Digging in Archives Amidst the Genocide.
An explanation for my silence
I spent the last year in the most luxurious sort of tomb.
Last September, I began a Cullman Center fellowship. This meant that the New York Public Library paid me to sit in a wood paneled room at their main building on Fifth Avenue – the one with the lions in the front – to write my book on the Jewish Labor Bund, the anti-zionist, secular, socialist Jewish political party to which my great-grandfather belonged back in Tsarist Russia. Five days a week, I closed the door to the first dedicated office of my life and fell into my research. Invisible assistants delivered everything I desired. The impossible-to-find memoir of Jacob Celemenski, weapons smuggler for the Warsaw ghetto revolt? At your service. That Clara Zetkin crumbling pamphlet that the Bund translated into Yiddish? Certainly madame. Like a glutton, I followed every footnote. I plunged into rabbit holes, and indulged archival whims. I typed. The manuscript swelled, tangents branching off, fractals forming, characters spilling like ink from a bottle kicked across a rug. I communed with the rebel dead.
My Cullman Center Fellowship began September 4. Then came October 7. Israel began a genocide in Gaza whose obscenity words feel inadequate to describe. Which war crime should I list? Yesterday, in a fit of pique over the ICJ ruling, Israeli bombs burnt dozens of people alive in their tents in Rafah, an area that Israel had falsly designated as safe. In one photo, a father holds his beheaded baby towards the camera, to show the world what it had done. The day before, a smirking IDF soldier posed for a photograph in front of a library he had lit on fire. We Jews are the people of the book, supposedly. This was blasphemy, another example of what Naomi Klein called the false idol worship of Zionism.
These two facts – my research about Jewish radicals in the bloody twentieth century, and Israel’s US-funded murder spree in the twenty-first century – combined to shut me up. I couldn’t speak about the present. I could only write about the past. I went to marches, drew portraits, raised money, did all the activist things one ought to, but I could not write to you, or to any of the other publications who approached me. It was like a snake had constricted my throat.
The Cullman Center fellowship is over. I have a manuscript to show for it, albeit one that is ninety-seven thousand words longer than it was supposed to be. I followed the Jewish Labor Bund from their origins in the Tsarist Empire through the Russian Revolution, the pogroms, interwar Poland, and the Holocaust, to their ultimate defeat. As I wrote, I heard the chants of Free Palestine outside my window, shouted by humans who refused the current genocide. I was grateful. As my friend Irena Klepfisz, a poet born in the Warsaw Ghetto, wrote that “history stops for no one,” and the chants often brought me down from my hermitage, into present life. Free Palestine. حرية لفلسطين
All of this is to say that I’m back. Thank you for all of you who stuck with me despite my silence. You helped me and I am grateful. Thank you to the New York Public Library, which let me write a book that I may not have been able to finish otherwise. I promise to polish it till it shines hard and sharp as a diamond.
Thank you.
Thank you for the update. I can only imagine how you feel, as the phrase of "like a snake had constricted my throat." feels just about right. Thank you for brining so much to the plate, we need more knowledge because many are acting on so little. Keep it up