their dormant Jewishness becoming potential liability – they are shaking off the dust, embracing their Jewish identity, and deepening their appreciation of the meaning and beauty of their heritage.