Chapter 1: I Am Born
I’m going to wait to publish this first blog entry until I’ve already arrived in Israel because I’m worried that I’ll write something that might irk the snoops in Israeli surveillance and give the government an excuse to deny me entry into the country. People (including myself) paid good money so that I could embark on this trip to Israel/Palestine, so I don’t want to give the censors anything to salivate over — at least not before I’m in country.
And actually I’ve decided that even once I’m in country I’m going to publish these posts under a pseudonym, because (1) I’ll be applying for an extended student visa and don’t want to f*** up my chances and (2) I want to shake off any undue hindrances on my, like, writerly consciousness, empowering me to do the Emersonian thing and speak the rude truth like a boy who’s sure of his dinner.
As for choosing a pseudonym, I don’t think I could top that triumphant Maccabian moniker that Mr. Wolf Blitzer chose for himself during his stint in Eretz Yisrael; he chose Ze’ev Barak, meaning literally Wolf Lightning (“blitz” literally meaning lightning in German as well as Yiddish). A badass name for a milquetoast journalist.
As for Hebrizing what name I’ve already got, a comrade on my trip has suggested that that whole process smacks of colonialism. To her point, many of the founders of the State of Israel, who were undoubtedly colonizers, switched up their nomenclature from mundane and monochromatic, opting instead for more dramatic noms de guerre (hence “Green” becomes “Ben-Gurion”).
Oh! — I know what name I’ll pick. But in order for this name to make sense, I’ll need to share some of my familial background first.
Back around the turn of the 20th century a young Jew named Abe (a.k.a. Aby) Pick was shot in the foot during a firefight in Odessa, which was then a part of Czarist Russia. Abe’s older brothers had allegedly been involved some kind of anti-Czarist revolutionary activity, and so it’s plausible that their agitator antics contributed to their younger brother catching a bullet in the metatarsals. More likely, however, Young Abe was one of many casualties of the 1905 pogrom in Odessa — probably the single worst pogrom in Europe prior to the Nazi Holocaust — in which ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, and Greeks killed over 400 Jews and destroyed some 1,600 Jewish properties.
(As a side note, the State of Israel almost 110 years later would kill over 500 children [not to mention hundreds of other innocent civilians] in their assault on Gaza in 2014. But that’s a discussion for a later date.)
In any case, Abe, his foot still bleeding, fled Russia and landed (we don’t know how) in Constantinople, where he found refuge with the family of a local rabbi. After a few weeks of doing odd jobs around the house and at the synagogue, Aby, perhaps just at bar mitzvah age (maybe younger), quit the capital of the Ottoman Empire and headed to The Hague in the Netherlands, where he boarded the ship of a Norwegian merchant who took this strange Russian boy as his apprentice. Whether this Norseman was motivated by a desire for cheap labor or a bout of Christianly compassion [sic], we don’t know. But I do know that in 2018 it takes over 23 hours to drive from Istanbul (present-day Constantinople) to The Hague, so I can’t imagine what that trek would’ve looked like for young Aby one-foot.
Accounts of this next point in the story vary in the family lore depending on who is telling the story, but Abe eventually immigrated (almost definitely illegally [sin papeles]) to the United States, where he changed his name from Pick to Pickard, apparently out of fear of further persecution by the Russian Czar. His great great great great grandson would go on to be the captain of the Starship Enterprise.
After crisscrossing the country several times, moving from New York to California and back, Abe and his wife Etta settled in a predominately Irish neighborhood in the Bronx, where they raised their two children, the elder Mildred (or Milly) and the younger Solomon (or Sol, my maternal grandfather).
I never met Aby, but for some reason I regularly contemplate the story of his coming to America, especially when I’m getting ready to travel, as I am now. I seem to recall my grandpa first telling me this story when I was doing a project on family history for a Hebrew school class when I was maybe 10 years old. My grandpa, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s about five years ago, probably couldn’t recall the details of his father’s epic saga anymore, but I’d like to think that somewhere in Sol’s crystallized consciousness, in the part of his mind more resilient to the Alzheimer’s decay, the shadow of the memory of Abe’s flight from persecution and journey towards refuge and sanctuary in the United States lives on. At least it’s pretty to think so.
Memory functions in special and sometimes problematic ways for us Jewish folks. In psychology, there’s a concept known as generational trauma, whereby a trauma inflicted upon one individual literally mutates his or her DNA, causing the trauma to be passed down to future generations. If the trauma of 19th and 20th century anti-Semitism lives on in our genes, it’s manifestations are most certainly exacerbated by how modern Jews teach their children about the Holocaust — for example, by taking them through Holocaust museums, showing them the pictures of emaciated Jews in concentration camps, and sharing the stories of the people who perished in the Nazi gas chambers. Though today in the United States many (maybe most) Jews enjoy significant economic privilege, if you ask us to remember our people’s history, many of us will feel the pain quite viscerally.
And so what’s one Jew to do with this trauma as it exists? We can see in Israeli history how the pain of the Holocaust and European anti-Semitism led to Jews inflicting terrible pain onto others — namely, the Palestinians. This is most obviously the case with former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. As he and his cabinet of war criminals were bombing densely populated civilian centers in Beirut and cracking down mercilessly on peaceful protesters in the West Bank, Begin wrote a letter to U.S. President Ronald Reagan, revealing how he was chasing imaginary ghosts of the Nazis, whom he mistook for Palestinians. He wrote to Reagan: “Now, may I tell you dear Mr. President how I feel these days… I feel as a prime minister empowered to instruct a valiant army facing ‘Berlin’ where, amongst innocent civilians, Hitler and his henchmen hide in a bunker deep beneath the surface.” This quote highlights very dramatically how the memory of the Holocaust perverted the minds of its victims such that they could commit barbaric acts against their Other. It reminds me of the epigraph that historian Benny Morris chose for his canonical work on the history of the Arab-Zionist conflict, Righteous Victims: “…To those whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”
Yet I won’t resign myself to fatalism, and I continue to believe that we can be the designers of our own destinies — we are not the prisoners of the past. The memory of the Holocaust can promote love and kindness if we channel it properly. It can and should promote solidarity with those who suffer injustice and live under oppression today. Abe Pick was one among many of a persecuted ethnic and religious minority group in his home country. He suffered not just at the hands of his compatriots, but at the hands of the Russian state itself, causing him to become a refugee. If I’m remembering the lesson of Passover correctly, since Jews were once aliens in the land of Egypt (and in Europe), we must recognize our people’s past plight in the eyes of the stranger at our doorstep today, embracing her, giving her sanctuary, and standing up to her oppressors.
The name Abe for me recalls my “memory” of my great grandfather’s story. As an American, it also invariably connotes Abraham Lincoln, the president widely remembered for his belief in universal equality and as a sort of antebellum Moses — though of course his real biography is far more complicated and notably less glorious (no time for that here though). Abraham was also, reportedly, the grandfather of Judaism; and in fact all three major monotheistic religions (known as the Abrahamic religions) claim Abraham as their founder. Lastly, the original first name of my chosen intellectual godfather Noam Chomsky was actually Avram (“Noam” being his given middle name), which was the prophet Abraham’s name before being chosen by God as the patriarch of the “chosen people.”
So let my pen name for this project be Aby Pickard, and let every Israeli government snoop and sub-fascist Likudnik know immediately that this Yid stands squarely with the Palestinians. Just as this allegiance, a true expression of my heritage as I see it, breaks with the predominant political trends in post-war Judaism, so does my adoption of my mother’s maiden name for publishing purposes break with patriarchal tradition.
As I understand it, Jewish morality appears to readily prescribe standing with those oppressed by external oppressors — like, for example, standing with African-Americans in the United States. But, Jewish morality, up through the present, doesn’t get applied to those oppressed by Jews. In the shadow of the Holocaust, with the ghosts of our emaciated ancestors surrounding us, modern Jews in the diaspora, who don’t necessarily read Israeli newspapers like Haaretz, can’t seem to reckon with a narrative that would imagine the descendants of the Nazis’ victims as the oppressors of another people. Nonetheless, this narrative, though difficult to digest, reflects a tragic and brutal reality, and it needs to be acknowledged lest the descendents of a nearly exterminated people remove another people from their homeland in turn.
Hence I’m embarking on a program called Solidarity of Nations (Achvat Amim) in Israel/Palestine for five months in order to promote the universal right to self-determination, trying as best a mortal man can to change the political weather, imploring my coreligionists to reconsider what commitment to Jewish safety and security means, asking them in particular to acknowledge how the security of one people cannot come at the expense of another. I’m prepared to stand in solidarity with the Palestinians, even if that means standing on the opposite side of the barricade as friends in the Israeli military firing tear gas canisters.
Now let us go and make our visit.
