An Interview with Holocaust Survivor Alice Herz-Sommer

This remarkable Jewish woman is 109. She lost her entire family (parents, siblings) during the Holocaust. 

She and her little boy survived the concentration camps because she was a concert pianist and the Nazis decided it would be good PR for her to perform concerts.

In addition, she was diagnosed with cancer in her eighties. 

So she is a Holocaust survivor and a cancer survivor. 

She lives alone in a flat in London. Did I mention she's 109?

She plays the piano three hours a day. People on the sidewalk below often pause to listen. 

Somehow, optimism infuses her life. She has no anger or hate. 

She doesn't understand why people complain. 

What is there to complain about, she asks?

Here's a 12-minute video clip. She has something to say that most of us will never get. But it's worth the time.

Recommended Reading: Outwitting History

Loy alekho hamelokke ligmor.  "It is not up to you to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it."

 Beautiful words. They're Hebrew. Odd that they're quoted in this book about Yiddish. But they were uttered as words of comfort to the author of the book I just finished, Outwitting History, during a rare moment of discouragement.

This is a book I loved for so many reasons, but I guess the most compelling reason was because it was honest. Yes, there were poignant and funny and heartbreaking stories. But there was also a sense of history and significance. What Aaron Lansky did was truly remarkable. And that he remembers so many of the details is also remarkable. Did he keep a diary, or is he just a darned good story-teller? Maybe both. 

I loved the book. It made me laugh out loud. It made me weep silent tears. It was populated with people I think I know. I can hear their voices in my head. They're my people. But they're also strangers to me. 

A theme runs through this book. Where are the yungermen? The young people? The young Jews? The idea of assimilation comes across as a tragedy. And perhaps it is. But who's to blame? 

One point, articulated near the end of the book, stood out to me. Lansky was talking about historical amnesia. He told a story of a rabbi who was speaking at the Yiddish Book Center on the subject of Jewish humor. Lansky, his wife, and others were laughing so hard their sides hurt. At one point, Lansky happened to glance around and noticed that his interns weren't laughing. Later he asked why. Their answer: We didn't get the joke. 

"This was not a good sign," Lansky writes. "If our smartest and most Jewishly committed young people no longer get the joke, it means that on the most fundamental level, they don't understand Jewish culture." 

But who's to blame?

I find myself drawn to books on Judaism lately because of my dad. He and I had an interesting discussion this past November. I remember we were sitting in my sister's study, waiting for a friend of mine to come pick me up for a dinner engagement. While waiting, my dad, an agnostic Jew, expressed concern about whether I and my siblings and his grandchildren understood or appreciated their Jewishness. 

My dad is a Jew. But we weren't raised as Jews, either religiously or culturally. Whatever "Jewishness" we understood or appreciated theoretically would come from him. But, to be frank, there was none. Bagels, knishes, rye bread, matzo brie, Fiddler on the Roof? This is Jewish? Yet here he sat, aggrieved that his children and grandchildren didn't understand or appreciate their Jewishness, as if it were our fault.

Lansky writes:

This is what makes the books we've saved so important. In their pages lies a civilization, a missing millennium of Jewish history, the knowledge we need to defend ourselves. Moreover, they contain a sensibility, born of marginality, that our fractured world desperately needs. After all, nothing heightens one's commitment to social justice more than injustice, nothing hones one's love of peace more than a few thousand years of violence and oppression. Yet at this precise moment, when threats of terrorism, environmental catastrophe, and nuclear annihilation have the whole world feeling vulnerable, when Jewishness has more to say than ever before, what do we do? We disavow our past, jettison our books, and forget to teach our children who they are.

Yes, I wrote in the margin. My dad is guilty of this. My dad bemoans the fact that his children are ignorant of their Jewishness, but who else but he could have instilled Jewishness in us? 

Jewishness is not something acquired or adopted (though many will and do convert). It is something passed down, from mother to daughter, from father to son, from parent to child. In this regard, I am bereft. But is he alone to blame? Perhaps his own parents failed him in the same way. 

Anyway. Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books, by Aaron Lansky. A really great book. Highly recommended. You will laugh, you will cry, you will learn.

And now I move on to This is My God: The Jewish Way of Life, by Herman Wouk (pronounced Woke). He's still alive, I believe, living in Palm Springs. He was born in 1915. His wife recently passed away. We won't have him here for much longer.

I started reading it this morning, and on the dedication page I read the following: 

Nobody can be more aware of the deep lacks in This is my God than I am. The theme needs a prophet. The subject needs monumental scholarship. I offer the book, relying on the maxim of Rabbi Tarfon in Ethics of the Fathers: "The work is not yours to finish; but neither are you free to take no part in it."

What????