Microwunderkammer

 Parental Artifact #10–a plate of Hamantaschen (and, sorry, a bit of a rant).

To be clear, the plate is not from my parents, and the hamantaschen are definitely not from my parents. But the hamantaschen, the subject I’ve been thinking of, are part of my inheritance. Hamantaschen, particularly the only true hamantaschen, which are made with a poppy seed filling, are the best cookies in the world. This is not open for debate.

Every so often, when I was a little kid, my Grandaddy would give us some hamantaschen that were made by Uncle David. They were delicious. I knew that they were an infrequent treat, but I didn’t make any connection between them and a particular time of year. Grandaddy was not observant about his Judaism, and was far more likely to quote from Rousseau or Spinoza than Torah. I don’t remember if I ever met Uncle David when I was a kid, but I sure was grateful for the cookies.

Now I’m older. I never got the recipe for hamantaschen from Uncle David, who died in 2017, but I make my own every year for Purim. I am far more aware of the story behind these cookies, the book of Esther, the story of how the Divine could manifest as blind chance, and save the Jewish people from genocide. I am also far, far more aware of how humans in the 20th century almost fulfilled Haman’s genocidal aims, and how both Uncle David and Grandaddy escaped these disasters, and how it left them damaged. I’m also aware how, seventy and eighty years after the fact, too many people have forgotten (or deliberately choose to ignore) this history.

Hamantaschen, as my Grandaddy told me, represent the hat of the wicked Haman, the vizier to the king of the Persians in days of old. Because a Jew, Mordechai, once received preferential treatment to him, Haman conceived an irrational hatred of all Jews, and plotted their destruction. The virtuous Esther, daughter of Mordechai, was able to convince the king of the Persians that the Jews shouldn’t be killed, and instead the wicked Haman and all his allies were hanged. We eat Haman’s hat, Grandaddy told me, to celebrate our victory over this murderer.

When I first heard this story, I was six or so, and I wasn’t really aware in any meaningful way of the Holocaust, or of history in general. I was kind of aware that there was such a thing as a Jew, though I didn’t really view Grandaddy as Jewish, and he didn’t make much of it. I learned more as I got older, of course. Grandaddy, David Appleman, was from a Jewish settlement in what is now Belarus. He and his family fled in 1913, after a series of pogroms, eventually ending up in the New World. Nazis completely erased his community during WWII. He abandoned Jewish observance (though not Jewish food or socialist-tinged Zionism), married the daughter of an Irishwoman and a Scot, and settled in to America. He traveled across Europe once after the war; although the train stopped in Germany a couple times, he didn’t set foot on German soil.

Although my Grandaddy liked Jewish food, he was not really a cook. So it was left to Uncle David to bring the hamantaschen. Properly, Uncle David’s name was Alicia, though I didn’t know that or the awful details of her story until I was in high school. She was born in Poland in the early 1930’s. All the male members of her family were killed early in the Holocaust. She and her mother were on a train to one of the extermination camps, but her mother saved her by tossing her out of the train into a snow bank. She survived the war fighting as a partisan, was interred in a DP camp in Cyprus, and worked in the war that gave birth to the state of Israel, where she met and married one of my Grandaddy’s nephews. She had no surviving family, so grew very attached to my Grandaddy, her uncle. Apparently, for a long time, everything was “Uncle David” this and “Uncle David” that with her, and so most of the family started calling her “Uncle David.”

She wrote a good memoir, and it hasn’t been banned, yet. It’s not a comforting read. There is a continual ratcheting up of awfulness, of tragedy upon tragedy. I suppose it could be interpreted as having a happy ending, in that Uncle David avoided the death camps, survived, and started a new life, but every other person around her had been killed and every thing taken away from her. Even after the end of the war there was the continued oppression of the DP camp and the unwillingness of any nation to somehow find a way to deal with the problems caused by the Holocaust. Her book is in my collection, next to Primo Levi’s memoirs and Art Spiegelman’s “Maus.”

Of course, I’m writing this because some jackasses on a school board in Tennessee have removed “Maus” from their middle school curriculum, using some flimsy excuse involving mouse nudity and cussing. The jackasses say they are looking for something more “appropriate.” I suppose it’s possible that they are that prudish, but I doubt it. I wonder if there is anybody in the world who believes that that is truly the reason it has been banned, given the circumstances.

The removal comes at a time when a political party, aligned with fascists, are writing a bunch of vaguely-worded yet punitive laws aimed at teachers, preventing them from “making any [white] student feel uncomfortable” or advocating any “negative account of the founding and history of the United States of America.” There are also bans on the bogeymen of “Critical Race Theory” and the 1619 project (Apparently, it is terribly corrosive to young minds to learn learn that Thomas Jefferson owned his wife’s half-sister and raped her repeatedly, or that slavery was the underpinning of much of early America’s economy, and that these facts have ramifications to this day). There is a massive, nationwide project under way to sanitize history, to make it more comfortable and soothing to White folks, and to let White minds not be troubled by the slightest notion that “White privilege” or “systemic racism” are real things. To these aspiring authoritarians, it’s imperative that their children never see a highly approachable, sympathetic, humane book like “Maus.”

—If you can teach about the Holocaust with something “nicer” than Maus, you can teach kids that Jews are idealized beings rather than humans who have vices and virtues and faults of their own. This is especially easy if you live someplace with very few Jews, like rural Tennessee, or rural Oregon. If your kids believe Jews are something other than humans, well, it makes it easier to treat them like something other than humans.

—If you remove Maus (or, say books by Frederick Douglass or Solomon Northrup or other books that humanize those who have suffered), you might let your kids believe that people unlike them are not quite as human. They might not be troubled by knowing that doctors under-prescribe pain medications to Black Americans, not because of any physiological difference, but because of centuries of belief that Blacks were less sensitive to pain.

—If you ignore the first half of “Maus” and start teaching that the Holocaust began with trains to Buchenwald, you can obfuscate the gradual slide from democracy to genocidal fascism, an imperceptible but constant worsening, of yielding to political bullies and people who used threats of violence. Kids might ignore that sort of thing going on today. They might not even notice when people start banning books.

—If you remove “Maus,” told by and aimed at Americans, children might learn that genocidal fascists were a problem only overseas, and can’t become established in America. They might come to believe that, as long as you don’t personally shoot anybody, you’re not a bad person. They could even grow up to vote for someone advocating the early steps of a fascist program, and justify their vote by saying “the alternative is worse” or “I like some of his other policies” or “he’ll grow into the office” or “the only thing that matters is his view on abortion.”

—If you can avoid teaching about the characters in “Maus” risking all to flee their homeland, kids might learn that policies that bar entry to this country for refugees from persecution are justifiable. If, instead, you teach that the United States is perfect, then our behavior towards the Jews on the MS St. Louis, the “Ship of the Damned”, was perfect, and barring entry to refugees now is just as perfect.

—If you can dodge the lesson about the Poles in “Maus” taking the property of Jews—or about Americans taking the property of interned Japanese in WWII, or the confiscation of Indian lands, or Tulsa, or the extraction of life and labor from Black slaves—you might get kids to believe that ordinary, non-genocidal, non-fascist citizens didn’t reap any benefit from the oppression of others, and that you got where you were entirely by your own virtue and labor.

—If you make it difficult to read Maus—or Alicia’s story, or Night, or Survival in Auschwitz, or any of the memoirs by actual survivors of the Holocaust, you can obfuscate the horror of the Holocaust with incomprehensible numbers. No child can comprehend “six million.” But a child can understand the story of an individual, and then you would have to teach what a genocide really is: a tale of tragedy and suffering on a staggering scale, repeated six million times. But, if you can “educate” your children without this understanding, it’s easy to convince them that your minor inconvenience is comparable to genocide; and if you can do that, you make it easier to say that an actual genocide, happening to someone else, is really a minor inconvenience.

—If you don’t let your kids read Maus, or accounts of other survivors of genocides, they might believe that there’s always a way out—that the “right” person will survive, that faith is rewarded and will survive the test of Auschwitz. They might believe that the suffering stops once the camp is closed, and that there’s no more suffering or responsibility or need for reparations. They may believe that the next generation is a fresh start, a tabula rasa, and that since they weren’t involved, it’s not their problem, and there’s nothing to learn from it. They might come to the conclusion that the Holocaust was even necessary, so that there would be a State of Israel, so that Jesus can make his big return.

I know this is small potatoes. It’s one school board in one district in one state, is been removed from a reading list and not banned, and the jackasses on the board insist they’re going to try to find a suitable replacement. It’s not a giant step on the road to genocide. It is, however, one of many small steps on a “biased random walk” towards fascism. We’re not marching directly towards that end, but we are wandering around—and somehow, the steps in the general direction of fascism always seem to be slightly longer than the steps away. Combined with all the other steps lately, from CRT bans to a proposal that teachers wear body-cams, it’s enough to give Jewish, anti-fascist me the jitters.

It’s part of my inheritance, from Grandaddy and Uncle David, that I eat hamantaschen, and that I get worried about this. It’s a debt I owe them, to fight against this. But there’s others to whom I owe this debt, and you may as well—the Jews who were murdered at the synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, and the hostages taken in Texas, and all who have to look at graffiti-ed swastikas and television commentators and politicians who are too chummy with neo-Nazis and “white nationalists.” It’s also owed to the Muslims and Sikhs and Blacks and Brown folks and non cis-het folks and all the others who are targeted by racists and fascists. For all of them, I remember and remember and remember, and let that guide my actions and votes.

Purim this year is on March 16-17. I will, as usual, be baking Hamantaschen and remembering Uncle David and Grandaddy. If you need help remembering the lessons of Purim, or if you need help remembering the lessons from Maus and Alicia’s Story, and if you want to take a bite out of fascism, come by and have some with me.