I created this blog to be honest, and honest I shall be.
I picked up The Diary of a Young Girl today, and am about halfway through it, and I am really, really struggling. There are all the usual reasons - the sheer horror of what happened, knowing how short a time ago it was, the fact Anne was just a kid, the fact she was such a precocious little kid that she probably would have had one hell of a life ahead of her, the fact she reminds me of my person’s little Jewish sister and that terrifies me, all of that and all the rest.
But there’s another feeling, one which I’m going to try my best to articulate, and that feeling is guilt. Not the traditional “oh how could this have happened” kind of guilt, or the “how had I not been so affected before” kind or even the “I’m invading” kind (though there is some of the latter). No, this is more personal, and perhaps more silly.
It’s a scared kind of guilt. A guilty sort of fear? Either works, because feeling it makes me feel guilty, but it terrifies me, so yeah. Whichever it is, it’s about my kids, and the fact that, by making this choice, I’m giving it to them, too.
Don’t get me wrong. Given what I know of modern progressive Jewish family life, I really do want that for my kids. And I’d like to give them a sense of belonging besides that. It’s not that I don’t want my kids to be Jews, because I do.
It’s that I’m right now feeling an acute target on their tiny little hypothetical backs.
It was only seventy years ago, and antisemitism hasn’t exactly vanished. It’s one thing to think I can weather abuse or insults, but it’s another to read about kids being slaughtered for their religion in such recent history, and know I want to have a family. I know it’s unlikely to ever happen on that scale or to me or my family in my lifetime, but.
It happened for a long time.
I don’t have a closing thought for this. I’m just feeling guilty. And scared. And guilty about feeling scared.
