עם אשכחך

A choice was made, a century ago, steamships bellowing in the background, to flatten Kushel on the entry roll into something bleached and palatable, and today I walk around with a fake last name. The newly minted Kessler family moved to the Grand Concourse, a cut above the Lower East Side tenement Jews, where my grandfather was able to springboard his lifelong career in academia from the same high school I would study to get into some sixty-something years later. My great grandparents attempt to assimilate worked, even if none of my coworkers know when pesach comes out this year. They and their descendants, like so many children of Ellis Island, were able to attend quality public schools, buy property, and build lives. That was the promise of these stolen shores; a safe haven, a place where our wandering might finally roll to an unceremonious end. The legend of passover says that matzah was an accidental invention, a rush job that didn’t leave time for bread to rise. In the haste to become American, to cash in on the privileges of whiteness, I fear we cut off one too many consonants from our names. Do we remember how we came here, the huddled masses, or have we become so drunk on our newfound placement that we are happy to kick the ladder out from behind us?

The April air whispers in the night my family dutifully recites passages that remind us; this is the bread of our affliction. Every year, as we celebrate passover – tracking the historically dubious tale of Jews as a migratory people – I think about the idea of homeland. The Exodus tale is about the scattering, as so many Jewish stories are, but it ends in redemption. At the end of the evening, we go home. The passover seder, in its current iteration, was a post-second temple invention, which is to say, a trauma response to displacement and destruction. We need to tell ourselves that there will be an end to the eternal diaspora of the past two millennia. As we sing songs of the fabled Zion, the rivers of Babylon by which we wept, the irony seems obvious. We spent so long yearning for a place to exist that we perpetuated our own pain on another people. All who are hungry, come and eat, we say at the seder, as Israeli tanks blockade wheat from the intentionally starved people of Gaza. We malign a pharaoh who tried to drown male children while bombs paid for with my American tax dollars eradicate entire bloodlines. And in this country, the land that took (not enough of) us in, a trickle of air that escaped the gas chambers, we allow our history and identity to be weaponized to deport those who would dare raise their voices in the values of preserving human life that we are supposed to stand for.

Attending nine years of Jewish day school means that I spent way too many of my formative years reading children’s books about the holocaust. As an anxious eight year old, I worried that my hair was too dark to pass for anything else in case they came for us again, as if I could ever be anything other than what I am. My family came from Poland and Russia and Lithuania, but a quick ancestry dna check would tell you that my lineage is shtetl, not statehood. Kushel is Germanic in origin, indicating that, most likely in the mid 18th century, that branch of the family fled Germany for Vilnius. My family comes from steerage on steamships and diaspora has always been critical to my understanding of myself as a Jew. I can’t help but believe that as the people for whom this phenomenon was quite literally named, there exists a moral obligation not to impress this state, this transience, on any other people.

The Judenrat were the council of prominent, wealthy, or established Jews of the cities of Central and Eastern Europe who were tasked with turning over their communities for deportation to the camps. Though the extent of collaboration with the Nazis is controversial, there is irrefutable evidence that at least some of them tried to leverage their position for personal benefit.

My grandparents, on both sides, were the first generation of my family to be born in this country. What was happening in Europe when they were growing up, the shorn branches of our family tree, was an open secret. They watched a genocide through hushed stories of stowaways, of those lucky enough to escape; I watch mine on Instagram, screaming and streaming through the bloody stamp of history. How did we, a people so obsessed with historical narrative, take the absolute wrong lesson from all of ours? We are so determined not to go willingly to our slaughter ever again that we have become a front for the same font of fascism my family fled from all those years ago. We wear ancient hatred like prayer shawls wound tightly our hearts. No slight is forgotten, and no empathy escapes.

There are no Kushels out there anymore, old world or new. They were evaporated in the gas chambers, and we moved on to try to make a new life. This country gave us a place to make that happen. How dare anyone try to tell me ‘never again.’