Amsterdam
The lives of some girls.
In 2019, Richard and I visited Amsterdam and met Jan Erik Dubbelman, International Director of The Anne Frank House. He arranged a private tour for us, and while we moved through the spaces, he spoke about Anne’s evolving significance and the contact zones her story establishes around the world. Who is in hiding now? How do they survive? Who are their hunters?
In the rooms we were shown—some available only to those behind the velvet ropes—we thought about the conditions that Anne, her family, and the other two families lived in for more than two years before their hiding place was discovered by the Gestapo and they were killed in concentration camps—except for Anne’s father, Otto.
Jan Erik said, “Listen,” and we could hear the footsteps of visitors above us and imagine having to be still and silent for all the hours of daylight, in case a floorboard creaked and someone downstairs was alerted that people were in hiding.
Anne’s face is everywhere in the museum. Her father liked taking pictures of her and her older sister Margot. Teenage girls line up outside. More teenaged girls come here than visit any museum in the world to see where Anne hid and think about the fights they are having with their own mothers. Or they come to discover what significance their lives might have as they get to live them. Anne was 15 when she was arrested. When Richard and I first met Jan Erik, he took us to the gardens behind the house, and I teared up, contemplating this brilliant girl, aware that her life and furious ambition would soon be ended.
Anne didn’t take her diary with her when she was arrested. She must have known it would have a better chance of surviving than she did. She knew she had written a book, and she knew she had a subject: life in hiding. Out of the 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands before the war, 17,000 survived, most of them in hiding. Some did not hide and passed as nonJews. After the war, when Jews returned to the Netherlands from concentration camps, some Dutch people told them, “You should be glad you missed what happened to us. We were starving.”
A third of the Jews in hiding, including the Franks, were betrayed by Dutch citizens who were not compelled by the Germans to report anything. In 1968, Otto Frank, the sole surviving member of his family wrote, “After the Allies had landed in Normandy in June 1944, we believed we’d soon be liberated. So the shock was even greater when the Gestapo unexpectedly forced their way into our hiding place on 4 August 1944 and arrested us.”
During the day, those in hiding slept or kept still. No one could use the toilet, in case they were heard in the shop below. The Franks and the other Jews in hiding were arrested not for doing anything but for being what they were. If tourism isn’t interested in how societies work, what is it asking us to look at?
Hudson
The weather is turning cooler. Things that draw you into the world are happening on the streets of cities, in nature, in bedrooms, on line, in love letters, in memories of Saturdays at the movies. The other day, Richard remembered being a small child and curling into himself in his seat when Flash Gordon was suddenly impaled on a rock face by a ray gun. Why this reaction? He didn't know. The elements of the memory: the child's feeling of independence in the movie theater suddenly ambushed by a moment of fear drew us back to times we can no longer feel except in memory.
I noticed the approach of my parents’ anniversary and felt the absence of my sister. I’m the last of us left. My parents did few things wrong, looked at in a certain light. My father has been dead for more than half my life. In the 1990s I cooked in a kitchen for people with AIDS. A friend and I were volunteers. We stood at a steel table, cutting Spanish onions into quarter inch dice. We wore long, white aprons and white paper hats. The onions made us cry, even though candles were meant to absorb the fumes. After our shift, I’d visit her apartment and look at mold growing on the leftovers in her fridge. I was jealous of the places where she’d been invited to eat.
The other day, the sheep on the neighboring farm were sitting on the ground. Richard thought they might know it was going to rain and were saving a dry spot, like birds on nests. When we bought the house, I knew too little to be afraid of things that could go wrong with it. Yesterday, I saw a picture of a woman I had been friends with in my thirties. I didn’t recognize her. Her hair was so gray it looked bleached, and although the image was in color, it seemed grainy and in black and white.
She was at the book party of a mutual friend. We haven’t been close for the majority of my life, yet people still ask me what she’s writing or the state of her health. When I saw her picture, it was like seeing Flash Gordon impaled on a rock face. There is something about this relationship that lives a counter life inside me. I’m not interested in why. I’m not really interested in the persistence of my thoughts. It’s simply true they are probably always there.
When you fall in love, what’s one more piece of power you let a person have over you? I remember watching my mother roll her nylon stockings up her slim thighs and attach them with little garters. I was on her bed before we’d hit the streets for our walk. Love moves. No one is to blame.
Other Jews in another time.
Nobody Wants This, the new romcom on Netflix, is funny and adorable, starring Kristen Bell and Justine Lupe (Willa from Succession!) as blond-haired sisters with a podcast about dating and sex. Kristen falls in love with Noah (Adam Brody), who is a rabbi, and this is supposed to be the weirdest arrangement of star crossed lovers imaginable. How can it be? It can't in 2024, so the show has to portray Jews as if it is 1954, and it has to imagine that people who are not Jews have never heard the word, shiksa.
Everyone on the planet knows what that word means, especially actual female humans who are not Jewish. It's an ugly word. It's a slur, tarted up as if it’s sort of cute because it's a slur that Jews use, Jews, the universal recipients of slur words—accurate—but in no way a get out of slur-jail card free, the way it's assumed to be on the show. American Jews cannot be organized as "othered" people, not even if they look like Woody Allen's worst nightmare in Annie Hall. That historical period has passed and, I hope, the idea advanced by some characters on the show that Jews need to have babies with other Jews in order to preserve Jews on the planet and Jewiness.
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