Aharon Appelfeld, The Story of a Life

I just read Aahron Appelfeld's biographical book The Story of a Life, published in Hebrew in 1999. It's an interesting book, in some ways a very moving book - but it's not, in any obvious way, the story of a life. Or at least, not in the way a historian such as myself would recognize it.

For me, the story of a ilfe starts with dates (birth, for example), place, key events in a chronological order, and some biographical principle of organization. I once read a biography of Sigmund Freud, and the biographer had two or three pages about events when Sigi was 3 years old hand had problems with wetting his pants. Most biographers wouldn't include that sort of data, but you can see what organizing principle had that biographer include that data in that particular biography. (Or not. It actually added nothing to the story, But it could have, I suppose).

I digress.

Appelfeld has a different organizing principle than you'd normally expect in a biography. The central event of his story is the Shoah, which began for him when he was seven years old and ended six years later. He was a child throughout, and a pretty young one when it began. He didn't have biographical concepts as it was happening: he didn't know dates, he probably had only a childish concept of time, and no intellectual tools whatsoever to make sense of the events. (Adults don't have the intellectual tool to make sense of the Shoah, either, not even today, if they're honest with themselves). His mother was murdered at the beginning of the war, in an event he didn't see but did hear. He was with his father for a while (we aren't told how long the while was, and at the time he must not have known it himself) then he was alone. He was in forests and villages, but there's no reason to believe he could have named them at the time - or later. After the war he made it to Italy and from there to Israel, but having a clear conceptual or historical grasp of the events he was living through may not have been the most urgent need even then.

What he did have were memories which settled in his very bones. At one point a Ukrainian peasant woman started beating him and he needed to escape: the memory of this, he tells us, has remained in his ankles till this very day, more than 50 years later. Other physical sensations cause other memories to rise. Sometimes it's not even physical sensations, it's social ones, such as the dread before the Six Days War in 1967 calling forth physical dread from 25 years earlier.

So it's not a chronological story, it's the piecing together of many sensations and snippets of memory which are attached to them, eventually giving us what he promised in the title: the story of a life. But the story of a life felt, more than of a life remembered. Or perhaps, the story remembered through the sensations of feeling it.

An unusual book, but compelling. Different, perhaps, but in its way, very convincingly true.

Eshter Golan, RIP

Esther Golan passed away peacefully in her sleep early this morning. She was 89.

I wrote about Esther in Right to Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel's Wars, where I recounted how she was called out of a talk she was giving to a group of young people at Yad Vashem about her Holocaust experiences, to be told that her grandson had been killed that morning. 29-year-old Eyal Yoel had been fighting with his reserve unit in Jenin; it was April 2002. Nine years ago tomorrow. The date of his death, Yom Hashoah, is one day later than the date of her death, the evening of Yom Hashoah.

The story that Esther always told those groups was about how her parents sent her off with her little sister in 1939, from their hometown of Glogau to England; and how the girls and their mother managed to correspond for a while, until their father, and then their mother, were murdered by the Nazis. She would always read a section or two of her mother's last letter, which exhorted them to find their way to "our homeland", the Land of Israel.

Yet the way Esther told it, it was mostly an optimistic story, about how the two of them eventually did make their way here, and how they were reuinted with their older brother who had been here the whole time, and how she raised a family, and completed her education, and went to university, and had a long and fulfilling life. Maybe it was because of the optimism that she was invited, over and over, to travel to Germany and talk to scholchildren who could have been her grandchildren, or later, her great-grandchildren. And maybe it was the optimism which enabled her to learn how to use all the new-fangled contraptions such as e-mail and photoshop; she prepared a presentation with her mother's letter in Powerpoint.

She even had a blog. Her last post, from a few months ago, was about the blessings of having all those descendants. Who knows what their great-great-grandmother would have made of all this; of all her descendants and distant descendants "living in our land".

Or dying there.

Here's a bit from a recent post she wrote:

It is so easy to fall into the trap of being served. But then comes the question "Who am I?" And as long as I can, I hope to be able to conduct my life as best as I can and remain a useful person within my locality, help others where I can and accept help when and where needed. All this is part of growing old. This my present motto. I hope I can live up to it.

Eliezer's Handshake

We're not close friends, Eliezer and I. He's almost a decade older than my father would have been, were he still alive. Born in a small town in Eastern Europe, he was a teenager when his father sent him off to Budapest in the hope things would be better there, which in a way they probably were, since Eliezer survived and the rest of his family didn't. I think about that sometimes: The teenager sent off by his father; the survivor now twice as old as his father ever was.

After the war he came to Israel, and in the 1950s started a family, but it wasn't a happy ending. His second son has disabilites, and today, in his early 50s, you can still see this pains Eliezer. His wife, the mother of his three children, died of cancer in about 1970; I remember how her slow death was whispered at school, and can only imagine how horrible it was for her, and for him. Their oldest son, Avi, about whom I've written here and elsewhere, was scarred by his mother's death, to an extent that even we, teenager boys, could recognize. Then in 1982 he was killed in battle, landing Eliezer yet another body blow.

He's not a cheerful man, Eliezer, but he's very much alive. At our synagogue he's one of the stalwarts of the conservative branch of the congregation, the ones who are wary of some of the more liberal innovations which sometimes are mooted, yet he's always respectful of the liberalizers who could be his grandchildren, and they treat him with courtesy and accept that some changes can't be done so long as he and his group are still with us. A few years ago he was seriously ill, and it would have been reasonable to suppose he'd reached the tipping point beyond which old men fade away, but no. He lay at home for a few weeks, then determinedly made his way to synagogue with a walker, then a cane, and now he's back to normal; I often see him at the pool.

We're not close friends, Eliezer and I, but he knows I preserve Avi's memory, and this has created a bond between us. "Your husband knew my son Avi", he once said to my wife, who responded "I know". "You do? How?" "They were friends, Avi and Yaacov, and Yaacov remembers, and talks about him".

It's memorial day, and last week was Yom Hashoah, and tomorrow evening we'll begin celebrating Israel's 63rd Independence Day, and Eliezer is part of all these days. I usually make a point of going over to him after services to shake his hand. His grip is the steeliest handshake I've ever experienced.

Celebrations in the Family

News junkies (and most blog readers are a subset of them) can easily lose perspective, compelled as we are to endlessly respond to immediate events. So here's a spot of perspective.

Yesterday I was talking to Moshe Z, a member of our congregation. Moshe looks like a robust 70-year-old, but since he's got an Auschwitz number on his forearm he's got to be in his early 80s. Last week his first great-grandchild, a girl, was born to one of his granddaughters. Moshe was telling me how emotional it was for him to have a fourth-generation descendant. He then went on to tell that this is being a good month for him. First, the great-granddaughter. Then a few days later, his second-youngest grandson (of eight) joined the IDF. Next week another granddaughter is marrying.

I congratulated him on the birth and the wedding, but was a bit hesitant to classify the grandson's enlistment in the same category of joyous events. "No, Yaacov, you're wrong about that. For those of us who came from Europe and know how important this country is, the privilege of seeing our sons serve in our army is something to celebrate".

"May he return in peace", I said, and we shook hands on that.

Dancing at Auschwitz?

An Australian woman took her Holocuast survivor father and three children to Poland and they filmed themselves dancing at the sites of the Shoah.

It it art, as she says? Not that I can see, but I'm not an expert. Is it good taste? I don't know. Is it worthy of condemnation? I don't think so. It's a bit loopy, but a Holocasut survivor dancing with his grandchildren at Auschwitz, to my mind, is overall more positive than negative.

Hillel Schaechter, 1923-2010

Hillel Schaechter died last week in Jerusalem. He was born in Leipzig, and some parts of Leipzig never left him. All the years - 14, I think - in which I was his boss at Yad Vashem, he always insisted on calling me Dr. Lozowick. I had a staff of 150, most of them younger than I, and everyone called me Yaacov. But not Hillel Schaechter. He would come into my office sometimes, "Dr. Lozowick, I know you're busy, but I'd really like to tell you about the files I'm working on right now". But I'm running ahead with the story.

He was 15 when Kristalnacht happened, in November 1938. He was a German citizen, but his parents were Poles, so the event was doubly terrifying: All Jews were being attacked and their property assaulted or stolen, but the Polish Jews were being deported. His parents hid on the grounds of a consulate, if I remember the story he told me. Each year on November 9th he'd come around and remind me of those traumatic few days, to ensure we didn't forget, nor overlook it because of the worse events that followed.

He had been lucky not to have seen what followed. In August 1939 he bade farewell to his parents, and boarded a train that took him to a camp that sent him to a ship that took him to Haifa in Mandatory Palestine. He was 16 when he arrived; if I've go the story right, he had an older sister who was here already, somewhere. (She's still alive, deep in her 90s).

He was sent to a religious kibbutz in Gush Etzion, thirty years before Jewish settlement there was defined as being illegal by international law. Later he was transferred to a different kibbutz,where he worked as his parents and entire family were murdered in Europe. After that war, and then after the one in Israel, he met and married. He and his wife had four children, and they lived in Kfar Haroeh, where he spent his career dealing with administration, and logistics, and accounting, and what's now called human resources; in the 1967 war he was still fighting in the reserves.

Then it was time to retire. He and his wife moved to Jerusalem; soon thereafter she fell ill and died. It was about then that he came to Yad Vashem, where the archives made use of his ability to read German handwriting, and especially the Gothic handwriting that has long since been disused so younger Germans cannot decipher it.

He had been an administrator, not a historian or archivist. Yet the documents he was dealing with were from the world he'd been born into; the descriptions were from his world. Many times he'd come by to tell me how important it was that the latter generations be told about the things he was finding on those files: irrational antisemitism of the Nazis; hopeless attempts by Jews to extricate themselves. It was almost as if, on the smallest of scales, his efforts were directed at fixing what could never be fixed.

One morning five or six years ago he came to work with a platter of cakes and invited us to celebrate with him: his eighth great grandchild had just been born, and he did the arithmetic for us: "I lost 36 members of my family in the Shoah, but I'm almost there again", he told us, counting his children grandchildren and great grandchildren. "That's my revenge on the Nazis, all those descendants".

This morning I went to visit his children as they sit shiva in his son's home, about two miles from the first kibbutz he stayed in, in 1939. "He lived to see 41 grandchildren and great grandchildren", his oldest daughter said, "he had a full professional career and then a second one at Yad Vashem. Yet throughout it all, he was always that frightened 16-year-old, taking leave of his parents forever at the train station in Leipzig".

He was a good man.

A Window to Hope and Despair

One more day with Yehuda Poliker's 1988 Holocaust record and we'll move on.

The Jewish calender has cycles. One ancient one is from Pessach, signifying liberation from bondage, until Shavuot (Pentacost), seven weeks later, signifying liberation to live as Jews. There has always been a tension to the period, in which the nation is free but still lacks positive content for its freedom. About 1,800 years ago an additional layer was added, when it was decreed that a month of those seven weeks were a period of mourning for the destruction of Judea by Hadrian (143CE), and the end of any hope for political renewal following the earlier destruction of the temple (70 CE). Weddings are forbidden, men don't shave, music isn't played and so on.

Then, in the 1950s, a new cycle was inserted into the double-layer ancient one. The date of the independence of the State of Israel was decided by the British who left on May 14th 1948. After the ensuing war, however, the Knesset decided (twice, in 1953 and again in 1959) that the day before Independence day would be Yom HaZikaron, the day of commemoration for the fallen soldiers; the day one week before that was designated to remember the Shoah. These decisions were the result of political horse-trading, but sometimes even politicians get it right, even beyond their wildest dreams, and without intending it they had added modern depth to the traditional cycle. (I once read the record of their deliberations: they really didn't intend anything so profound)

So now we're in the week of trepidation. It's a week of palpable sensitivity, even as everyone goes about their normal business. What better a way to introduce it, I tell myself, than with Poliker's Chalon el hayam hatichon, a Window to the Mediterranean Sea.

The lyrics were written by Poliker's partner Yaacov Gil'ad, but the story is that of Poliker's father. A man who had lost his entire family including his children at the hands of the Nazis. His wife, likewise. Now, in December 1950, he has traveled to Israel without his new wife and son, to scout for a better future. He has found a one-room apartment in Jaffa, and he writes her (no iPhones in those days) to tell that perhaps, perhaps (ve-ulay) there's a chance, one in a million, that they can still somehow forge a new, better life. Maybe there's a slim hope, climbing in the window.

To add to the poignancy, the window faces west, back to Europe, to where there's no hope only despair. On that level, the window is false; the hope, if it's there, is climbing in from the street of Jaffa, the local reality, not from beyond the view. But that's just my reading.

Hebrew lyrics
English translation
I promised to write when I left you
but I didn't write for a long time
now I miss you so much
such a pity you are not here
after I arrived in Jaffa
hopes were born out of despair
I found my self a room and a half
on the roof of a deserted house
I have a folding bed here
if the three of us want to sleep
you the kid and I
against a window looking out
to the Mediteranean Sea

And maybe from afar
there is a one in a million chance
and maybe from afar
some joy is sneaking up to the window

The end of December 1950
outside there is war between the winds
suddenly we had snow fall
so white and reminds me what I already forgot
The wound is still open
if only you were here with me
I would have simply told you
what ever a letter will not say
If you want you have a home here
and you will have me
much kid's laughter coming to the house
and a window looking out
to the Mediterranean Sea

And maybe...

Ups and Downs: They're Life. Both.

Michael has responded to this morning's blogging with a story he heard from his father, who survived Buchenwald:

Otto had been a chess champion (won the Belgian title in 1936), and his chess hero had always been a Russian named Alekhine. One day in Buchenwald, in the latrine, Otto came upon what he thought was a miracle of sorts: there on the ground was a page from a recent German chess magazine, undoubtedly discarded by an SS guard, with an article by, of all people, Alekhine. So Otto's heart skipped and his mood soared. Until he began reading. Then he discovered, for the first time, that Alekhine had become a rabid antisemite sympathizer with the Nazi cause, and the article was all about the evils of "Jewish chess..." And Otto then sank into an especially low depression. But then there was another uplift, because it occurred to him that if he was still capable of experiencing both joy and depression it must mean that his humanity had not been destroyed, even by the Nazis. And this awareness, that he was still human, gave him hope and the will to continue.

65 Years

Auschwitz was liberated by Red Army troops (who didn't know it was there to be liberated until they stumbled upon it) 65 years ago today.

A few twins held by Mengele for his experiments survived as children. Other than them, the youngest survivors were in their mid-teens; most were in their twenties.

Living memory of Auschwitz is to be found, today, only in the minds of octogenarians. Not many of them left, either. The living memory is slipping away.

Yehoshua Bichler, RIP

My friend Yehushua Bichler died earlier this month, age 80.

His friends from his own generation called him Robino, from Robert, but I felt that would be disrespectful of me so I called him by his Israeli name, Yehoshua. I first met him in a graduate seminar about the SS, in the winter of 1982 I think. He was not a particularly good speaker, and he had trouble focusing what he wished to say into concise paragraphs, so when Prof. Yehuda Bauer anounced one week that the following week Yehoshua would take over for as long as he needed, we were puzzled. We remained puzzled for the first 20 minutes of the next class, too, until it dawned on us that Yehoshua was telling a story none of us had ever seen in the history books.

In a nutshell, we all knew that the Nazi murder policy began with the invasion of the Soviet Union in summer 1941, and it was carried out by the infamous Einsatzgruppen, in which there must have been a few thousand men at most. Bichler, however, had uncovered documents that told of SS Brigades no-one had ever noticed, numbering in the tens of thousands, who had also been part of the operation. They were subordinate to a different part of the SS, their logistics were supported by different units, and their existance changed the picture of general complicity in the murder program.

I recognize this isn't that important to most people, but in all the years since I've never again run into a historian who was able single handedly to rework the outlines of the accepted story in such a clear way. Yehoshua was aware of the stir he was creating, but it didn't go to his head. Perhaps the fact that he himself had been at Auschwitz, had watched the death of his father, and had lost 57 (fifty seven) members of his family, tempered his perspective on things.

A few years later I became the head of archives at Yad Vashem; Yehoshua ran the archives at Givat Haviva, a small research center dedicated to the Zionist youth movements. So now we were colleagues. I came to my task with the energy of youth and lots of big ideas; Yehoshua ran a smaller place and knew every file; he also knew many of the people, places, and the events, in a way I never could. We were friends, but in a very unequal way.

If you ever have two or three spare days, you should go to Yad Vashem and watch Yehushua's 8-hour video testimony about Slovakia, and Auschwitz, and death marches. It's a tape of a man in his sixties, with the mein of a confused and uncomprehending boy, unable to understand the story he was telling, or unable to believe it, or make any sense of it. This, from the man who had uncovered an entire branch of the SS.

Offhand, I don't think I ever saw him not smiling, in an unassuming, slightly embarrassed way.

Nucho Eden, may he rest in peace.

Concert for Peace: NEVER!

Following my comment about the unfortunate Palestinian response to some of their teenagers playing music to an audience of Israeli Holocaust survivors, Claudio sent me this depressing link.

It is really hard to write on this subject without getting angry. We all know the extent to which Israel can be evil and satanic. After all, we Palestinians have been on the receiving end of Israeli savagery for decades.

In fact, being thoroughly tormented and killed by the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of the holocaust has always been and continues to be “the” Palestinians’ way of life.

However, for some Palestinians to allow themselves to be duped to sing and play music to their oppressors and child-killers is simply beyond the pale of human dignity.

It is at least as insulting and humiliating as some Jews were forced or duped to play music to SS, Gestapo and Wehrmacht soldiers during the Second World War. In both cases, the act was meant to humiliate the victims and rob them of the last visages of human dignity.

It goes on and on. Khalid Amayreh is a person whose primary motivating force is hatred.

I don't know enough about the Palestinians to say how typical he is. He talks similarly to the people in Jenin who got so angry the other day, so he may not be a lone voice in the wilderness.

I'm of the persuasion that Israel should always be on the lookout for whatever policy might lead to peace with our neighbors, and should be willing to pay a reasonable price to encourage it to happen; I'm also of the persuasion that no matter what we do, the ultimate decision is of our enemies. They're the ones who need to decide to live alongside us in peace; a large majority of Israelis has long since wished to live alongside them in peace. Items like this demonstrate that some Arabs, in this case, Palestinians, are so consumed with hatred they'll pay whatever price needed to have it gratified - and since that won't happen, they prefer war.

Since Mr. Amayreh is so involved in Holocaust-Zionism comparisons, malicious nonsense as they are, here's another one for him to ponder.

While the Jewish grievances against Germany were vastly and incomparably greater than any Palestinian grievance could ever be, by 1952, that's less than a decade after the Shoah, Israeli society was at extreme loggerheads with itself about a proposal to accept indemnities from Germany. Ben Gurion the pragmatist sought German funds to help build Israel, recognizing that they would contribute to Germany's international rehabilitation; a large, vocal, and for a moment even violent opposition stated that Jews should never accept anything from Germany; better to slog on with food rationing and hundreds of thousands of refugees in tents, and never give the Germans the dignity of accepting anything from them. We'll put the past behind us and move on, but we'll not forgive.

Ben Gurion won the day, though it was close. By 1965 there were full diplomatic relations between Israel and Germany, two years before the Six Day War; the first German ambassador was a one-armed veteran officer of the Wehrmacht. By the late 70s, (West) Germany was Israel's closest ally in Europe. The two national memories are complicated till this day, and will remain so for the next century or two, but they don't interfere with each side's ability to get on with promoting its interests in a reasonably civil way.

Concert for Peace, Or Not

Last week the NYT carried this nice fluffy story about a youth orchestra from Jenin that preformed for a public of Holocaust survivors in Holon, Israel. It was the idea of the orchestra's Israeli Arab director, Wafaa Younis, (no idea if she's fluffy) and funded by Shari Arison, Israel's wealthiest woman, who no doubt is fluffy headed (but means well). I briefly toyed with the idea of linking to the story, but seem not to have. It was too fluffy for me, and didn't seem to have much significance beyond the good-feeling markup.

Apparently I was wrong. Some influential group in Jenin has fired Ms. Younis, forbidden her to enter town, and put an end to her harmful escapades.

Adnan al-Hindi, the leader of the camp’s Popular Committee, a grass-roots group representing the Palestine Liberation Organization, said the young musicians had been exploited by the orchestra director, Wafaa Younis, for the purpose of “normalizing” ties with Israel. He said by telephone that the children had been “deceived” and dragged unwittingly into a political situation that “served enemy interests” and aimed to “destroy the Palestinian national spirit in the camp.”

“It was a shock and a surprise to the children and their relatives,” he said, adding that Ms. Younis had told the young musicians’ families only that the trip to Holon was an opportunity for artistic self-expression.

Ms. Younis, from central Israel, has been traveling to Jenin every week for several years to teach music in the camp. Mr. Hindi said that the house she rented as a studio had been sealed, and that she was barred by the Popular Committee from all activity in the camp.

Depressing, isn't it. And note that al-Hindi is Fatah, not Hamas.

Israel and Innovation

From time to time - with rising frequency these days - I ponder on how it must have been to be a Jew in the 1930s, with antisemitism the official policy of some of the world's greatest powers, with antisemitic parties in most countries, and with loud antisemitic cries from all sides. It must have been very frightening. Not like these days, when the rising tide of Jew-hatred is very aggravating, certainly, but not really frightening.

Less often, I think about how the world must have looked to the dazed survivors in Europe of summer 1945, or to their grim relatives elsewhere. Their story is not told that often, and very rarely is it dwelt upon. As a general statement, Israel's critics and enemies, both, detest it when Jews in general and Israelis in particular talk too much (or at all) about the Shoah. Israel hasn't learned the lessons of the Jews' own past, they'll tell you. Israel has learned the lessons too well, and is now copying its tormentors, they'll tell you. Israel, of all nations, should understand better, they'll tell you. Israel is trying to wield the ultimate victim-weapon to as to stifle thought, discussion or recognition of what's really going on, they'll tell you. And so on.

I expect a more profound reason for all the shrieking is a dim awareness that actually, the multi-stranded story of those dark days has the potential to disrupt almost all the pat templates they use to explain the world - so they ward it off.

Take, for example, the multiple-tiered explanations about how when people suffer, they aren't nice in return. They must be assuaged, their needs addressed, their woes removed, their grievances respected, acknowledged, and rectified. You know the line; it's one of the top meta-narratives of our age. It's also all wrong, fundamentally wrong, and quite pernicious. Those Shoah survivors disprove it by the simple fact of how they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps (after they acquired boots) in a mostly indifferent and partially hostile world.

Some fifty years later, on February 20th 1999, the Economist published a Special Report titled Innovation in Industry. It was a fun read, so much so that I made myself a copy, which was fortunate because I can't find it now on their website. They talked endlessly about Silicon Valley, of course, but also had this:

Apart from its genius for networking, Silicon Valley seems to have an abundance of two other ingredients that other places lack. One is a culture that rewards risk, handsomely, but does not punish failure. The other is simply chutzpah—that upbeat sense of self-confidence that says anything is possible, go for it, and never be too shy to ask for help. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the place emerging as California’s most likely rival in innovation is Israel, with its close-knit society that networks ceaselessly, deals daily with risk, reveres learning, and is blessed with a torrent of well-educated immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Natan Sharansky, a physicist and former gulag prisoner who is now Israel’s trade and industry minister, points out that a fifth of his new country’s population arrived in the past five years, doubling the number of technicians, engineers and scientists there. Israel has 135 engineers and technicians for every 10,000 people, compared with America’s 18. This abundance of talent shows up in the success rate of new ventures in Israel. No surprise that Israel trails only America and Canada in its number of new listings on the innovation-driven Nasdaq stockmarket each year. With such stellar results, the amount of venture capital chasing Israeli innovations has been increasing by around 35% a year. Last year more than $4 billion of high-risk money found its way into innovative start-ups there, not far off the figure that venture capitalists invested in Silicon Valley. If it can keep this up, Israel is set to become the innovation centre of the world.

That was then, and now is now. The Dotcom bubble exploded, the "Peace Process" did too, the Palestinian culture of death attacked Israel with its full potency while the world media looked on and tut-tutted; more recently the entire world economy is staggering. And on March 12th 2009, a decade and a week after the previous report, the Economist came back with another (it starts here). "Global heroes. A special report on entrepreneurship".

For me personally this one was even more fun that the previous one, since - contrary to any reasonable expectation I ever had - I'm deep in the entrepreneurship world myself, in spite of my advanced age and encroaching senility. More pertinent, however, after the first few conceptual chapters about the phenomenon in general, the reports turns to discuss who's doing what, and why. Sure enough, as if the decade never happened, Israel gets mentioned, again, and again, singled out beyond all others. Here, for example:

DOV MORAN’S desk is littered with the carcasses of dismembered phones. Mr Moran has already had one big breakthrough: inventing the now ubiquitous memory stick. But he dreams of another one: he wants to separate the “brains” of the various gizmos that dominate our lives from the “bodies” to enable people to carry around tiny devices that they will be able to plug into anything from phones to cameras to computers. Mr Moran sold his memory-stick business to SanDisk for $1.6 billion, creating a thriving technology cluster near his office. This time he wants to build an Israeli business that will last, challenging the giants of the camera and phone businesses.

Israel is full of would-be Dov Morans. It is home to 4,000 high-tech companies, more than 100 venture-capital funds and a growing health-care industry. Innovations developed in the country include the Pentium chip (Intel), voicemail (Comverse), instant messaging (Mirabilis, Ubique), firewalls (Checkpoint) and the “video pill”, which allows doctors to study your insides without the need for invasive surgery.

Even more than other countries, Israel has America to thank for its entrepreneurial take-off. A brigade of American high-tech companies, including Intel and Microsoft, have established research arms there. And a host of Israelis who once emigrated to America in search of education and opportunity have returned home, bringing American assumptions with them. Many Israeli entrepreneurs yo-yo between Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv; almost 70 Israeli companies are traded on NASDAQ.

The Israeli government helped by providing a ready supply of both human and physical capital. Israel has the world’s highest ratio of PhDs per person, the highest ratio of engineers and scientists and some of the world’s best research universities, notably Technion. The country’s native talent was supplemented by the arrival of 400,000 well-educated Jewish refugees from the former Soviet empire.

However, Israel’s main qualification for entrepreneurialism is its status as an embattled Jewish state in a sea of Arab hostility. The Israeli army not only works hard to keep the country at the cutting edge of technology, it also trains young Israelis (who are conscripted at 18) in the virtues of teamwork and improvisation. It is strikingly common for young Israelis to start businesses with friends that they met in the army. Add to that a high tolerance of risk, born of a long history and an ever-present danger of attack, and you have the makings of an entrepreneurial firecracker.

Eat your hearts out, Guardianistas and boycotters.

Hitler Can't Find Parking in Tel Aviv

There's all sorts of talk swirling around cyberspace about an Israeli spoof someone put up on Youtube, where a section from a recent German film about Hitler's final days has been dubbed with Hebrew subtitles, according to which Hitler can't find parking in Tel Aviv. (I never drive down to Tel Aviv. I take the bus and let the bus driver worry about parking).

Haaretz tells that Holocaust survivors are furious and demanding Youtube delete the clip.

Noah Flug, the chairman of the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors and a survivor of Mauthausen concentration camp, sent a letter to YouTube demanding that the clip be removed due to its sensitivity.

I've known Noah Flug for more than 40 years, and have great respect for him, but in this case I disagree. The clip isn't offending to survivors, it's side-splitting funny, at least in its original Hebrew version. The English one that has been put up "in response to public demand", so to speak, is merely quite funny. Both of them are embedded in that Haaretz link, so go judge for yourselves.

On the Passage of Time

Frankfurt airport. Three or four elderly Israeli women and one well-dressed elderly man reached the checkpoint (I think it was the fourth so far) by electric golf-cart: a service offered by the airport for elderly passengers who might have problems walking the distances. The driver of the golf cart was a courteous young woman who seemed heartened by the fact that these particular charges spoke German; and if it was German with a not fully recognizable accent, it made no difference. They were nice old people.

At the checkpoint she unloaded them and assisted them up to the barrier, where she handed them over to the young Israeli security person; this was a dark skinned young woman with whom the elderly man briefly flirted, in a grandfatherly way. “And from where in Czechoslovakia do you come?” she asked him, referring to a country that exists still in his memory but no-where else. Behind the young woman stood a uniformed young German policeman wearing body armor and a sub-machine gun. As the elderly folks passed through he smiled at them, and gave a ghost of a salute.

Do Holocaust survivors think through all the ironies of such moments? Probably not, I expect. This won’t have been their first trip through a German airport, and the novelty will probably have worn off. They seemed mostly interested in getting through the process so as to find a seat in the lounge beyond. But the ironies are there, even if no-one dwells upon them.

Postscript: Someday Israeli air passengers won’t have to be screened through four layers of security more than anyone else. When that happens you’ll know that peace may be a reality. No speech by any politician of any nationality at any venue will do the trick, unless it manages to carry off that one. Putative peace arrangements that leave the need for those special airport precautions are perhaps better than nothing, but they won’t be peace arrangements.

Persecution, Revenge, and Morality

Jonathan Freedland has apparently written a novel based upon the story of those Jews who tried to punish Nazis after the Shoah; his paper has helpfully given him space to write about the subject, here.

You can quibble with his contention that almost no-one was punished for murdering Jews. The Soviets hung quite a large number of Nazis, though not in Western-style trials. In the 1960s the (West) Germans began a process of identifying Nazi criminals and investigating their crimes with an eye towards bringing them to justice. Well over 130,000 pf them were investigated, and in the process the documentary evidence was vastly expanded; most serious historical research of Nazism would be far poorer if it hadn't been for those efforts. Sadly, somewhere on the road from investigations to convictions almost all of the suspects managed to get off and wander back home, where they died in their beds.

The (East) Germans occasionally meted out justice to an old Nazi, but mostly they didn't.

Freedland's story, however, is about the survivors and some British-uniformed Jews from Mandatory Palestine who tracked down specific Nazis and executed them. Probably hundreds, though the documentation, obviously, is sparse, and the executioners themselves mostly never told.

Critics of Israel and apologists of Arab terror love to tell about the suffering that preceded the terror, thereby explaining it and in many tales even justifying it. They also love to tell that Israel's actions are equally evil, except that since they're state-sanctioned, they're worse. The poor Arab terrorists don't have a government and a big army, you see, so they engage in the poor man's version of violence, while the Israelis get to engage in the rich man's version. Finally, they tend to add, the Israelis insist on talking about the Holocaust all the time because they are trying to monopolize the victim status, since - as the previous two points demonstrate - being a victim is a higher moral status than anything else, and even lets you engage in all sorts of horrible actions without being fully tainted by them.

The real story of the Jewish avengers, somewhat unmentioned by Freedland, is that it disproves all those themes.

1. Over the past 1500 years or so the Jews were persecuted more than any other group (not all the time, mind you, but again and again and again). Yet they never resorted to violence against their oppressors. (OK, I can't vouch for "never", but if it happened it was extremely rare and isn't in the history books).

2. Until very recently, the Jews didn't have armies or governments or other vehicles of letting off steam as such, and they still didn't engage in violence.

3. The previous comments were true for at least 1500 years, long before the Nazis. The Nazi persecution, however, dwarfed anything that preceded it - but even it did not call forth Jewish revenge in the primary use of the term, not under the Nazis before 1945, and not in Germany after 1945. The stories that Freedland has uncovered were of rough justice and were aimed at specific German men. In one case they were aimed at a camp of captured SS men. They were never committed against the general German populace - even though the general German populace had heartily supported the Nazis, and mostly knew that the Jews were being horribly tormented by them.

All of which demonstrates that the decision to murder or not is a decision, not an irresistible and uncontrollable urge. Jews who were persecuted over the centuries figured out ways to get on with life. If they did, anyone could; if others don't, it's because of their decisions, not their circumstances.

The Ultimate Pole (or...?)

The Economist has an obituary for Bronislaw Geremek, "Polish historian and politician", one of the handful of people who formulated Polish history in the second half of the 20th century, and thereby also European history.

He was also a Holocaust survivor.

A Place of Very Little Hope

Barack Obama was at Yad Vashem earlier today. At the end of his visit he commented that "ultimately, this is a place of hope".

Which of course it isn't, or shouldn't be.

Israel is ultimately a place of hope. The ability of the survivors of the Shoah to forge positive lives for themselves, many hundreds of thousands of them, is not only a place of hope, it's a deafening rebuke for all the fools who like to excuse victims or perceived victims for their consequent weaknesses. And yes, the designers of Yad Vashem's museum and grounds succumbed to the temptation and allowed their story to be caught up in the inspirational power of Israel, and at times they are carried away by the justified triumphalism of some survivors; by doing so, they diminish the story they're supposed to be telling.

But Obama, we're told, is extraordinarily intelligent, and sees farther and clearer than most of us. He should have been able to see through the distractions that were set in his path, and he should have been able to set aside the innate optimism of a liberal politician and of the black man who is poised to break the ultimate glass ceiling, and he should have recognized that Yad Vashem is anything but a place of hope. If there is hope for humanity it is in spite of that story, not as a result of it.

Yom HaShoah

Today is Yom Hashoah, the day of remembrance of the Holocaust. The topic of the day this year is the contribution of the Holocaust survivors to the creation of the State of Israel - and a vast contribution it is. Essentially, Holocaust survivors brought great blessings to just about every single walk of life or undertaking they touched. There is much that is miraculous about this country, and the survivors wrought more than their shares of the miracles.

Which in itself is miraculous. It is extraordinarily fashionable in this age to garner the benefits of victimhood, to inherit loss, and of course to blame the culprits for each and every weakness we are blighted with, and for all the flaws in our world. The survivors of the Shoah were victimized beyond all others. They didn't wallow in their victimhood. Nor did they pick themselves up and get on with their lives, which would have been the admirable thing to do. Instead, they hauled themselves up by their torn shoestrings, and then created a world, one immeasurably better than the one they came from. Still flawed, of course, because they are human, but astonishing none the less.

Ze'ev Sternhell's Story

Sterhnell, an important historian and a prominent publicist, turns out to be a Holocaust survivor with a fascinating story, full of twists and turns. Here it is, as told to Ari Shavit, with the added benefits of insightful analysis of each of his own stages. Read the whole thing, as they say.