Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(115)
The still-children watched from their desks; they saw men digging their own mass graves and then kneeling in them, their fingers interlaced behind their heads. Why did they dig their own graves? If you’re going to be killed anyway, why help with the killing? For the few extra moments of life? That might make sense. But how did they maintain that composure? Because they thought it might buy them a few extra moments of life? Maybe. A minuscule chance is infinitely greater than no chance, but a moment of life is an eternity. Be a good Jewish boy and dig a good Jewish grave and kneel like a mensch and, as Sam’s nursery school teacher, Judy Shore, used to say, “You get what you get, and you don’t get upset.”
They saw grainy montages of humans who had become science experiments—dead twins, Sam could not not remember, still clutching each other on a table. Did they cling like that in life? He could not not wonder.
They saw images from the liberated camps: piles of hundreds or thousands of skeletal bodies, knees and elbows bending the wrong way, arms and legs at wrong angles, eyes so deeply sunken they could not be seen. Hills of bodies. Bulldozers testing a child’s belief that a dead body doesn’t feel anything.
What was he left with? The knowledge that Germans were—are—evil, evil, evil, not only capable of ripping children from their mothers and then ripping their small bodies apart, but eager to; that had non-Germans not intervened, the Germans would have murdered every single Jewish man, woman, and child on the planet; and that of course his grandfather was absolutely right, even if he sounded insane, when he said a Jewish person should never buy a German product of any kind or size, never put money into a German pocket, never visit Germany, never not cringe at the sound of that vile language of savages, never have any more interaction than what simply could not be avoided with any German of any age. Inscribe that on the doorpost of your house and on your gate.
Or he was left with the knowledge that everything that has happened once can happen again, is likely to happen again, must happen again, will.
Or the knowledge that his life was, if not the result of, then at least inextricably bound to, the profound suffering, and that there was some kind of existential equation, whatever it was and whatever its implications, between his life and their deaths.
Or no knowledge, but a feeling. What feeling? What was that feeling?
Sam didn’t mention to his parents what he’d seen. Didn’t seek explanation, or comfort. And he was given plenty of guidance—almost all of it unintentional and extremely subtle—never to ask about it, never even to acknowledge it. So it was never mentioned, always never talked about, the perpetual topic of nonconversation. Everywhere you looked, there it wasn’t.
His dad was obsessed with displays of optimism, and the imagined accumulation of property, and joke-making; his mom, with physical contact before saying goodbye, and fish oil, and outer garments, and “the right thing to do”; Max, with extreme empathy and self-imposed alienation; Benjy, with metaphysics and basic safety. And he, Sam, was always longing. What was that feeling? It had something to do with loneliness (his own and others’), something with suffering (his own and others’), something with shame (his own and others’), something with fear (his own and others’). But also something with stubborn belief, and stubborn dignity, and stubborn joy. And yet it wasn’t really any of those things, or the sum of them. It was the feeling of being Jewish. But what was that feeling?
THERE ARE THINGS THAT ARE HARD TO SAY TODAY
Israel continued to describe the situation as manageable, but it also continued to close off its airspace, which left tens of thousands of Israelis stranded on vacation and prevented Jews who wanted to help from coming. Tamir tried hitching a ride on a Red Cross cargo plane, tried getting special clearance through the military attaché at the embassy, looked into chaperoning a shipment of construction equipment. But there was no way home. He might have been the only person grateful to be at the funeral—it gave him a few hours to rest in peace.
Sam wore his ill-fitting bar mitzvah suit to the cemetery. Wearing it was the only thing he hated more than the process of getting it: the torture chamber of mirrors, his mother’s unhelpful help, the functionally pedophiliac survivor tailor who not once, not twice, but three times groped at Sam’s crotch with his Parkinsonian fingers and said, “Plenty of room.”
Tamir and Barak wore slacks with short-sleeve button-up shirts—their uniform for every occasion, whether it was going to synagogue, the grocery store, a Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball game, or the funeral of the family patriarch. They viewed any kind of formality—in dress, in speech, in affect—as some kind of gross infringement on a God-given right to at all times be oneself. Jacob found it obnoxious, and enviable.
Jacob wore a black suit with a box of Altoids in the pocket: artifacts of a time when he cared enough about how his breath smelled to attempt to echo it off his palm for sniffs.
Julia wore a vintage A.P.C. dress she’d found on Etsy for the equivalent of nothing. It wasn’t exactly funeral attire, but she never had occasion to wear it, and she wanted to wear it, and since the neutering of the bar mitzvah, a funeral was as glamorous an occasion as she was going to get.
“You look beautiful, Julia,” she said to Jacob, hating herself for saying it.
“Very beautiful,” Jacob said, hating her for saying it, but also surprised that his assessment of her beauty continued to matter to her.