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The Eastern Europe of Sholom Aleichem, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Kafka and Elie Wiesel

By Anita Mathias

The Eastern Europe of Sholom Aleichem, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Kafka and Elie Wiesel

We spent this morning in Prague’s old Ghetto and Jewish quarter. 

Jewish people have lived in Prague for a millennium—subjected to a variety of petty restrictions: for a while the only trades open to them were the rag trade and the usury. They had to wear distinctive hats and ruffs and badges, which exposed them to persecution, they were regarded as the personal property of the King under the Statuta Judaeorum, subjected to pogroms and extortion.
The Spanish Synagogue was modelled on the Alhambra in Granada. It was a privilege to be inside a synagogue, and to walk up to the place where the Torah was stored for instance, well beyond the balcony reserved for women. I do not remember going to a synagogue before, though Roy says I must have.
 As is appropriate in a baroque city, it was entirely too much. Absolutely gorgeous, but too much. Ornate, colourful, gold and ruby and sapphire in fantastical geometrical patterns. Absolutely lavish. I felt as I did in the Cloud Forest in Costa Rica. There was so much, such a profusion of loveliness that I did not know what to focus on or to take in first.
The places humans devise to worship God are very interesting. Some like the Puritans wanted simplicity and purity. I am with them. Some, like Archbishop Suger, who designed Saint-Denys in Paris, and who is credited with introducing stained glass in cathedrals, and with the invention of Gothic itself, wanted “More Light” as Suger said, coloured light.
If I had to devise a place of worship, it would be a simple Gothic cathedral, maybe not as high-roofed as Amiens, but still immense, with long lancet windows, with alternately stained glass and natural green views outside. It would be set in a place of natural loveliness, in the kind of surroundings the Cistercians chose in Riveaux for instance.

The reverence for the Torah was moving—massive bejewelled Torah crowns, Torah shields, Torah pointers, finials, covers.  These had been gathered here from all over Eastern Europe by Hitler who wished to construct a Museum to an Extinct Race. What wickedness—wanting the destruction of an entire race.
Hitler’s pathological hatred of the Jews, the immense amount of time, organization, energy and resources he devoted towards his Final Solution was irrational—and one of the factors in his speedy downfall, most historians agree.  However, as we observed the historical evidences of anti-semitism in the museum, it was clear that Hitler was not acting in a vacuum. Part of his demonizing of the Jewish people was shrewd political calculation.  Jews were conjured up as the enemy to distract the populace from the miseries of hyper-inflation in the Weimar Republic, unemployment, and the crippling burden of reparations. And the holocaust would never have occurred without the tacit consent, encouragement, delight and collaboration of hundreds of thousands of people. I found the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. unbearably painful and did not go through the whole thing. One of the documentaries I remember is the gloating faces in the crowd watching Jews clear the rubble after Kristallnacht or Allied bombing raids, and the sheer exhaustion on the faces of the suited victims who had their businesses trashed, and then had to clear the wreckage.


The Pinkasova Synagogue had a chilling list, every inch of wall space covered of the names, dates of birth, and dates of death or transportation to the death camps of 80,000 Jews.  It is the longest epitaph in the world, though of course, it only represents a fraction of those who died in the camps.
Artists, writers, musicians, scientists, academics, psychologists, doctors—what an immeasurable loss of individuals who had lived, and learned and suffered and thought before they could transmit their learning and life experience to the next generation.  What a loss too of ordinary men and women, repositories of a wonderful oral tradition before it could be transmitted to succeeding generations.
Hitler’s Final Solution was to render the Jewish race extinct. He did not succeed in this, of course. Though, he did partially succeed in his diabolical purpose. The vivid, quirky, eccentric, Eastern Jewish life of the ghettos and shetls celebrated in the stories of Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Bashevis Singer or the paintings of Max Chagall no longer exists.  And the world is the poorer for it.

Kafka grew up in the Jewish ghetto, though since his father was upwardly mobile he left it. However, the destruction of the old ghetto to make room for lavish five storey mansions on prime real estate left profound scars on his psyche. As a German speaker among Czechs who hated Germans, as a Jew among German speakers who hated Jews, and as an agnostic among believers, Kafka lived in a constant state of fear, the angst he describes.
The list of writers, playwrights, painters, musicians, academics, and scientists who either perished under or fled from Hitler is immense. What an vast amount of Jewish talent!! The victims of pogroms, fines, forced migrations, extortion of much of their history in Europe, European Jews tended to invest in the intangible–in scholarship, learning, culture, song, family ties, tradition, scripture. One would think that with all this Jewish talent amassed in Israel, we would have seen an unparalled flowering of culture, literature, and the arts. But we haven’t really. 
Perhaps standing outside the party, your nose pressed against the window, is what gives you the clearest view. Being an outsider helps you see the inside most clearly. While the psychological advantages of being an insider are considerable, you no longer have the vantage point of the outsider with which to view the party, the perspective of distance, the artistic tool of defamiliarization which helps you and your reader see things more clearly. 


 My husband Roy’s post-doctoral advisor at Stanford University, a old worldly Jew called Gene Golub told me that before the second World War, the Jewish culture of the shetls and ghettos was described as yiddishkeit, which I understood as an Old Worldly gentleness, sweetness, courtliness, courtesy, even unworldliness. I have sometimes encountered it, and it is charming. After the trauma of the Holocaust, Golub told me, the Jewish psyche and culture changed. Their watchword became “Never Again.”  What a dreadful psychological burden to live under!! The Israelis describe themselves as Sabras, prickly on the outside, sweet on the inside.
Not long after my conversation with Golub, Roy and I took a flight from JFK to Israel, where Roy was speaking at a Conference around the time of Succoth. The plane was full of Orthodox Jews from Brooklyn going to Israel for the festival—black clad, black hatted, ringlets to die for on either side of their faces, tassels, scrolls on their forehead, the works. At the correct time, they all stood up in unison, whipped out their prayer books, and proceeded to chant in unison, with synchronized bowing.
We hit turbulence. They continued unperturbed, though their swaying now owed something to atmospheric disturbance.  They steadfastly ignored all pleas to sit down by the increasingly agitated stewardess. Their chanting and bowing and swaying continued unabated. Finally, she announced over the intercom, “Could any Hebrew speaker here ask these guys to sit down?” knowing full well that they were New York Jews and understood every word she said as well as she did!!
Never again. What an enormous psychological burden to grow up with!! It is just the opposite of the philosophy taught by the Jewish Messiah, Yeshua or Jesus—though where his philosophy led him to in the short run is a matter of historical record.
Interestingly, Gandhi who achieved one of the most amazing Velvet Revolutions in the history of mankind by following the Nazarene’s principles of non-violence (and Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience) counselled the Jews of Europe not to resist Hitler. I wonder what would have happened if they had resisted him even less than they did? 
* *  *

At the end of this day full of thought and emotion, we walked through the Old Jewish Cemetery, Beit Hayyim, House of Life, full of massive gravestones. The same half acre or so has been used as a graveyard for a millennium. It was massively overcrowded as the ghettos were in life, people were buried twelve deep. Pretty much all the ground was taken up by a pell-mell assortment of gravestones, large, small, intricately carved in Hebrew. Masses of them.
Irene asked as we walked home, “Will the Jews ever forgive Hitler? Will the Jews ever forgive the Germans.”
Interestingly, that was the question Elie Wiesel asks in the Sunflower. As I remember it: A German commando, dying in pain, tells Wiesel how the SS crowded a village of Jews into a house, doused it with petrol, set it alight. He sees a man and a woman hold a child out of a window, put their hands over his eyes, and then jump. He shoots. Dying, in pain, he asks for a Jew, any Jew, to ask for forgiveness. Wiesel, seeing him blinded, dying, in immense pain, walks away, silently. The German dies, unforgiven.
Should he have forgiven him? Wiesel asks a panel of thinkers. Most said No.

And what did I answer Irene, aged 11, who asked me if the Jews and Israel would ever forgive the Germans. I said, “Yes. They will. They have to. They cannot go through life bearing the psychological burden of the wrong done to their families. They cannot be Atlas bearing the weight of all that evil on their shoulders. They have to toss that wrong into the dustbin of history. They have to forgive. They need not forget, but they have to forgive. For their own sakes. For the sake of their children. For the sake of their children yet unborn.
Because, in an irony of history I do not understand, those who cannot forgive or forget a wrong done to them WILL REPEAT THAT WRONG. It is an inexorable law. The bullied becomes a bully. The abused become abusers. Those who cannot forget the Nazis may repeat their conduct when they hold the reins of power.
We saw moving exhibitions today of anti-semitism through the millennia. We left convinced that the Jews undoubtedly need a homeland of their own, and why not the homeland promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, a homeland to which they are perhaps physiologically and psychologically adapted? But please, Israel, treat the Palestinian people who also love the land, as you would have wished to be treated in the long centuries of your exile, when by the rivers of the Vlatva, or Don or Danube, you sat down and wept as you remembered Zion, and wistfully said, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

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Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India

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Francesco, Artist of Florence: The Man Who Gave Too Much

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The Story of Dirk Willems

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  • “Rosaries at the Grotto” A Chapter from my newly-published memoir, “Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India.”
  • An Infallible Secret of Joy
  • Thoughts on Writing my Just-published Memoir, & the Prologue to “Rosaries, Reading, Secrets”
  • Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India. My new memoir
  •  On Not Wasting a Desert Experience
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If you'll forgive me for adding to the noise of th If you'll forgive me for adding to the noise of the world on Black Friday, my memoir ,Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India, is on sale on Kindle all over the world for a few days. 
Carolyn Weber (who has written "Surprised by Oxford," an amazing memoir about coming to faith in Oxford https://amzn.to/3XyIftO )  has written a lovely endorsement of my memoir:
"Joining intelligent winsomeness with an engaging style, Anita Mathias writes with keen observation, lively insight and hard earned wisdom about navigating the life of thoughtful faith in a world of cultural complexities. Her story bears witness to how God wastes nothing and redeems all. Her words sing of a spirit strong in courage, compassion and a pervasive dedication to the adventure of life. As a reader, I have been challenged and changed by her beautifully told and powerful story - so will you."
The memoir is available on sale on Amazon.co.uk at https://amzn.to/3u0Ib8o and on Amazon.com at https://amzn.to/3u0IBvu and is reduced on the other Amazon sites too.
Thank you, and please let me know if you read and enjoy it!! #memoir #indianchildhood #india
Second birthday party. Determinedly escaping! So i Second birthday party. Determinedly escaping!
So it’s a beautiful November here in Oxford, and the trees are blazing. We will soon be celebrating our 33rd wedding anniversary…and are hoping for at least 33 more!! 
And here’s a chapter from my memoir of growing up Catholic in India… rosaries at the grotto, potlucks, the Catholic Family Movement, American missionary Jesuits, Mangaloreans, Goans, and food, food food…
https://anitamathias.com/2022/11/07/rosaries-at-the-grotto-a-chapter-from-my-newly-published-memoir-rosaries-reading-steel-a-catholic-childhood-in-india/
Available on Amazon.co.uk https://amzn.to/3Apjt5r and on Amazon.com https://amzn.to/3gcVboa and wherever Amazon sells books, as well as at most online retailers.
#birthdayparty #memoir #jamshedpur #India #rosariesreadingsecrets
Friends, it’s been a while since I blogged, but Friends, it’s been a while since I blogged, but it’s time to resume, and so I have. Here’s a blog on an absolutely infallible secret of joy, https://anitamathias.com/2022/10/28/an-infallible-secret-of-joy/
Jenny Lewis, whose Gilgamesh Retold https://amzn.to/3zsYfCX is an amazing new translation of the epic, has kindly endorsed my memoir. She writes, “With Rosaries, Reading and Secrets, Anita Mathias invites us into a totally absorbing world of past and present marvels. She is a natural and gifted storyteller who weaves history and biography together in a magical mix. Erudite and literary, generously laced with poetic and literary references and Dickensian levels of observation and detail, Rosaries is alive with glowing, vivid details, bringing to life an era and culture that is unforgettable. A beautifully written, important and addictive book.”
I would, of course, be delighted if you read it. Amazon.co.uk https://amzn.to/3gThsr4 and Amazon.com https://amzn.to/3WdCBwk #joy #amwriting #amblogging #icecreamjoy
Wandering around Oxford with my camera, photograph Wandering around Oxford with my camera, photographing ancient colleges! Enjoy.
And just a note that Amazon is offering a temporary discount on my memoir, Rosaries, Reading, Steel https://amzn.to/3UQN28z . It’s £7.41.
Here’s an endorsement from my friend, Francesca Kay, author of the beautiful novel, “An Equal Stillness.” This is a beautifully written account of a childhood, so evocative, so vivid. The textures, colours and, above all, the tastes of a particular world are lyrically but also precisely evoked and there was much in it that brought back very clear memories of my own. Northern India in the 60s, as well as Bandra of course – dust and mercurochrome, Marie biscuits, the chatter of adult voices, the prayers, the fruit trees, dogs…. But, although you rightly celebrate the richness of that world, you weave through this magical remembrance of things past a skein of sadness that makes it haunting too. It’s lovely!” #oxford #beauty
So, I am not going to become a book-bore, I promis So, I am not going to become a book-bore, I promise, but just to let you know that my memoir "Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India," is now available in India in paperback. https://www.amazon.in/s?k=rosaries+reading+secrets&crid=3TLDQASCY0WTH&sprefix=rosaries+r%2Caps%2C72&ref=nb_sb_ss_ts-doa-p_1_10My endorsements say it is evocative, well-written, magical, haunting, and funny, so I'd be thrilled if you bought a copy on any of the Amazon sites. 
Endorsements 
A beautifully written account. Woven through this magical remembrance of things past is a skein of sadness that makes it haunting. Francesca Kay, An Equal Stillness. 
A dazzling vibrant tale of childhood in post-colonial India. Mathias conjures 1960s India and her family in uproarious and heart-breaking detail. Erin Hart, Haunted Ground 
Mathias invites us into a wonderfully absorbing and thrilling world of past and present marvels… generously laced with poetic and literary references and Dickensian levels of observation and detail. A beautifully written, important, and addictive book. Jenny Lewis, Gilgamesh Retold 
Tormented, passionate and often sad, Mathias’s beautiful childhood memoir is immensely readable. Trevor Mostyn, Coming of Age in The Middle East.
A beautifully told and powerful story. Joining intelligent winsomeness with an engaging style, Mathias writes with keen observation, lively insight and hard-earned wisdom. Carolyn Weber, Surprised by Oxford 
A remarkable account. A treasure chest…full of food (always food), books (always books), a family with all its alliances and divisions. A feat of memory and remembrance. Philip Gooden, The Story of English
Anita’s pluck and charm shine through every page of this beautifully crafted, comprehensive and erudite memoir. 
Ray Foulk, Picasso’s Revenge
Mathias’s prose is lively and evocative. An enjoyable and accessible book. Sylvia Vetta, Sculpting the Elephant
Anita Mathias is an is an accomplished writer. Merryn Williams, Six Women Novelists
Writing a memoir awakens fierce memories of the pa Writing a memoir awakens fierce memories of the past. For the past is not dead; it’s not even past, as William Faulkner observed. So what does one do with this undead past? Forgive. Forgive, huh? Forgive. Let it go. Again and again.
Some thoughts on writing a memoir, and the prologue to my memoir
https://anitamathias.com/2022/09/08/thoughts-on-writing-a-memoir-the-prologue-to-rosaries-reading-secrets/ 
#memoir #amwriting #forgiveness https://amzn.to/3B82CDo
Six months ago, Roy and I decided that finishing t Six months ago, Roy and I decided that finishing the memoir was to be like “the treasure in the field,” that Jesus talks about in the Gospels, which you sacrifice everything to buy. (Though of course, he talks about an intimate relationship with God, not finishing a book!!) Anyway, I’ve stayed off social media for months… but I’ve always greatly enjoyed social media (in great moderation) and it’s lovely to be back with the book now done  https://amzn.to/3eoRMRN  So, our family news: Our daughter Zoe is training for ministry as a priest in the Church of England, at Ridley Hall, Cambridge. She is “an ordinand.” In her second year. However, she has recently been one of the 30 ordinands accepted to work on an M.Phil programme (fully funded by the Church of England.) She will be comparing churches which are involved in community organizing with churches which are not, and will trace the impact of community organizing on the faith of congregants.  She’ll be ordained in ’24, God willing.
Irene is in her final year of Medicine at Oxford University; she will be going to Toronto for her elective clinical work experience, and will graduate as a doctor in June ‘23, God willing.
And we had a wonderful family holiday in Ireland in July, though that already feels like a long time ago!
https://anitamathias.com/2022/09/01/rosaries-readi https://anitamathias.com/2022/09/01/rosaries-reading-secrets-a-catholic-childhood-in-india-my-new-memoir/
Friends, some stellar reviews from distinguished writers, and a detailed description here!!
https://amzn.to/3wMiSJ3 Friends, I’ve written a https://amzn.to/3wMiSJ3  Friends, I’ve written a memoir of my turbulent Catholic childhood in India. I would be grateful for your support!
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