Inner Emigration
By Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird
Prepare yourself to swallow all your diamonds and your rings And all your ticky, shiny, windy things Don't scare yourself The photos in the newspapers are blurred The radio is broadcasting a whirr Beware yourself, your neighbors aren't neighbors anymore They're leaning with a glass against your door Take care of yourself, and hoist into the air your disbelief Just go ahead and give yourself relief Get ready for your Inner Emigration: Get ready to be alien inside Consider all your social obligations The borders are your foreign order bride You won't ever have to leave your nation You won't ever have to even try Just make a secret Inner Emigration And you won't ever have to say goodbye Well Hannah was at home in the Berlin cabarets of '32 But in '33 the weather turned and the Brownshirts all turned loose And the rumors they were bad, her Sozi lover Alex was getting scared He heard that his name was on a list For having red friends and brown hair He wanted to get out And Hannah could have gone with him to his family in Ukraine But instead, she took a walk out in the rain Through her Berlin, and thought about how this weather, it would pass And how things had always worked out in the past She made a kind of Inner Emigration She started to feel alien inside With all the social marginalization Her sense of place was starting to be tried But she couldn't bear abandoning her nation She didn't want it all to pass her by So people make their Inner Emigrations Till, one by one, they have to say goodbye Well, Sasha had heard about the emigratsye And the talk wasn't just in the family anymore But in the Kharkov streets there was a kind of thaw "We're going home" said old Saminsky When he filed his application to leave And Anya already had family in Tel Aviv But Sasha didn't know Two hundred years among Slavs being called "Hebrews," He knew they'd only be called "Russians" among Jews And then on the Prospekt Lenina Avtobus He heard the Saminskys lost their apartment and were denied their pass The weather seemed like it was never going to pass He chose to make an Inner Emigration He chose to keep his alien inside With all the bureaucratic frusterations He chose to keep his status bona fide And what's the bother of finding a new nation? A border isn't art, it's just a frame Just make a secret Inner Emigration The holy land and exile are the same Anat was a Sabra The daughter of a Sephardic Kibbutznik nurse And a Yekke lawyer from Bonn She fell in love with Kais Born in a PLO refugee camp in southern Lebanon And they married in Cyprus He almost got arrested living with her family in Ramat Gan So she tried wrapping her hair And serving coffee with his family in Hebron But that didn't work either They thought about leaving to live with her cousin David in Brooklyn But he and his boyfriend Patrick wanted to get married And were maybe moving to Berlin So she went to the Jaffa beach and stared at the sea And thought about how someday all of this would pass If only she could find someone to help Kais pass Should she make an Inner Emigration? Tell me what you think she should decide Considering the couple's situation She'd be better off as someone else's bride She and he comprise a kind of nation The kind we build inside when we're alone But if they just make Inner Emigrations Then they'll only have a home when they're at home Compare yourself What does this all have to do with you? How does your experience ring true? You're where, yourself? You aren't suffering anyone's regime You're free to follow every little dream Be fair to yourself, you needn't be oppressed to feel alone You don't have to be driven from your home To spare yourself from feeling like a part of the control With an internal diplomatic role So make a kind of Inner Emigration It's a kind of shift accomplished easily We all have made our disassociations Whether on the job or in our family And what could be more irrelevant than nations When everywhere you go, it's buy or sell? But if we all make only Inner Emigrations Then everything will only go to hell
Sometimes Jew Hatred is like the tides, it comes in and it goes out, and that thought can be comforting. Sometimes the idea of leaving home is too frightening. Sometimes Jew hatred is fatal. Times like those and times like these are complicated for the individual.
