‘Hated since forever’

Last Saturday was called the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, and the war which has exploded in Israel and Gaza is only just beginning. On my social media, I follow artists who support Israel and even more artists who support Palestine. Many of them are responding with wisdom and empathy and grief. But there are a few who are celebrating the civilian deaths in Israel. (And perhaps, in the coming days, I will see some celebrate Israel’s response.) In America, the Anti-Defamation League, which has been collecting data since 1979, says that antisemitism reached historic levels in the States last year, with 3,697 incidents. 

A Jewish-American author called Sabrina Mark published a memoir in essay form earlier this year: Happily: A Personal History – with Fairy Tales. She wrote it before this war began but not before it could be imagined. The uptick in antisemitic actions in America includes schools, Petula Dvorak wrote in the Washington Post: “in Montgomery County in March, kids have found swastikas scrawled on desks, drawers, doors, tables and chairs. A child found one on a piece of paper stuffed into his backpack. There was a tiny one on the edge of a Jenga block. Many in bathrooms. This was just one month. Just one school system.” 

That is the America Mark is raising two Black Jewish boys in. “I don’t know how to protect my sons,” she writes. 

The missing Aleph

Happily combines personal stories and fairytales in a brilliant, inventive way. Mark opens the collection with her son Noah gathering Ghost People in the form of woodchips five years ago. “If I were to keep everything my boys have ever found and brought home, I could easily have enough for a whole tree. Maybe even a small forest.” When the shooting happened at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, Noah wanted to know what happened to the Tree of Life. “’Nothing,’ I say. ‘I think a branch fell.’” 

Parents in the synagogue tell Mark that she is keeping her children in a bubble, or say that her children are not ready. “Who is ready? I wonder. At 43, I’m not ready. Ready to know we can be burst into smithereens at any moment? Ready to be hated since forever?”

In the story about Noah’s Ghost People and the synagogue shooting, Mark interweaves the story of the golem, a monster built to protect Jewish people, who is then dissolved by removing one letter – the aleph – from his name. It’s the only letter that separates “truth” and “death” in Hebrew. Noah’s Ghost People look like the letter aleph. “When there is a shooting, and then another shooting, and another, all the politicians’ ‘thoughts and prayers’ are with the families of the victims. ‘We don’t want your thoughts and prayers,’ we say. We say this, of course, because it’s the thoughts and prayers of men and women we suspect have (like Pinocchio) an aleph missing. We say this because after each shooting, it’s already too late. . . the Ghost People are already being buried.” 

Happily centres around much that cannot be protected against: not only the forces of antisemitism and racism but the pandemic she wrote these essays in the midst of. Cancer in her family, distant parents, death of grandparents, insecurity around being her husband’s third wife and stepmother to his children. Every essay writes through the generations – grandparents, mother and children all mentioned in the same breath. Her dreams are cracks that she is falling through, that she needs to stop up with words.  

The first fairy tale

In an interview with Tin House magazine, Mark explains that she grew up with the Torah every day. It blurred the line “between story and the day, and miracles and the possible, and the impossible.” Now she sees similarities between the Old Testament and fairy tales: “They both act as these beautiful strange guides that are both right and wrong, violent and healing, and liars and truth tellers all at once.” 

The first fairy tale she truly encountered was featured in a documentary called Finding Pictures where a fresco by Bruno Schulz is unearthed. Schulz was a Jewish-Polish writer and artist offered protection by Felix Landau, a Nazi, if he would paint Landau’s son’s bedroom. Schulz painted an entire mural. When he was finished, another Nazi killed him on the street. In the documentary, years of whitewash are stripped away. Five chunks of the fresco are taken immediately to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Museum. The rest of the painting is ruined. “Bruno Schulz has painted his father’s face into one of the dwarves’,” she writes, “and the face of his beloved childhood maid into Snow White’s, and his own face into the face of the carriage driver, hiding himself and his loved ones deep inside a fairy tale. I stare at the pieces of wall and imagine Bruno Schulz painting fairy tales to save his life, and I imagine Felix Landau shooting Jews in the head and the heart after having them dig their own graves.” 

In her essays Mark is doing something intuitively similar: burying her family in fairy tales. “Can I turn the essay inside out and wrap it around my kids like some kind of wool, overcoat, bubble, cocoon-type garment? I don’t know” (Tin House interview). 

“We don’t want the same stories to keep happening. We don’t want the same stereotypes and the same modes of hate to just keep being sewed inside of the story.”

How to carry a story 

Mark has written before of how her great-aunt could only take one item out of Vienna during the Holocaust. She chose a porcelain doll, which slowly fell to pieces over the years. As though in response, Mark is gathering items in all of her essays: Noah’s Ghost People, pebbles her children bring her, milk teeth, a plague doctor figurine. She listens deeply to each object.

In her essay U Break it We Fix It she describes how, in Exodus, the broken tablets are placed next to the new ones in the holy ark and carried through the wilderness. “To know your history is to carry all your pieces, whole and shattered, through the wilderness. And feel their weight.” When the Tin House interviewer asks her about the antisemitism baked into many European fairy tales, she replied, “We don’t want the same stories to keep happening. We don’t want the same stereotypes and the same modes of hate to just keep being sewed inside of the story. . . you say, ‘This was the story that was sullied and mean, and grew a poisonous seed. Here is the new story that we are going to be telling.’ You carry those things side by side.”