The Jews

- By Natalia Ginzburg

Translated from Italian by Jenny McPhee

The day after the events in Munich, the Catholic Press Association called me to say it was conducting an inquiry regarding the massacre and asked if I would express my opinion. I refused to respond. I told them that I never respond to inquiries.[*]

Pronouncing a few sentences over the telephone seemed both stupid and useless. But later, I wanted to respond to those journalists at length and in detail. I didn’t have only one opinion to express, I had many. Above all, I wanted to collect my thoughts on the subject, thoughts scattered within me.

When a tragedy happens in the world, we find ourselves considering how we would have acted if we’d been directly involved or had possessed the power to act. Since such power is entirely out of our hands, these thoughts are merely vacuous fantasies. However, even though we’re dealing with vacuous fantasies, I will express how I would have acted in response to the events in Munich if I’d had the power to act.

If I were Golda Meir, I would have acquiesced to the guerrillas’ demands and liberated the two hundred prisoners. They say that you must never give in to blackmail. But even blackmail, it seems to me, must be accepted when it comes to a world tragedy of this magnitude. They say that if the two hundred prisoners had been liberated, those prisoners, in turn, would have taken more innocent people hostage and perpetrated further massacres. But the world today is so disastrously constructed that, from one minute to the next, one must decide how to defend oneself and whom to defend. I think every other consideration should have been put aside and those nine hostages saved. If Golda Meir had freed the two hundred prisoners, she would have given the world a lesson, not in weakness but in power, or, at least, in the only power it is legitimate to believe in: the power that doesn’t care about winning and is ready to lose, the power that doesn’t reside in weapons or in oil or in pride but in the spirit. 

If I were the head of the German police, I would have let the guerrillas escape unharmed, taking the nine hostages with them wherever they wanted to go. If there was even an atom of a chance that one of the nine hostages could be saved, that atom should have been considered essential.

If I were the head of the Olympics, I would have canceled the games, since, after what happened, they obviously no longer made sense.

Finally, if I were a head of state, I would ask the Americans to withdraw their troops from Vietnam. Naturally, I would already have asked them to do so, but I would repeat the demand all the more emphatically at this particular moment. I don’t believe that Vietnamese children are any different from the nine Israeli hostages. The only difference is this: we’ve all become accustomed to knowing that Vietnamese children die, and we’ve even become used to watching, without batting an eye, how they die, having seen them die on television and at the movies. This is a horrifying thing to get used to. There doesn’t seem to me to be a decisive difference between the fact that there is a war in Vietnam and the fact that the officials wanted the Olympic Stadium to be considered an “island of peace.” It is false to believe that islands of peace can still exist in a world like ours. And human destinies are now so wrapped up and entangled with each other that a war in one part of the world propagates every day and everywhere indifference, habituation, and an overfamiliarity with carnage. If the US were suddenly to recall its troops from Vietnam, the nine Israeli hostages wouldn’t have died in vain.

When I think about the guerrillas, I feel a sort of inhuman horror. Such inhuman horror can be inspired only by the presence of inhuman desperation. When we are in the presence of inhuman desperation, our usual sentiments disappear, and we no longer feel hatred or scorn or pity. Our spirit turns to stone. Our path appears to have led us to a stone desert where, like trees, hatred, scorn, and pity do not grow. When we think of the guerrillas with such inhuman horror, we briefly become like them, or the idea we have of them, and we turn to stone, losing the breath of the spirit. We must defend ourselves from such inhuman horror because it’s an aberration.

The guerrillas represent, perhaps, the extreme limit of our own desperation: not yet inhuman and still drenched in pity and scorn; not yet inhuman but long since part of our daily existence. The key to understanding the guerrillas may reside in our own desperation. They seem to have come from a world not our own. But maybe the paths that have led them to such inhuman desperation seem incomprehensible and inhuman to us because we’ve never taken those paths ourselves, nor have we been able to understand how remote and foreign, and how nearby and familiar their paths are to ours.

We know very little about the guerrillas, but we do know that they are willing to throw away their own lives at any moment, just as they are willing to throw away the lives of others. When they throw away their own lives, we don’t think about courage, and when they throw away the lives of others, we don’t think about cruelty. They appear to be imbued with a power impossible to reach with our voices, and so it’s impossible to ask them to spare the innocent. It seems to us that, in the inhuman and desperate places in which they live, the guilty and the innocent no longer exist, because  their world no longer distinguishes between the colors of guilt and innocence;  it is lifeless and desolate and has only one color. Only death exists; life, reduced to a rag tossed away with a flick of the wrist, is no better than death and, in any case, the same color.

I am Jewish. I have always felt that everything concerning the Jews directly concerns me. I am Jewish only on my father’s side, but I’ve always believed that the Jewish part of me should be more serious and burdensome than the other part. If, somewhere, I happen to meet someone whom I discover is Jewish, I instinctively feel an affinity. After a minute or two, I might perhaps despise that person, but a feeling of secret complicity persists. This is an aspect of my nature that I find strange and don’t like at all, because it openly contradicts everything I’ve ever believed: it’s my belief that affinities among Jews don’t exist except in an extremely superficial sense, and I hold this to be true because I believe that humans should not be bound by their origins. This is what I think, but when I meet someone Jewish, I can’t repress a strange and somber feeling of collusion.

When I heard about the Munich massacre, I thought: Once again they’ve killed people of my blood. I thought this while thinking a million other things, but I thought it. When I thought it, I felt contempt for myself, because it was a contemptible thought. I don’t believe in the least that Jews have blood different from that of others. I don’t believe there are blood divisions.

I am Jewish and had a middle-class upbringing. This middle-class upbringing instilled in me some false ideas. As a child, I must have somehow inhaled the idea that the Jews and the middle class were superior to others and entitled to greater rights. I was certainly never told any such thing by my family, and indeed, I was taught that all people should have equal rights. But an idea of superiority must have been present in the fabric of my education. We struggle all our lives to free ourselves from the flaws of our education, but these flaws remain imprinted on our souls like tattoos. As adults, we spend our lives attempting to remove these tattoos from our souls.

With regard to the Jews in Israel, I believe I thought that they were superior to the Arabs and entitled to greater rights. Then, at a certain point, I found this idea monstrous. I tried to rip it from my mind and furiously stamp it out. But I realized that I had cultivated this monstrous idea in myself for many years, like a plant on a windowsill. And, despite my ripping and stamping, I’m not entirely sure that there aren’t still remnants of it strewn about inside me. Our monstrous ideas have the virtue of revealing to us our internal landscape. A monstrous idea grows and proliferates quietly without encroaching on what surrounds it. The monstrous idea grows and proliferates alongside our best impulses, our desire for justice and equality, and, rather than make these things disappear, transforms them bit by bit into a pile of soggy straw.

Our monstrous ideas should also have the virtue of allowing us to understand what our enemies, or those we call our enemies, are like. They should teach us how to regard others with tolerance and how to give them our extreme attention. After we have ripped up our monstrous ideas and stamped them out, we should remember them and stop thinking of ourselves as children of universal good.

At times, I have thought that the Jews of Israel were superior to others and had greater rights because they survived an extermination. This was not a monstrous idea, but it was wrong. The torment, the massacres of innocents that we have seen and endured in our lives, do not grant us any rights or any kind of superiority over others. Those whose shoulders have been burdened by the oppressive weight of fear do not have the right to oppress their fellow humans with money or weapons, because, simply, no living soul in the world has this right.

With regard to the Jews of Israel, what happens to me is this: If someone speaks against them, I am deeply insulted and overcome by a sense of rebellion. I feel as if my own family is being insulted. If, however, someone speaks of them with admiration and devotion, I abruptly feel these sentiments are antithetical to me and I find myself in opposition. 

After the war, we loved and pitied the Jews who went to Israel, thinking that they’d survived an extermination, that they were homeless and had nowhere to go. We loved them for their memories of suffering, their fragility, their weary gait, and their shoulders weighed down by fear. These traits are the ones we love in humans today. We were not at all prepared to see the Jews become a powerful, aggressive, and vengeful nation. We hoped that they would be a small, cozy, powerless country, all its citizens retaining their frail, bitter, thoughtful, and solitary physiognomies. Maybe it wasn’t possible. But this transformation was one of the horrible things that happened.

When someone speaks of Israel with admiration, I find myself in opposition. I understood at a certain point, possibly late, that the Arabs were poor peasants and shepherds. I know very little about myself, but I know with absolute certainty that I don’t want to be on the side of those who use weapons, money, and culture to oppress peasants and shepherds.

Our instinct pushes us to be on one side or the other. But, in truth, today it’s perhaps impossible to be on one side or the other. Human beings and societies undergo rapid and horrible transformations. The only choice available to us is to be on the side of those who die or suffer unjustly. One might say this is the easy choice, but perhaps it is the only choice we have today.

September 14, 1972
 

NATALIA GINZBURG was an Italian novelist, , essayist, translator, and political activist. She was raised in Turin, in an antifascist haven, and published her first stories at the age of eighteen; she would become one of the most important Italian writers of the twentieth century. She worked as an editor at the Einaudi publishing house, together with Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino. In 1963 her novel Family Lexicon won the most prestigious Italian prize for literature, the Premio Strega.

JENNY MCPHEE’s most recent novel is A Man of No Moon. Her English version of Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon was shortlisted for the ALTA 2018 Italian Prose in Translation Award, and her translation of a new, complete collection of Ginzburg’s essays, including this one, is forthcoming from NYRB Classics.