It's interesting to think about what having to teach something does for you. A topic like the Holocaust, which I had heard vaguely about for so long as a student, without really personalizing or deeply taking in to my own worldview, despite my Jewishness, suddenly becomes real. Reading Elie Wiesel's
Night, and debating which film to use in conjunction with the memoir, I realized that I was no history expert. My own knowledge of World War II was sketchy. I didn't study much history in college, and my high school history courses covering Modern European history, including the Holocaust and World War II didn't seem to go into great detail, or give any real visceral idea of the atrocity. Either that, or I was too preoccupied to retain much of it. Suffice it to say that I felt disconnected to the Holocaust. None of my mother's side (the Jewish side) was in Europe at that time. They had all sailed safely to Ellis Island long before. And my mother grew up as a Jewish girl in a mostly WASPish suburb of Washington, D.C., not New York City like her parents. As a little girl, she celebrated Hanukah, but they also had a little Christmas celebration. I never learned Hebrew, only wore a yarmulke twice a year (Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur), and only went to a handful of Bar or Bat Mitzvahs in my life. I knew 6 million Jews (give or take a hundred or so thousand) were extinguished. But I had no idea that there only 17 million to begin with at that time. One-third is almost more staggering than 6 million to me. Reading
Night and doing some research, I realized that teaching this material was important to me. I didn't feel Jewish throughout my childhood, but there were moments when it was made perfectly clear to me that I was living in a town that was predominantly Irish and Italian, and that included mostly Catholics and Protestants. When one of my closest friends and I got into a fight in 3rd grade, the phrase, "I guess that's how all Jewish people act" was thrown at me. When I was playing football in 4th grade, a small but decent running back, I remember two separate occasions of a penny being thrown at me, bouncing off my little metallic helmet, pinging in my ears. My name gave me away. So did being out of school for those two days in September when every other kid had to suffer through the annual autumn ordeal of getting used to a new teacher and a new class. But, in general, I didn't feel Jewish all the time. The Holocaust was definitely not something that was really talked about in my house growing up. I think my mom tended to focus on positive things, and I think she generally wanted us to fit in, be accepted. And as kids, my brother and I obviously weren't going to fight with her on that. There was a three-month period where I considered changing my last name to Abrams....but other than that, being Jewish really only occurred sporadically. There was a point in about 10th grade when Seinfeld become hugely popular, and I remember referencing it obsessively. I remember it got on some other student's nerves when I brought it up so much, and wondering how much of that had to do with my Jewishness.
Anyway, preparing to teach
Night, I realized I needed to know more about the Holocaust, and I realized I might get emotional while teaching about it (not that I won't get emotional about much of what I'll probably teach). I wondered if the students would ask if I was Jewish. They don't know my first name (which we'll call Sam), which might give them a clue. Hill is definitely not a Jewish-sounding last name, so I think they were debating it amongst themselves. On a few days, I heard them muttering to each other phrases which might have been (is he Jewish?), though they might have been saying (are you clueless?), or (and I chewed it?). I read the preface to
Night out loud to them last week. I read with the tone I thought the author of the preface, Elie Wiesel's boss from his stint at a French newspaper, might have read with: one of gravitas, of a feeling of deep humanity and generosity, and awe at the events of the Holocaust, and the feelings around France in the mid 40's, as well as passages from the memoir itself, which vividly depict Wiesel's loss of faith and stunned detachment from reality upon arriving at Aushwitz, observing the smoke from the crematoriums and the babies in wheelbarrows being prepared for the flames. Before I began reading, I noticed an empty seat in the front of the class, and instead of remaining standing behind the podium at the front of the class, I stepped up and pulled the open seat a few feet from where it usually sits, and sat down on the desk, with my feet on the seat, and began. The combination of reading something emotionally-charged and beautifully written, and the fact that I had quickly broken down the wall separating me from my students seemed to have them transfixed. I'm sure they reacted mostly to these haunting words:
Never shall I forget that night,
the first night in the camp
which has turned my life into one long night,
seven times cursed and seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the little faces of the children
whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke
beneath a silent blue sky.
Never shall I forget those flames
which consumed my faith for ever.
Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence
which deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments
which murdered my God and my soul
and turned my dreams into dust.
Never shall I forget these things,
even if I am condemned to live
as long as God Himself.
Never.
I left school that afternoon with a sense of euphoria. This is why I'm teaching. This means something. They were enraptured. They had to have been feeling that. They had to have been learning that this man's intensity of humanity, and his articulation of murdered faith had to mean something to them. And I was the conduit. The words, through the page, through my mouth, into their ears.
And today, finally, they asked me if I was Jewish. And I said "Yes." And a few of them said, "See! I told you." And I laughed, and said, "Finally, you asked!" And then Derek at the front asked if I was married (it wasn't a proposition), and Simone at the back shouted, "He said he has a girlfriend!" I explained that my mother is Jewish, and my father is not, and that I never learned Hebrew or had a Bar Mitzvah, to which Derek replied, "So you're not a man?"
And if I'd let them, they would have asked me six-hundred and eighty-four more questions, each one a bit more personal than the last. Anything they can do to get us off-track and on to something other than the novel at hand. Except in this case, I think they really wanted to know. "Are we reading this book and being taught about the Holocaust by a Jew?"
