#433 What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank-
Nathan Englander
You immediately know two things from reading this title: one, it’s
paying homage to the great story by Raymond Carver, and two, the subject matter
is going to be pretty serious.
Deb and Shoshana were friend at Yeshiva twenty years ago.
Shoshana and her husband have been living an ultra Hasidic life in Israel and
are visiting Deb and her husband in Florida. They have a long, tense, emotional
discussion over what it means to be Jewish.
Most of it focuses on whether it’s healthy to make the
Holocaust the defining characteristic of your life, culture, religion. They
tell a story about two Holocaust survivors that realize after forty-years that
their camp tattoo numbers are only three apart. The observers expect an
emotional recognition of this incredible event—surviving and existing this long
after having been so close to each other at the beginning –but instead the man
with the higher number just say that it proves that he cut the line back then
just as he does now. Meaning, that he wanted his life defined by his own
actions not by others from his past.
Obviously, these discussions will cause much debate and
anger and tears. The part I found the most interesting was talking about the
difference between religion and culture and the dangers of tying one with the
other.
“With religion comes ritual. Culture is nothing. Culture is
some construction of the modern world. And because of that, it is not fixed; it
is ever changing, and a weak way to bind generations. It’s like taking two
pieces of metal, and instead of making a nice weld, you hold them together with
glue.”
This was brilliantly crafted with impeccable dialogue. I’ll
let others more qualified analyze the meaning and religious aspects of this
story.
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