Saya Yahudi.
I do not know where to begin.
Every possible starting point for this story is both true
and false.
There is no right way to tell this story, but it is the most
important story I have ever had to tell.
A story so cosmic, and yet so personal, at the same time it
makes me feel like I have fallen off the face of the planet.
And perhaps I have.
I will move from the microscopic to the cosmic, the only
hope for my sanity lying in a gradual transition of scale that will not further
destroy my balance and sense perception.
.
.
.
Here are the few things I knew to be certain before tonight,
as of 6 o’ clock this evening, when they were eclipsed:
1) I am an American Jewish woman who has been living with a
Muslim Javanese family for a week.
2) In the first ten minutes of my arrival at their home,
they asked me about my faith. I lied, saying I believed in God but had no
official religion, instructed to do so by my program director who was concerned
for my safety.
3) This family has done nothing but feed me and worry about
my wellbeing the past week.
4) Two days ago, when I asked a Muslim cleric at an Islamic
boarding school why Indonesia doesn’t recognize Judaism, his wife laughed about
the destruction of one of Indonesia’s two existing synagogues by the government
last year because “it was a waste of space.”
I give her the benefit of the doubt, knowing Indonesians usually
laugh not out of cruelty, but in the face of awkward social situations.
.
.
.
Here is what I now know, the immutable paradigm shift, my
heart breaking, the world closing and opening, although to attempt to number
these instances would be absurd:
My
host sister was reading her history book.
I couldn’t resist
asking her if Indonesian schools taught the Holocaust.
She said a little.
I asked her what they
taught about it.
She
said she didn’t remember what it was about, that she would have to look it up.
(And I’m thinking that
if you don’t remember a lesson on the genocide of 6 million people less than a
hundred years ago, that doesn’t count as teaching.)
.
.
.
I run to my room to get my computer to pull up Google
translate.
The whole family is in the kitchen and this is my chance.
After 150 hours of thinking non-stop about the minor but
major detail of my Jewishness, I cannot resist this crack in the surface of our
usual chats about showering, and food, and school, and my progress or
lackthereof in Indonesian language.
I am already lucky in this moment, living in the house of a
government worker who can afford the luxuries of wifi and a computer.
With the majority of other Indonesians, this alignment of opportunities
would not have been possible, and we would have chatted more about my bathing
and sleeping in the few words I know how to speak.
Thus begins 3 of the most painful hours of my life. The
closest I have ever come to fighting for survival, with nothing but Google
translate and the slowest wifi connection I have ever encountered to aid my
uphill battle.
To recount what was said in full is a feat so overwhelming I
will not bother to attempt it.
I will have to settle with telling you what is so imprinted
on me that I will not be able to sleep if I do not write this here, to you, to
this abyss of code and pixel, my friends and family and the strangers far away.
So, Basically, Um…..
What started off as Were
you taught that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust? became Some of them were my family became That is why I am an American became I am a Jew.
Saya yahudi. Saya yadudi. Saya yahudi. Saya yahudi. Saya
yahudi. Saya yahudi. Saya yahudi. Saya yahudi.
Their faces crackled, shrunk, contorted.
But you said you had no religion, was typed fervently, as was I was told not to tell you I’m Jewish
because of anti-Semitism here.
And then the crack in the surface of mundane conversation
about tea and crackers and baths split open irreparably, consuming any
semblance of order, or sanity.
Saya yahudi.
The voracious typing exchanges between father orating and
daughter typing and me typing back and mother listening began and did not stop
until it was dark outside, and dinner had passed, and my Javanese dance lesson
and the time to bathe had come and gone.
My host father, a kind man who has told me every morning to
be careful -- hati-hati -- on the way
to school, dictated these words among many others to his typist of a daughter
for two hours:
Well, don’t worry. I know that not all Jews are evil. Not you.
You are not like them.
But it’s a real issue the Jews.
Have you read your people’s Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Jewish world
domination is a real problem.
Why else do you think Indonesia is poor if not because of the Jews?
Your people control the media and the energy and the government of the
USA.
But Bapak, I type
back as if my life depends on it, which it does in some way more important than
blood and flesh, there are only 6 million of us in the US. We are less than
0.02% of the world’s population. We are educated, yes, but for a group so
educated, we have never had a president and no one can imagine when we ever
will, there is still so much prejudice.
6 million people is more than enough with all the money and Nobel’s you
have.
But Bapak the Protocols were proven as forgery and
propaganda 90 years ago. And it led to the murder of 6 million of my people.
This is why we Jews support Israel despite our moral qualms because even after
6 million dead, a government official with a degree from Indonesia’s best
university believes this document to be the truth, I try to explain.
We discussed it at
community meeting last Sunday (after we ate dinner together and you wished
me a good sleep, I am now thinking).
And thus begins my
descent down to madness, to trying to argue with ignorance, to prove through google
translating Wikipedia summaries of 2000 years of Jewish and European history
why the Protocols are dangerous, why he should not believe them.
I first attempt to
use Indonesia’s Wikipedia to get him a history of anti-Semitism.
Unlike the thousands
of words of the English entry, it has five sentences.
(And thus, I’m
thinking, why the Internet does not liberate or educate us, but inevitably perpetuates
our biases in that the sources we are drawn to only confirm our reality)
I write about my
family, and how Holocaust denial in the Muslim world and the widespread belief
in anti-Semitic propaganda (i.e. educated upper middle class government
workers) scares American Jews into pardoning Israel of its PTSD excessive sins
of retribution and force, believing more than ever in the necessity of a backup
solution because not much has changed, which justifies and enables more Israeli
force, which fuels more anger and anti-Semitism, and so on, and so on, and so
on.
I write about how
stereotypes of Jews as bankers come out of us being allowed to do that one
‘dirty’ job in Medieval Europe.
I write about how there
is a lot to criticize Israel for, but that much of the Muslim world shoots
itself in the foot by focusing on paranoid lies as opposed to the condemning
truths, pushing the West away.
I write about how
really the Jews and the Palestinians were both fucked by the British, who have
now conveniently wiped their hands clean of the mess and point anti-Semitic
fingers at Israelis from the safety of their academic institutions,
blacklisting them for their own destruction, their own guilt, how colonialism
of different kinds exported a European millennia of hatred on to the middle
east and ran fast and far away, how Palestinians and Israelis, Muslims and
Jews, get caught up hating each other when they were fucked over by the same
people.
I write about the
power of keeping criticism to the truth, about how many Westerners and Jews
would respond differently if lies weren’t perpetuated.
I write about all the
evidence to the contrary of the protocols.
My host father says he agrees. But then he pulls out a book
on how the Star of David is the symbol of Satan, and thus begins round 2 of why
this scares me, why this is why I lied, why this is why American Jews give
Israel a carte blanche.
He opens a slideshow on how America caused the earthquake in
Haiti with submarines, how the tsunami here was a nuclear war crime pulled off by
a country which he insists is run by Jews.
I tell him that he
overestimates America’s capabilities, that we may have bombs but that we are
not God, that we do not control the laws of geology.
I tell him that I
understand the paranoia because my country has done horrific things, but that
this goes too far.
Have I made it clear
that this is a man who has welcomed me into his home, a stranger, a man who
told me to be careful this morning, a man who works for his government as a
social worker, who has it good here, a man with a degree from the best
university?
And so my heart is
breaking.
And so my lungs are
closing.
I am free, and yet I
am not.
I do not have to lie,
but I do not think it is in my head that they turn on the TV at dinner instead
of attempting to talk to me this time.
Even though he now
tells me he understands why the Protocols are scary.
Even though he tells
me he sees how they are just the same as the all-Muslims-are-terrorists lies in
the US.
Even though he tells
me he sees why American Jews are afraid.
Even though he tells
me he understands what I mean when I say that it is easier for the government
to control you through hatred than the complicated truth that fosters
compassion.
Even though he
promises he will take this back to his Muslim discussion group.
Even though he passes
me the rice.
But I am just one man,
he says, and my community is small.
And Indonesia is big.
I know, I tell him,
but at least you are someone and that is more than nothing.
We eat a very late
dinner in the light of the television.
Ibu boils me water to
bathe in as usual.
But unlike the seven
nights before this one, as I write this to you now so that I won’t be alone in
my heart breaking, no one has come to knock on my door, and ask about waking me
up, and say goodnight.
Unlike the seven
nights before this one, the door to the bathroom and kitchen and the bedroom of
Ibu and Bapak is bolted.
I am alone.
It is true I wished
earlier this week, never having a minute to myself here, food always being
stuffed on my plate against my wishes by Ibu and Bapak, to be left alone in peace.
But not like this.
This is alone-alone,
alone in my aloneness, not the quiet camaraderie of being by oneself in a house
with people who have your back.
I have learned many
things in this void of a night, but this one stands out now as I prepare to
face a dark room and my dreams:
Aloneness and peace are
not the same thing.
Before in my life,
peace and alone meant the same thing. But this is a new kind of alone, in an
island on an island in an island on an island, and so on, until the nothingness
threatens to crack onto itself.
I sit here typing, this clattering of
keys a pathetic rendering of this ferocious night, thinking that perhaps
stories might be able to save humanity, that I should hit the road telling the
story of my people to the whole world, not to justify Israel but so that it and
we can be understood, so that compassion can be created to tear down the
cowardly structures of absolutes and lies, how we need a collective democratic
timeline of the conflict starting with Adam, how I want to kick the Brits in
the nuts for their hypocrisy and still-infamous anti-Semitism, how many double
standards regarding my people there are, how the hateful paranoia about us is
the only form of minority prejudice I can think of that is twistedly flattering
while fatal while insulting, how the treatment of the conflict insults the
intelligence and ability of Arabs as equally capable agents, whether or not Ibu
will wake me up tomorrow, whether the subtle differences in body language and
eye contact might be in my head, how I hope they are in my head, how I hope I
am wrong.
I am no longer just a
girl in a house of a kind stranger telling me to be careful each morning on the
way to school.
And perhaps I never
was.
