A Bit of History

I spent the first 21 years of my life in New York City.  Life in the Bronx in the 1950's was a bit like Eastern Europe transplanted.  My parents, my relatives and their friends were all Holocaust survivors and most of them arrived in New York by way of displaced persons’ camps and Jewish relief organisations in the late 1940's. As a result, my circle of friends all had parents who were survivors.

Our apartments were always open to each other and I could always be guaranteed good food at the homes of my friends. The shtetl had been transplanted to the Bronx.  Yiddishkeit surrounded me and the culture attached to the Yiddish language.  My first language was Yiddish and I didn’t really speak English until I started school at 5. The world seemed to revolve around the kitchen table where I would sit and listen to the tales of the “alte heim” with wonder and awe.  I remember wishing that I had been there when my parents were small because their lives sounded so foreign and unusual and they seemed to yearn for those days so much. 

There were also more painful times, usually late evenings, after a few games of kalookie (an unintelligibly fast card game), when my mother, my uncle and their friends would talk about the early war years in the ghetto in Lodz and the time their father was taken away and their sister died.  The names of Birkenau, Auschwitz and Belsen became as familiar to me as Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan.  Indeed, when I was young, I think I knew as much about the camps and ghettos of Poland as I did about the streets of New York.  As a child I reacted with the same fascination for these stories that a moth has for a flame, inexorably drawn but afraid of the power of the memories to hurt my parents and in turn, hurt me.

My mother and her brother grew up in a home with Yiddishkeit ever present, but not orthodox religion.  At home in Lodz they observed the major Jewish holy days but not much else.  This was the way my parents continued in America.  After all, assimilation into the great United States was important to the newly arrived refugees, and though being Jewish was important, as long as we were surrounded by other Jews and spoke a similar language, ate the same foods and shared a common culture, then daily religious observance was not deemed necessary.

When I was eleven years old my parents did the all-American thing and sent me to summer camp for July and August.  The camp they chose to send me to was a bit different to the usual sun, sports and swimming environment to which other kids were sent.  Camp Hemshekh was set up by a group of Holocaust survivors who were also members of the Jewish Labour Bund in Europe before the war.  They wanted to create a place where their children could come together and learn Yiddish culture, socialist principles and also enjoy the clean mountain air that was rated so highly by these new city dwellers. This was a tradition that followed their own pre-war experiences of leaving the city for a few weeks every summer with groups like the Socialist Kinder International Farband (SKIF). 

Camp Hemshekh was started in the summer of 1959 by a group of Yiddishists and Bundists formed into a committee called (and even as a child I had to smile at this) Survivors of the Nazi Persecution Inc. That first summer there were 150 kids and almost all of us had parents who were Holocaust survivors.  I went to Camp Hemshekh every summer for seven years and have to praise and acknowledge these recently traumatised survivors for providing the space and tools to help us come to terms with the past experiences of our parents and their families. Very few of us had grandparents, many of us had no relatives and we became family to each other. 

In Camp Hemshekh I learned to read and write Yiddish.  I listened to prominent Socialist and liberal thinkers and of course, as a child, was clueless as to their identities, but not completely oblivious to the messages that were coming across.  I embraced human rights and began to understand the importance of maintaining a strong ethical identity throughout the world.  I formed the kind of friendships that have not died over the last 50 years and Yiddish culture has remained a strong theme in my life that goes back to those days.

Every summer we would learn about different Yiddish writers, poets and musicians.  We performed the works of I.L. Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, Avram Reisen and many others.  We sang the songs of the ghettos and the laments of the Holocaust.  We learned the anthems of socialist youth throughout the world and wrote our own original works in Yiddish and in English. As far as I was concerned the whole world was Jewish and I never needed to step into a synagogue for further reinforcement. 

Each summer we held a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and the Holocaust itself.  We recited the poetry of the camps and sang the songs of the partisans. All of us children lit candles and many of us ended the evening in tears.  There was a great strength and comfort in experiencing these cathartic feelings amongst our peers.  There was no need for explanation.  Our parents were not freaks; they were not the only survivors in our community.  We were all the children of survivors and we understood and accepted this overwhelming shared history.  I may not have learned the exact events of my parents’ lives, but I still understood the pain of what they had lived through and the beauty of the culture they had lost.

In 1968 I met my husband while we were both on holiday in Amsterdam.  It really was love at first sight, helped on a bit by the fact that, as luck would have it, he was Jewish (and I knew how much easier this would make life with my parents!)  He was far more Jewish than anyone I had ever met.  Orthodox, kosher, synagogue- going and English, a pretty heady and exotic combination.  We got married a year later in New York and arrived in London a year afterwards.

London was a major culture shock.  Where were the Jews, where was a Yiddish speaking community?  The ultra-orthodox communities of North London? Stamford Hill? Not for me. I felt lonely for the community I had left behind in New York, but this was the 1970's and I entered into the “me generation” with enthusiasm.  In the early 1970's I found a guru, an Indian master named Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, whose teachings I followed for the next 12 years.  I changed my name, wore orange clothes, shocked my family and devoted much of my time and energy to seeking a deeper spiritual understanding of the world and myself.  I never abandoned my Jewishness (impossible!)  and the role of seeker came naturally.  Once again, I entered a world of community, like-minded people looking for spiritual fulfilment, for healing and belonging.  I learned to meditate and cultivated many deep friendships.  I travelled to India and stayed in the ashram for a short while.  After many years my relationship with my guru changed and I no longer felt the need for a master in the same way and I dropped my disciple role, though I still retain wonderful friendships and still value the learning of those years.

Having dropped my guru connection, I felt I was on my own again.  I was not actively seeking another group to belong to but I had come to realise that there was value in my Jewish heritage.  As our children grew up, we celebrated the Jewish holidays, we had Passover Seders, lit Chanukah candles, ate honey cake and cheesecake at the appropriate times of the year and certainly my children knew they were Jewish, even if they were not quite sure what that meant outside of holiday times. Occasionally I attended an orthodox synagogue service with my mother-in-law, but it always felt strange, as if I was sneaking in the back of an all boys club.  I knew there were other aspects of the Jewish religion but I was not particularly interested. 

Slowly I began to see that through all my years of seeking spiritual fulfilment I had never really looked at my own Jewish identity.  I was delighted to explore Yiddish culture.  I longed to hear Yiddish spoken and would deliberately sit next to the Chasidic Jews on the 253 bus in order to hear a bit of my “mamaloschen”, but I had not looked any further.  As I read some more of Jewish thought and explored a bit more of Jewish mysticism I began to see a glimmer of hope for my finding something of what I was looking for in my own heritage and culture. I recognised that spirituality and meditation were not the exclusive remit of Eastern religions but were also the essence of all truth.

Nostalgically, I miss the old world of my childhood, the Yiddishkeit and the warmth of those years, the schmaltz herrings, gefilte fish and kitchen table intimacy.  English Jews do not have the luxury I had of being part of the millions of Jews in New York and therefore feeling at home and comfortable.  The children of Holocaust survivors in England were not part of a strong group that gave each other support and affirmation. I am grateful to my parents and their strength of spirit.  I take inspiration from my parents’ generation and comfort from my own. 

I am beginning to understand what it is to live and work righteously in the world, in a diverse society with all the different aspects of my identity intact. My love of community grows from my roots. I see the enormous expansiveness of living with spirit and not needing to name it, or label it. The infinite wisdom inherent in genuine love continues to grow in me. For this I am truly grateful.