Paradoxes of an assimilated Americanised quarter-Jew

My ambivalent, attenuated Jewishness often feels like a catch-22, as I’ve said before. On the one hand, even indicating it or pointing it out makes me feel fraudulent. A friend of mine, actually a former roommate of mine from college, posted this comment on Facebook:

Truth be told most Jews are not Jewish in any meaningful sense. They don’t go to Temple, don’t know their aleph beys, don’t keep the Sabbath, don’t keep kosher or observe Jewish law. They don’t speak Yiddish or Hebrew. They don’t marry within the faith and they don’t raise their kids Jewish.

I hasten to note that he wasn’t singling me out, or intending to single me out, with this comment. He was speaking to the state of American Jewishness generally. But I have to admit, that’s me all over, guilty as charged. I don’t keep kosher and don’t go to Temple because that’s not my religious tradition. I learned how to say the Sh’ma Yisroel, but don’t know any more Hebrew than that, and my Yiddish is limited to a couple of phrases my parents use. At best, I belong to the beta Gershom. My Jewish grandmother, halakhically speaking on the ‘wrong side’ of the family (my dad’s), married outside the faith and died young, never getting the chance to raise her children as Jews. So what the hell am I doing even calling attention? Isn’t that cheating? Isn’t that theft? Isn’t that appropriating something that isn’t rightfully mine? I am not and never have been a member of this community. Isn’t it presumptuous and officious to assume any kind of responsibility for it? I can’t stand it when American evangelicals, Messianics and the like put on cosplay as Jews, like Jewishness is their toy-box, to use Dr Weiss’s phrase. But when I talk about my family history, given the degree to which the Jewishness of that history has been watered-down in precisely the way that my former roomie describes, is what I do any better at all?

At the same time, pointedly not speaking about my immigrant Jewish grandmother, not saying anything about what this beautiful Wisconsin girl with my sister’s face in black-and-white photos has meant to me, also seems not only like a cop-out, but also like a kind of historical denial. It feels like participating in some kind of cover-up: like soaking a library in gasoline, dropping a lit match and walking away. History matters a great deal, even and especially if it’s the kind of history that might give you neuroses. It took me a very long time to realise and to process that when my Dad told me he ‘doesn’t have a Zionist bone’ in his body, he was giving voice to far more than just his politics. He was indicating, perhaps indirectly, an entire family history of doyikayt. Whether Bundism was their explicit politics or not, my foremothers and forefathers lived an entire way of being Jewish that was Yiddish, non-Zionist, localist and leftist - that I had no idea about prior to my high school years.

This may be expressed as a paradox: I am just enough of a Jew to be neurotic about not being one. Another paradox is that it is my Tory sensibility that militates in me that, whether I like it or not, I’m part of this localist-leftist Yiddish history. I don’t get to choose that, just like I don’t get to choose who my grandparents are. Given that, the least-bad option as far as I can tell, as it were my best plea for clemency, is to simply be humble and be honest about all of the foregoing, and allow others - Jewish and not - to come to their own determinations.

In fact, whatever falsity may be hidden in it, such honest, humble remembrance is all the more important now. The politics of the (Eastern) European far-right resurgence, its echoes on these shores, the violent Ukrainian, Polish and Hungarian nationalisms that have begun their steady creep out of the shadows of history, render this remembrance necessary and urgent. The far-right resurgence on both sides of the Atlantic not only summons old ideological ghosts, but it rhymes and pairs off all too neatly with the historic and resurgent nationalist pretensions of Israel as the only territorial safe haven for Jews, which must therefore be accomplished even if it means depriving Palestinian Arabs in perpetuity. These triple lies have to be confronted as one if the Jewish people will live in peace, either with their neighbours, their histories or, ultimately, their consciences. Historically, the group which confronted them the most convincingly were the Jewish localists.

I am not Jewish in a religious sense: whatever I have is only the assimilated-apostate Jewishness of Saint Constantine and Saint Bunakov. But I can remember those in my family who were Jewish, and I can remember the way that they were. It may be a vain and pretentious hope, but if there is even a chance that such an anamnesis can, even in some small and yet-unseen way, cut short a cycle of tragœdy that seems to be repeating itself, it should be made.

How (not) to remember the Holy Innocents

The Holy Innocents of Bethlehem (commemorated on 29 December this year in the Orthodox Church) came up in a rather strange way this Nativity season in a conversation I had recently with my father, when we were discussing the daycare options for Albert, and I appealed to my parents’ experience in selecting daycare services for my sister and me. He told me about the first place I was (very briefly) sent to daycare, which was a preschool run by a fundamentalist Lutheran sect out of a certain neighbourhood church which is now in the possession of ‘non-denominational’ Baptists. During my fourth Advent season we were being taught the story of the Nativity from the Gospel of Saint Matthew at this school, and it apparently traumatised me and gave me nightmares – because the Christmas story that the preschool teacher felt it appropriate to teach the toddlers in her care was precisely the one from St Matthew 2:16-18 about King Herod slaughtering the innocent toddler boys of Bethlehem.

Speaking for myself, I can’t really remember anything today about this particular incident, which Mom and Dad both tell me is a very good thing. But my parents recall it well enough, and were understandably livid about it at the time. They argued, somewhat fruitlessly, with the preschool teacher, and afterwards unceremoniously withdrew me from the programme and sent me to a different school. Children need – and my mother, rightly, was adamant on this point – to be fed with milk before they can be expected to digest meat. The birth of Christ is an occasion of joy and hope; in my parents’ view the most important message that little children need to be given at Christmas is that Christ is our hope and that He loves us: that even in the darkest season of the year, there is light.

I imagine my erstwhile preschool teacher, grounded as she was in a polity embracing the fundamentalist conviction of total human depravity, would have argued (assuming she had the presence of mind to do so) that even children need to be faced with the knowledge of that depravity in themselves. After all, what indeed is it that a child would need saving from? But, as that most sane of Englishmen Chesterton put it: ‘Færie tales do not tell children the dragons exist; children already know that dragons exist. Færie tales tell children the dragons can be killed.’ The theological merits of the Christmas story in its entirety have to be backgrounded by a conviction – not of the realities of human evil, which are evident enough even to a toddler even without hearing of evil tyrants who order children to be butchered by the thousands – but of the hope that such evils can be overcome by the eucatastrophe that has just occurred.

So what are we to do with St Matthew 2:16-18, then? All Scripture serves some purpose, be it exoteric or esoteric. And it is instructive, I think, to look to Orthodox iconography in this regard. We do not paper over or ignore or sugarcoat the massacre, which is graphically portrayed in some of the icons of the Church. But the incident is literally overshadowed by the loving embrace that Christ, ‘He who loves the innocent’, gives to all of the slain children. The main point is not to cow children into terror with the butchery of Herod, but instead to assure us that not a single one of those children is forgotten or forlorn in the grand scheme of things. Even if historically only thirty or forty infants were slain by Herod in his mania, the theologically-significant number of 14,000 handed down by the Church assures us that every child, every victim of injustice and violence is remembered and cared for in æternity. Earthly violence is always and everywhere overshadowed by eschatological hope.

Unfortunately, we live in a time where such violence, such real scandals to any faith in a just God, are now commonplace. Our own government, whose job it is to care for us, gives funding to the enemies of mankind and aids the Herods of the House of Saud in perpetuating a genocide of Yemeni Shî‘a children halfway around the world, even as it hypocritically points at the real or imagined humanitarian faults of other governments and critics. Our very culture is steeped in the idea that unborn infants are of no moral consequence, and can be discarded without compunction, to the tune of millions every year. Both those on the political right and on the political left delude themselves at their peril, if they believe God is indifferent to these things, or that they will go unaccounted in the final reckoning. He was there. He was one of them.

And that is the point of the story of the slaughtered children. Part of the scandal of the Incarnation is that Our Lord came into the world, not in power and glory, but in the most vulnerable and most marginal way imaginable. Though his parents eluded Herod, still in the Crucifixion at the hands of another Herod and his Roman taskmasters He shares – not in an empty sentimental way, but in truth – in the suffering of even the smallest, most wretched and most insignificant of these innocent ones. He embraces them, He comforts them, He heals their wounds and dries the tears of Rachel over them. And in the end, they will be the ones at Christ’s side when He calls the world to account. Be Thou entreated for the sake of the sufferings of Thy Saints which they endured for Thee, O Lord, and do Thou heal all our pains, O friend of man!

Where we live, there is our land

Part 1 of my Here-hood Saints series

I am an amnesiac. I am an American. The two go together, and not altogether on account of the alliteration. And it would go together with being a son of Adam, for that matter – poor bloke got tricked into eating a fruit and forgot what good and evil were. My amnesia gives me a double mind; it is not the cause of my guilt, but I am guilty of it anyway. Věra Danzer Cooper – the Jewish grandmother I never knew, and never knew I had until high school – has been something of a haunting presence in my life: more so than I would have thought possible at the time. The sweet and smiling face in the yellowed photographs, almost the double of my younger sister’s, somehow ‘clicked’ something in my mind. Separated as we were by generations (but not by gæography, she also a Wisconsin girl planted in Rhode Island!), she made certain abstractions concrete. She sparked in me a fascination with genealogy, which in turn led me to discover certain rhymes and patterns in my own family life. Blood is thicker than water. Water evaporates. Blood leaves marks and scars. Both flowed from the side of Christ, pierced by a Roman spear at the behest of my kin. Tertullian talked about the ‘blood of the saints’ as the ‘seed of the Church’. There’s a truth in that, but we’ll get to it later.

Blood links me indelibly to Wisconsin and to Rhode Island – both of them my childhood homes; both of them my Jewish forebears’ homes. The blood of my working-class Moravian-born immigrant great-grandfather was spilt, probably in France, in order to seal that link forever. ‘דאָרטען, װאוּ מיר לעבען, דארט איז אונזער לאנד. Dorten, vau mir lebn, dart iz aunzer land.’ Alfréd Danzer may not have been an ideological Bundist, but he lived and suffered like one. How strange it is, then, that I should be a migratory bird, a weird and hopelessly-fragmented kind of pilgrim, an assimilated-apostate Jew wandering in search of Christ on the wrong end of another continent!

So there I was in Qazaqstan: a nervous wreck and a broken failure on the verge of washing out of Peace Corps. I went to the hram of Saint Aleksandr Nevsky looking for… I don’t even know what it was anymore. Father Valery (Shurkin), the rector of that parish where Saint Aleksandr was the patron, welcomed me as warmly as if I were another Russian. And he asked me if I was Orthodox; I replied in my broken survival Russian that, no, I belonged to a ‘peace church’. He replied to me, gently, in paraphrase – though I didn’t and couldn’t have known it at the time – the wisdom of Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco:

The closer we approach God, the closer we approach each other, just as the closer rays of light are to each other, the closer they are to the Sun. In the coming Kingdom of God there will be unity, mutual love and concord.

That the Kingdom of God is only as ‘close’ as we are to each other, and functions as a kind of inverse-square law bringing people closer as they draw near the source of that radiance, made a kind of intuitive sense to me. It also, I realise in hindsight, authorises a spiritual directive to ‘be where you are’: the light reaches everywhere; you do not have to, and should not, pack up and leave to find it. ‘Dorten, vau mir lebn, dart iz aunzer land.’ (The irony is that I had to travel to Qazaqstan and China to figure that out.) Saint John was a Russian-speaking ethnic Serb from Khar’kov; not a Yiddish-speaking Jew from Kiev. And yet even that propinquity is not an accident; as God sees it, nothing can be. If Jewish Bundism was a political reaction to a bloody kind of settler-colonial imperialist impulse on the part of our own people, then here is the spiritual mirror of that belonging. Orthodox Christianity, too, is a church of empire that doesn’t have to be.

To be a church of empire or a church of the crucified: that was the choice that the princely Saint Aleksandr, the patron of that little hram in Saimasai, had to make. He had cultivated the habits of ‘here-hood’ in his early life by attending closely to local administration in Novgorod and Vladimir, and settling disputes between merchants and craftsmen and boyars. He is most famous, though, for his military victories: winning Davidic battles against the Teutonic Goliaths on his Western frontier – the Swedes at Neva; the Germans and Balts at Peipus. Saint Aleksandr’s military prowess is commemorated in the legendary Sergei Eisenstein film bearing his name, but this is not the most important aspect of his life or character.

When it came to a true choice between worldly glory and Christ-like humility, he opted for the latter, the way of nonviolent resistance and self-abasement over the way of triumphalism. He has never been wholly forgiven for it since (and particularly not by Western-looking Slavs nor by cold-war liberals). The louder the schismatics cry out in false umbrage that he is a proto-Stalinist, the more intensely his example of sublime meekness in the spirit of Saints Boris and Gleb puts the lie to their canards and calumnies. Saint Aleksandr made a prudential decision to surrender his independence to the Khan of the Golden Horde. He gave over vain promises of imperial glory and even his state’s independence from the Tatars, in order to save the lives of his people and the spiritual character of his country. He had to put aside any illusions or delusions of grandeur he might have entertained, and make a decision here and now. He decided in that moment that ‘dorten, vau mir lebn, dart iz aunzer land’, and not some other. He didn’t have to travel to France and fight to seal the link to his home in blood. He did it merely by refusing to run, by refusing to fight, by bowing his head and bearing the Cross where he stood. To that heartsick ‘peace-church’ stranger standing in his temple, somehow he drew close: a ray of light pointing toward the Son.

At the time, the importance of my visit to the hram of Saint Aleksandr had not made itself particularly strongly felt. It was only with a certain distance of time that the full effects of that ‘fragment’ came. But the saint was ‘here’.

In the sense I’m using it, all saints are ‘here’, insofar as they are in Christ. As Saint John says, all those who have drawn close enough to God to be so glorified have, by so doing, drawn close to those here on earth as well. Grace knows no worldly borders. Rather, Christ and His saints draw near to those of us who are in need of grace. Christ’s blood is indeed a seal upon us, linking us indelibly to the Heavenly Kingdom in the Eucharist, no matter where we are. ‘Dorten, vau Dir lebn, dart iz aunzer land.’ The Crucifixion and Resurrection are historically- and gæographically-particular events that themselves shatter the logic of history and gæography. It is only we, limited as we are, who are in need of particularity and mediation. In that sense the blood of the saints truly is a seed. It falls to us to cultivate it.

I am tied to my homeland – the Upper Midwest, broadly – in a way which is completely belied by my peregrinating youth and young-adulthood. Bundism is in my Jewish-American heritage even if my amnesiac double-mindedness ‘forgets’ it, strives and rebels against it; though it belongs to a non-Christian tradition it nonetheless informs my Orthodoxy. And there, in that space where the local and the universal dissolve, there are some voices and some faces that figure with greater prominence. The humble Saint Aleksandr of that Qazaqstani temple is one. The others may be familiar to readers of this blog. Some, like Saint John of Riga, drew near to me in my wanderings abroad. Others, like Saint Alexis of Wilkes-Barre, were waiting for me at journey’s end. The examples of these saints, already remembered eternally by God, can help me – an ignorant slave, like Meno’s – to remember what I have forgotten.

The problem of becoming doyiker

Enlisted men from Racine, Wisconsin, 1915

I’ve said before that whatever Jewishness I have is problematic and hopelessly Americanised. I have a biological grandmother on the ‘wrong’ (that is to say, spear) side of the family who was Jewish. She sadly didn’t live long enough to pass on much of her experiences or cultural awareness to her children, let alone to her grandchildren. Religious Jews would consider her ‘apostate’. Sæcular Jews would consider me (at best) bet Gershom. And yet, as I’ve also said before, having Jewish family is not nothing. Relatives of mine perished in the Shoah; I’ve learnt their names and (as far as my amateur genealogy would allow me) their stories. I’ve felt that that much was my solemn duty.

The results have been intriguing. History – even personal history – rhymes in strange ways. My great-grandfather, an immigrant from Moravia, settled in Racine, Wisconsin and became a machinist. I, a ‘peregrinator’ as one dear reader of my blog put it (fun factoid: my favourite bird growing up was the migratory duck hawk, of the sort which perched in the rafters of the MS&E building at UW-Madison), made a temporary home in China before moving back to the Upper Midwest – the Twin Cities, in my case – and became a machinist. To my knowledge, my Jewish family had not one Zionist bone among them (though of course, that could be a very different case now). And my great-grandfather may have had Bundist sympathies. Certainly he lived the ideal of ‘there, where we live, that is our country’, to the point where he picked up a gun and fought in a war opposing his own former homeland – and came home wrecked by the invisible brutality of chlorine warfare.

By contrast, doyikayt – that is to say, ‘here-hood’ – has been something truly difficult for me to learn, ‘peregrinator’ that I am. My political and cultural sympathies are with Yugoslavia, with Czechoslovakia, with that Russia that embodied the highest ideals of Tsarism and narodnichestvo both. In certain political quizzes (a time-wasting online weakness of mine), my values don’t match up that well to any American political party – and in fact match up far better with certain parties in Russia (of both right and left). Particularly given that I believe fervently in ‘here-hood’, my beliefs and my praxis (or at the very least, my expressions of that praxis) do not match very well. This is a problem. In fact, I don’t think it would be wrong to describe this suspicion that I would belong better somewhere else, as a form of acedia, an intellectualised and sæcularised sloth on my part.

As my priest here in the Twin Cities says, the retreat into such suspicions and dissociative fantasies of ‘belonging elsewhere’ is a form of mâyâ, of illusion – distracting me from the more important work closer at hand. At times, it seems to me that the world presented to us by television, radio, popular mass entertainment, social media: is all mâyâ. Such an illusory world is seductive. It feeds my ego. It makes me feel ‘in control’. And from an Orthodox perspective, there is little that is more dangerous than that.

Becoming doyiker, then – becoming here, starting to live where I live and not somewhere or somewhen else – needs to become a spiritual and practical struggle for me. Although I am not a monk and have no plans to become one, I could certainly learn a thing or two from the cœnobitic discipline of stability and the Patristic cautions against monks and novices feeling as though they could be better and would make better progress somewhere other than they are. Part of being doyiker is not seeking for some other homeland, except in the eschatological sense, and instead trusting to God that He wasn’t blindly or haphazardly placing me where I happen to be.

I don’t think it is an accident that these reflections have fallen on the eve of the synaxis feast of the Saints of North America. Even though doyikayt is an autonomist principle which comes from a radical-socialist sæcular Jewish philosophy, it has deep resonances within the Orthodox Christian tradition. These men and women had to be doyiker. In many cases, they simply had no choice but to do the work before them, as impoverished working-class minorities – even refugees – in a culture which ranged from indifferent to outright hostile. But they did it anyway and they did it gladly.

Holy Martyr Juvenal of Alaska, Holy Father Herman of Alaska, Metropolitan Saint Innocent of Moscow, Holy Father Jacob Netsvetov, Holy Hieromartyr Tikhon of Moscow, Holy Martyr Peter the Aleut, Holy Father Alexis of Wilkes-Barre, Holy Father Raphael of Brooklyn, Holy Father John, Archbishop of Shanghai and San Francisco, Holy Priestmartyr John Kochurov and Holy Priestmartyr Alexander Khotovitskiy, pray to God for me, the sinner, and for all of us struggling with our delusions.

My ‘Jennifer complex’

In one of my previous posts I alluded to a certain ‘Jennifer complex’ I have. It’s a little difficult to describe, and even more difficult, dear readers, to ‘lay out’ in the open in a blog format, as I hope you understand. I don’t want to cause embarrassment to people who might be affected by it. But it’s necessary, I think, to face it head-on, with the help of Our Lord and Saint Bede (whose feast we celebrated just this past week). It’s already led me in certain reactive directions. As I’ve said before, it’s shaped my æsthetics, my spelling habits, my political and moral vision, and it goes quite a bit deeper than the usual transferred nationalism. Consider this blog post, then, a further occasion for metanoia. (Not to worry: my spelling habits and so forth aren’t likely to change in the near future…)

As my readers know, I’ve long had a contrarian Tory streak. Various things have fed into that. In grade school, one of my closest friends, a self-described ‘hopeless Romantic’ and ‘frantic half-Greek geek’ from Finland (long story) and I used to play hot-seat multiplayer Conquest of the New World, and I distinctly recall that if I ever had my druthers I would always fly my ships under the Union Jack. Said Greco-Finnish best friend also introduced me to the Moomin books by that big-hearted Fennoswede Tove Jansson, whose FSG translations were all written in immaculate British English. I don’t think it’s an accident that I recall starting to use British spelling and punctuation styles in the fifth grade.

My Anglophilia deepened during my early teen years. I gained a love of Shakespeare from my homeroom teacher in the sixth grade, who taught both English literature and the natural sciences with a true and unfeigned passion. I have to admit, this was a teacher for whom I had one of those chaste, adoring late-childhood attractions. She was of course funny and approachable, but also had exacting expectations of her students. She managed to encourage me and push me out of my comfort zone in all sorts of directions that I never knew I was capable. She took our class to the American Players Theatre for our school field trips. Under her direction, I acted the part of Macduff in our public junior high school’s production of the Scottish play. In any event, my romantic – I use the term with the full range of connotations – love for older English literature certainly dates to my junior high years. (I won’t lie: my favourite part of teaching AP English is still A Midsummer Night’s Dream.)

In the seventh grade, my parents moved me out of the local state school and into a GATE academy in the Dane County suburbs. I can say without reservation that, for the most part, I hated it. I remember passing those two years as a frustrated, resentful, troublemaking ‘problem student’ who got sent to the office multiple times for picking fights with my classmates. I also remember being made painfully aware of being the picked-on ‘poor kid’ in rich-kid school. That was the beginning, I think, of my being drawn toward left-wing politics: nothing builds class awareness quite like suddenly finding oneself in the bottom one. There was one teacher, though, who left an impression on me, and that was the Anglo-Irish Catholic history teacher who taught our history class from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. I was mostly impressed by her wit, the force of her personality, the crispness of her accent. She was also quite kind and understanding, but she expressed it in a very different way – I remember at one point she chided me about being unable to accept a compliment with grace. To be honest, her compliments rather took me aback, even when they were for something as simple as performing well on a history exam.

And then, at the age of fourteen, in my high school freshman English lit class, I watched the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle for the first time, just after we had finished reading the book. I truly don’t think I ever had a celebrity crush before or since deserving of the name; let alone any that came anywhere even close to that I had for Ms Ehle, based on her performance as Elizabeth Bennet. (Which is ironic, really, because Ms Ehle is herself a Carolinian – though her mother, Ms Rosemary Harris, is British, and Ms Ehle herself was trained at a drama school in London.)

‘Fine eyes’, indeed – talk about soft power. Jennifer Ehle’s version of Lizzie Bennet – eloquent, vibrant, subtly mischievous, by turns tender and devilishly arch, the loving elder sister and the wry observer of human folly – came to represent something of a Platonic ideal, in my early-adolescent-heterosexual-white-male psyche, of British femininity and all of its many virtues and potentials. There was a chiaroscuro depth and lightness to her rendition. Far more so than her face or her hair, rather, Ms Ehle’s expressions and her elusive turns of emotion smote me: the brilliance of spring sunlight in a smile or the rising storm winds in a glare.

Oh, she’s still got it.

Laugh as you like, dear readers. Tell me, which of us wasn’t an idiot at the age of fourteen? (Though I still say it cannot possibly be the mark of an idiot to be drawn to Ms Ehle and her acting.) At least in a conscious way, this infatuation lasted only about as long as the usual ones do – which is to say, not long. And it would be a serious mistake to pathologise anything so normal (and, let’s be blunt, American). But on a subconscious level I think it affected me in some strange ways.

I started reading John Milbank on account of his ‘radical orthodox’ critique of capitalism, but the continuing power his high-church Anglican ethos had on me came from his winged vision of an elder ‘Platonic, spiritual England’ that merged, in my mind, with a slightly-eroticised vision, through the lens of John Kenway’s camera, of the South West countryside. Again, this particular form of English Romanticism is an ethos that still works on me, just as it worked on Khomyakov. It fits in neatly with all the rest of my Anglophilic tendencies, and provides them a power at a level beyond rationality that they wouldn’t have had otherwise. Likewise, my interactions with the work of Dr Cornel West have been shaped by his preference for Jane Austen, even where his love for Jane isn’t even necessarily the main point.

There’s not that much of a punchline here. I don’t think it’s either wise or fair to pathologise my Anglophilia wholesale; thus, I’m starting to doubt my choice of the word ‘complex’ is particularly apt. Still, it seems a useful exercise at least for the time being to throw a glance or two over my shoulder to see precisely where I’m ‘coming from’.

Poverty, shame and the American South

When I was in New York State awhile back, visiting my grandmother – my South Carolinian grandfather’s second wife – I told her a little bit about the amateur genealogy work that I had been doing. She was interested in it, and told me that she’d encouraged my grandfather to do the same. He wasn’t interested. When she asked him why, he’d replied: ‘because I don’t want to find anything I’d be ashamed of’. Indeed, I didn’t find any of the resources on the Cooper line through links or websites maintained by our own family, but instead through the Fowlers, who are related to us by marriage. Based on what my father and grandmother have told me, there were two things at work that prevented the Coopers of Greenville County from keeping or maintaining an interest in their own past: poverty and shame.

There really ought to be a theory of special relativity for the poor. When you’re poor, time dilates. Your horizons narrow. You start thinking about the season. Then the week. Then the day. Anything beyond that is a luxury. Personally, I’ve only known relative poverty: the sort which comes from having some savings, no debts, but also no (or very little) income. But even that relative deprivation was enough to cause me to lose interest in planning for the future or thinking about the past, and instead look for short-term solutions. So really, I can only imagine dimly what it would have been like for the Coopers in the 1920’s and 1930’s: permanently in debt, living on what they could get picking and baling cotton, wondering whether they would have enough to last the season. What would they have cared for some names scribbled in some old government ledger somewhere in Pennsylvania?

And then there is the shame aspect – which is the flip-side of the culture of honour for which the South is, for better or for worse, known. The country has now spent decades telling Southerners that they need to be ashamed of who they are and where they were born. That the sins of the nation are borne on their shoulders. The response from the older generations of Southerners – people like my grandfather – has been to shrug it off. It was part of their world, and not one they were in any position to negotiate. However: based on my understandings of what my grandfather told me when I was younger, on what I was told about my grandfather by those who knew him best, and on what he actually did – he did his level best to overcome and repudiate a legacy which he saw as an occasion for shame. He embraced the New Deal and the opportunities offered by the GI Bill with both arms. He served as a Navy medic in the Pacific theatre of WWII. He moved to Providence, Rhode Island. He married a Jewish woman from Racine, Wisconsin (a woman whose ‘whiteness’ at the time was highly-questionable) – and later, a native New Yorker with Austrian immigrant roots who had fought for integration and fair treatment as a district superintendent for Washington DC’s public (read: majority-black) schools. And he passed on his values to his children: Dad still calls men ‘sir’ and women ‘ma’am’, but he has a strong New Deal, Social Gospel streak, and supported Bernie (as I did) with his pocketbook, as well as with his vote.

The tangledness of my family history is tangled up with the American South in ways I have yet to fully appreciate. A reader of my blog recently pointed me to Chesterton’s What I Saw in America as a definitive resource on the American South (a book which I have, in fact, already read). But, like de Tocqueville, Chesterton was a tourist – and not one gifted with de Tocqueville’s keenness of observation, despite his ability to play with an idea and turn a phrase. It’s far too easy to romanticise the South, particularly for people who burden it down with all manner of nostalgic importance – or who write onto it ideas and models imported from elsewhere. The moonlight-and-magnolias (auto-)mythologisation of the South (something which Chesterton, unfortunately, latched onto somewhat) is something I’ve militated against on this blog. Not because I’m anti-Southern, but because the Coopers are very much a Southern family, and because their own story as cotton-picking sharecroppers cuts against the grain of that mythology.

Because you can’t really talk about the American South without talking about the ‘other side’, no matter which ‘other side’ that is. It’s a unique and complex place in which I’ve spent far too little time, and I fear that I’ve done it something of an injustice myself by focussing too heavily and too harshly on the œconomic distinctions which make it different from any place in the Old World to which its own mythology might mistakenly point. No matter that the evidence does suggest that the antebellum South was largely an œconomic colony, whether of the American northeast or of Manchester or even of its own coastal planter class. Focussing on that dimension alone may miss a significant part of the picture. The very best treatment of the American South I have yet seen, despite its deadpan-snark sense of humour and the fact that it’s aimed squarely at a British audience, is Rich Hall’s documentary The Dirty South, which shows precisely how the lived experience of a place has been ‘downright distorted’ in popular culture – from the straight-up moonlight-and-magnolias mythmaking of Gone with the Wind to the one-dimensional caricature of Southern religion in Inherit the Wind; from Harper Lee to Erskine Caldwell; from Li’l Abner to Deliverance.

‘A chief motive today to emphasize past evils is that we might whitewash our own’ – or so says my Chesterton-reading commentator. This is indeed true, but I would advise this gentle reader to remember what the great Southern man of letters himself said: ‘the past isn’t over; it isn’t even past’. It’s not to escape indictment for myself that I write about the South and its past; it’s so that others may better understand where I’m coming from in the present. Because – poverty, shame, honour, pain, race, sectionalism, manners, all of it – even though I’ve lived my whole life in the Rust Belt, in the Upper Midwest, in New England or in China, I’m nonetheless in several senses a creature of the American South, and that’s not something I can shrug off with ease. Still, I can only write about that piece of it I know, and at that a piece I’ve gotten secondhand and through the blood.

What to do with doyikayt?

Jewish Labour Bund election poster

In terms of ancestry, I have English, Scottish, German, Danish and South Slavic roots. The English, Scottish and German bits of my heritage I’ve long been familiar and comfortable with. I was raised in a Mennonite church. My parents encouraged me to learn the German language (and eat Bratwurst – though ironically my quarter-German mother does not care for Sauerkraut). As a child I loved – loved – reading history, folklore and other literature from England and Scotland, collecting coins and trinkets from there. My sixth-grade science and English teacher instilled in me a sincere love for the plays of Shakespeare, and for his keen understanding of history and human nature. Possessed of a damnable contrariety throughout middle and high school, I stuck to British spelling even at the expense of my grades. Insatiably, and not satisfied with just Harry Potter, I imbibed Tolkien, then Lewis, then Sayers. You could easily say that I was raised an Anglophile.

During high school, however, I discovered that my biological paternal grandmother, who died when my father was four years old, was the child of Moravian-Jewish immigrants to Racine, Wisconsin. My father ultimately didn’t want much to do with that side of the family, so his Jewish background had never really come up in family conversations prior to then. Ever since then, I haven’t really figured out or known what exactly to do with that knowledge, or even if it’s really important. I can say certainly, and even ‘proudly’, that I have Danish roots. That I have Jewish roots, though? That’s not altogether clear.

There are several factors militating against its importance. By most if not all standards of ‘Jewishness’, I’m not a Jew. First and most importantly: I’m not a member of any Jewish community and never have been. Secondly: my grandmother would have been considered a religious apostate for marrying a Methodist and then adopting his faith. Thirdly: in terms of Rabbinic law, as the child of a Gentile mother, my Jewish heritage is on the ‘wrong’ side. At most, I’d be considered a ‘beta Gershom’.

At the same time, having a European Jewish grandmother is not nothing, not a mere neutral fact, not to be cast aside lightly. In my subsequent genealogical research, I discovered that several members of my extended family on that side perished in the Shoah. One of my cousins, Milan Schulz, ended up becoming a Cold War broadcast commentator in Germany for RFE/RL – his father Bedřich Šulc had been sent to Kaufering and was murdered by the Nazis there, just months before the collapse of Hitler’s régime. The knowledge of this, and the knowledge even of my own distance from it, has haunted me. Despite – ideologically speaking – not having a Zionist bone in my body, I did begin to read Jewish history in a very different light after the realisation that men and women who were my blood-kin had been the direct targets of the Germans’ fanatical hatred. I began to read the commonplaces, the casual references to the Jew as an insidious outsider in European literature, with a much dimmer eye.

I think I can also say that this knowledge shaped my spirituality. Elements of the life of Saint Ilya (Fondaminsky) of Paris, also by heritage a sæcular Jew and also by faith a convert to Orthodox Christianity, drew me closer in sympathy to him and to his work, both inside and outside the Church, both historical and activist, both sæcular and spiritual. His consistent advocacy for the Jews did not stop him from embracing Christ, and embracing Christ did not prevent him from continuing to advocate for the Jews as a class and race of despised people – even to the point of dying alongside them. The martyr lived his whole life in dialectic, the sort I can only reach for as I might the light of Polaris.

At the same time, to be connected to Jewishness in even as attenuated and tangential a way as I am, means to embrace dialectic at some point. Reading about the General Jewish Labour Bund recently, I came across a Yiddish word for what this group of sæcular Eastern European Jews believed about themselves and about their relationship to the world: doyikayt (דאָיקייט), meaning ‘localism’ or, more literally, ‘here-hood’. For the members of the Bund, doyikayt was a positive, assertively-communitarian commitment to living Jewish lives in their own countries and communities, instead of either assimilating to the dominant culture or tearing up their local roots and fleeing to a distant Zion. I can’t help but read doyikayt more tragically, more apophatically, particularly in light of what happened to the Bund: they were killed by Nazis and collaborators, or fled into the waiting arms of the Bolsheviks. One can’t help being doyik; all one’s choices are already conditioned by ‘here-hood’. In the case of Americans with Jewish descent, the doyikayt which was so dense with meaning for the Eastern European Bund takes on a much thinner, but still distinctive taste. Those of us who are descended from Jewish immigrants, who are not Jews ourselves, simply are here, and the blown-apart and fragmented political meaning of that ‘here-hood’ is still being negotiated.

On a more practical level, doyikayt means making common cause. Even though I am Christian and not Jewish, already I embrace much of the same political substance my kinsfolk in the Labour Bund did a hundred years ago: œconomic fairness, localism and personalism. I’m not a sæcularist, but given the differences in context between Tsarist Russia and modern America and my philosophical reasons for mistrusting sæcularism, I hope I can be excused for that! But given the blown-apart nature of the doyik even in modern times (to borrow a phrase from Axel Honneth and Shlomo Avineri), that may not be nearly enough. Particularly in light of the perennial Jewish experience in Europe, it should be clear that to be doyik means not to chase after some seeming-whole that may prove illusory; but instead to pick up the pieces where you are and to build something beautiful with them.

The Shoah, through American eyes

On Holocaust Remembrance Day, we should remember that there are several ways for an American to remember the Shoah, some of them helpful and others far less so. World War II is a living memory for some, but it is a living memory which is rapidly fading. As a millennial, my grandparents lived through the War – at least one of them witnessed the Pacific theatre firsthand. But of these grandparents, two of them are now dead. And my Jewish grandmother was lucky to have been born to immigrant parents in Wisconsin rather than stay in Europe, where she would have been forced into an Austro-Hungarian ghetto or into a Nazi concentration camp. As such, my experience of the Shoah is the same as that of any American Jew whose family immigrated early: I know of the Shoah only intellectually, through films and through books, and not through a personal narrative. But insofar as it was an attack on specifically ethnic, not religious, Jewishness everywhere, it nevertheless has a personal impact that does echo down to this day.

So what do we do with it?

First off, not only Jews suffered in the Shoah. The suffering of the Jews was particular and unique in terms of the full social and historical depth of the animosity toward them drawn upon by the Nazis and in terms of the symbolic value the death of the Jews held for their persecutors. But in the end it was a shared suffering – shared with Poles and Russians and Serbs, shared with trade unionists and political leftists of all sorts, shared with Romani, shared with the disabled and mentally-ill, shared with homosexuals, shared with all manner of social outcasts and scapegoats. One unproductive way to look at the Shoah is to wrongly essentialise the suffering of one’s own group, and to use it as a totem against others who were hurt and whose communities were destroyed.

On the other hand, there was a unique dimension to the Shoah, unlike any other event in Western history. To look at it as an atrocity like unto all other atrocities committed by world powers throughout history also is reductively relativistic, and therefore wrong, because it excuses all the people who do not deserve to be excused. The spiritual rot of anti-Semitism took hold at the very heart of the Western world, at the very pinnacle of the most intellectually-advanced Western society, and culminated in an industrialised bloodshed of such enormity that, for a brief time, it shocked the Western world into introspection about its own commitments. In this, the Shoah was very much unique, and Jewish suffering in it was unlike unto anything else in the history of the West. That the Germans in their utterly blind, Nimrodic spiritual pride, were so convinced of the superiority of their civilisation that so many of them were seduced by Hitler’s poison, deserves to be marked off. The Nazi hatred of the Jews itself masked a hatred of all godhoods but their own. There is an example there that now needs to be rightly understood by the modern West.

Whether it actually is so understood is another matter.

The Holocaust was born of the first and gravest of sins – hubris, the sin of the Evil One. We must take care that its remembrance does not do the same. It is actually not as clear to me anymore which is worse – the denial of the Holocaust or the manipulative use of the Holocaust to justify further acts of Western civilisational hubris (the wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and the Ukraine), and to indulge in the idea that the world and its people are ours to reshape in our own image. The former, though it goes without saying that it is a morally repugnant wilful blindness and deserves the highest censure, has at least the virtue of being a direct reactiveness, a pride expressed in the bluntest of possible forms: ‘I could not have done that’.

The latter, on the other hand, though its intentions are sincere – ‘never again’ as a battle-cry in the name of human rights and democracy – nonetheless masks the same spiritual illness that had taken hold of the Nazis. The pride takes a subtler turn. For the civilisation that understands itself as the ‘thousand year kingdom’, or in terms of the neoconservative and democratic-idealist discourse the ‘end of history’, dissent is tantamount to an existential threat and must be utterly erased. It is no accident that the cheerleaders of the war in Iraq compared Saddam to Hitler, or that Gadhafi, Assad, Putin and Xi have all come in for the same utterly-undeserved comparison from precisely the same people. It was a psychological need to highlight the cosmic and world-historical consequences of the failure to act to stamp out the dissenters from our designs and calculations. The same hubristic spirit of the will to power, of the self-justifying drive for mastery over man and nature, that drove the Nazis to their spectacular fall into the most animalistic depravities against the Jews, still wriggles like a worm around the very heart of liberal, democratic Western civilisation. Thus, to take the Holocaust as an object lesson in the self-justification of the merits of liberal democracy, rather than as an indictment of our spiritual disease, ultimately strikes me as equally wrong.

For this reason alone, the Holocaust ought to remain close to our minds. We as Westerners stand before it – not as the prosecutors, but as the accused. The fact of Jewishness places an additional burden upon those of us who are Jewish as well as Americans, because even though we have not personally suffered in the enormity of the Shoah, we have been chosen inescapably as witnesses for the prosecution. And we will remain witnesses. But as the beneficiaries of American civilisation and military action, we are very much not exempt from the indictment upon which the Nazis have been judged. We need to remember the Shoah, but we need to remember it rightly. Contra Nietzsche, memory must not yield to pride. We must attain from the Holocaust that spiritual knowledge that comes only through our willing repentance, or the battle-cry of ‘never again’ will ring truly hollow indeed.

Tales of travels, travails and triumphs

This will be my first blog entry from Beijing, so I feel I’d best get my first impressions down quickly. After all, as the expression goes, ‘if you stay a day in China, you can write a book; if you stay a month in China, you can write an essay; if you stay a year in China, you can write a sentence’. I figure I’d best get started on that book, since I’ve already been here one and a half days.

For one thing, Beijing is far greener and far cleaner than I remember it from 2006. There are some beautiful gardens nearby my firm’s office (PlaNet Finance), and many of the streets are lined with flourishing trees and shrubs. In addition, one can see much further into the distance now than one could four years ago – the obscure outlines of great glass towers sparkling in the daylight, and shimmering at night with a thousand red and blue neon lights. I don’t know whether this new clarity of vision is because I’m living in the east side of Beijing rather than the west side (different neighbourhood, different environment), or whether this is a result of an active greening campaign dating back to the run-up to 2008. Busses here seem less crowded now. I don’t know whether this is because I’ve simply gotten used to riding the erratically-timed sardine can that is the Port Authority of Allegheny County’s 71A line, because I’m taking all the wrong busses here, or whether the busses really are less crowded now. It will be interesting to see. I am overcome with the exuberant-yet-melancholy emotion of being reacquainted with an old friend I haven’t seen in many years; a sense of rediscovery and a sense of lost time. (This feeling is very familiar to me. I have recently made a prodigal return to Madison, Wisconsin for my sister’s graduation; I got to see a lot of old friends I hadn’t seen since I was 17 years old.)

I’ve spent the past couple of days mostly recuperating from my thirty-hour flight into Beijing (alternately sleeping and watching old episodes of Star Trek), and what time I haven’t spent resting I have spent exploring my surroundings. I have been put up temporarily in a friend’s home – Han Peng (韩鹏 a friend and fellow student at Pitt) and his family have very graciously allowed me to stay in their apartment near Three Circle Bridge (三元桥, Sanyuanqiao), and have even arranged for me to rent a more permanent residence near Peace Gate (和平门, Hepingmen), within easy subway access of the district in which PlaNet Finance is located. (The reason I found it so quickly was because Han Peng’s mother’s colleague was, upon her request, willing to rent a room to her son’s American friend.) I’m very grateful to the Hans for their assistance – once again, I am quite awed by the power of guanxi (关系, or connexions) in getting things done in China; these kinds of institutions are a communitarian’s dream.

So far, my stay has been very comfortable. I have not been able to access my blog here yet, except from the Beijing Airport. I’m not sure if this is a temporary glitch, if all Blogger is limited-access, or if the powers that be have somehow taken exception to the random philosophical ramblings, rants and YouTube links of a certain articulate Anglo-Catholic aficionado of China and heavy metal. Thus, I’m not quite sure whether I can get the ‘Banned in China’ merit badge just yet. I promise that once I get access, I will begin posting further… though, my gentle readers, be warned that may not occur for another three months (depending on said powers that be).

EDIT: It is actually the case that all Blogger is blocked here. I will be archiving the blog and moving it to another location soon, I hope. I will keep my readers posted!

On Wisconsin

Well, it appears that the controversy surrounding Dr Cronon and the open-records request of the state Republican Party has subsided, for the moment at least. The public statement issued by the University’s Chancellor Biddy Martin, though probably not as tough in terms of action as I would have liked, was probably nevertheless a politically savvy move that could assuage the fears expressed by Dr Cronon and his supporters about the threat to academic freedom and confidentiality (while still giving the Republicans some of the emails they wanted). I’m glad to see that the academy still sees that it carries, to some extent, a sacred trust (though many academics would not be caught dead using such language), and that their participatory ethos between student and professor is a part of that trust.

Meanwhile, on the threat of immanent shutdown of the federal government… John Quiggin has a good take on the matter over at Crooked Timber, though I am sceptical any truly substantive popular worker-rights movement (such as that taking place in Wisconsin – some truly impressive petition-driving for the recall of Dan Kapanke having been done already) will come of it. To some extent, I feel that the extension of such movements to the national stage has a diluting effect that makes elite capture much more likely.

That’s all for now – choir awaits.

On the topic of persecution

From the Gospel of St Matthew, chapter 5, verse 11:

Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

Witness the treatment of Dr William Cronon of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A highly-distinguished environmental historian who, unfortunately, I previously knew only by association (his daughter was on the same soccer team in elementary school as my sister), he recently made a contribution to the New York Times editorial page which has already made the very thorough rounds of the blogosphere. If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend it – I am very sympathetic to the argument. Our state does indeed have this proud tradition of supporting social reforms, in part because of the German immigrant population carrying forward the reform traditions of the European Continent after 1848. But further than that, I would argue – as it seems Dr Cronon is close to doing – that the ‘reform’ tradition is motivated by what I would term a Tory-radical sensibility: the notion that we are and must be held accountable to each other across generations and across the narrow boundaries of our interest group (as Dr Cronon aptly puts it, ‘common problems deserve common solutions’). Dr Cronon concludes that the assault by Governor Walker on collective bargaining for public employees ended up driving a deep wedge in the body politic, and runs completely roughshod over this small-‘c’ catholic participatory-political tradition of his state and of the historical Republican Party.

The response from the state’s Republican Party was swift and predictable: when the message goes against the official party narrative, always attack the messenger. A representative of the party, Stephan Thompson, made a request under the Freedom of Information Act for all of Dr Cronon’s emails going back to the beginning of the year containing a number of different keywords (including ‘Republican’, ‘union’, ‘recall’, ‘collective bargaining’, ‘rally’ and a number of names of related people). The obvious aim is very similar to what was sadly done to the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit by less legal means – use carefully-edited and massaged selections from Dr Cronon’s e-mail account to, if possible, publicly embarrass him and dismiss him as a partizan hack who violated the university’s policy of using his professional e-mail for political purposes. You can read Dr Cronon’s own account of these events here.

Ethically, Dr Cronon has the right of the matter. Having used his own resources (his own computer and his own e-mail address) in pursuit of the research that went into his blog post and into his NYT editorial, he has been very conscientious in following UW-Madison’s policies. The spirit of the open-records policy is that it is meant to be used as a safeguard against suspected wrongdoing by professors; it is not meant as an instrument of intimidation and blackmail against academics who fail to conform to a particular political narrative. As Dr Harry Brighouse notes over at Crooked Timber, if student-professor confidentiality is subject to these sorts of political football games, it could have profound detrimental effects on the tenor and ethos of the academic community.

I actually tend to think that as a result of Dr Cronon’s prophetic outspokenness on these issues, and as a result of such efforts to intimidate and silence him through open-records requests, his ideas and his input are going to gain a lot more traction in more than just the blogosphere. I certainly hope that this is the case, and that the blessings of Our Lord on those who speak the truth as they see it, and who are persecuted for doing so, may be so demonstrated.

EDIT: Fixed the links.

A brief discursive continuation on the topics of cheese and proletarian rage…

The Gov Scott ‘Just a Letter Out of Place’ Walker budget proposal to roll back public sector union benefits and destroy their ability for collective bargaining seems to have people up in… well, not arms, really, but up in a very righteously angry place… in my old hometown. For one thing, I think people have a very legitimate right to be upset at the sheer staggering hypocrisy of our newly-minted governor after having given some rather costly corporate welfare (in the neighbourhood of $140 million) going largely to multinationals with state presence, and more than a little licence to look askance at ‘budget repair’ that really does very little more than patch over the public costs of Gov Walker’s own political agenda. For another thing, it shows the utter intellectual bankruptcy of the ‘Tea Party’ movement that they will approve any deficit expansion which benefits them politically, even though reducing the deficit is supposedly their raison d’etre. Moreover, I do sincerely believe any erosion of collective bargaining rights for labour unions, in whatever sector, bodes ill for other political freedoms often enough to be of legitimate concern (though whether primary- and secondary-school teachers should be in public-sector unions in the first place is a very different question).

However, a major caveat here. I was born in Madison, and lived there for most of my life. So trust me on this one – it just isn’t Cairo or Tunis or Tripoli; and Walker may be a total douchebag but he isn’t a dictator. These kinds of inane, hyperbolic comparisons really don’t do credit to anyone, as they both cheapen the North African regimes’ struggles for basic dignity and political participation and distort the true purpose of these protests. Yet keep in mind also: the people here know exactly what they want and why, and are asking for it in a generally logical and civil manner. There has been no violence, no guns, no race-baiting, no government-overthrow fantasy at these protests (though a highly regrettable overabundance of Star Wars nerds)…

We shall see how things continue to unfold. My sympathies at this point, as if it weren’t already abundantly clear, are solidly with the protesters. I may yet have more; my apologies for ending my most recent blog posts in such a disappointing and tentative manner.

Also, this from Crooked Timber.