The Interview

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In Jamaica, I overhear my boyfriend Isac laughing in the next room. He says a few words I can’t make out. A pause. More laughing.

“What’s so funny?” I ask, when he exits.

“It’s a joke my mom makes.” His voice trails off, indicating that I wouldn’t understand and he doesn’t want to stop to explain it to me. It will break the spell. I let it go.

His mom is very funny, this I know. I often hear her witty observations via Isac’s careful imitation of her voice and mannerisms, but I’ve never met her. She died five years before we got together.

Isac told me that when his mother was dying, he explicitly asked her not to haunt him. “You don’t need to come back and visit me,” he joked and she laughed.

But deep down, I’m guessing he didn’t mean it because when we are in Jamaica, Isac always hears her voice more clearly and it comforts him. It’s not only his mother; he feels many of his ancestors while we are here, ones whose names he doesn’t even know. That was part of the allure of this place. I like to listen to ghosts and it comforts me that he can hear his, too.

I think we have this ghost thing all wrong. We should all strive to be haunted and when it finally happens, lean into it and see where it takes us.

But it’s not always pleasant. For example, my mom tells me she is being haunted.

This is nothing new. My parents’ old house has seen its fair share of ghosts. A friend of theirs, who used to live in an apartment on the main floor, used to complain about waking up to a presence on her chest that made it hard to breathe. A couple before them sensed a young girl, who would play hide and seek behind their shower curtain.

I thought about that ghost girl when my own daughter was very little, and she would walk in circles at my parent’s house, as if following someone else’s lead. I chalked it up to her imagination. Still, nearly every time I am alone in the house, I can hear the undeniable sound of footsteps making their way up the stairs.

My mom was comfortable with her ghosts. She even had a painting commissioned of her house with a ghostly image appearing in one of the corner windows.

But this ghost scares her, so I know something is off. It took a while before she admitted it was a close family friend, who died at a young age, very suddenly, just one year ago.

“Angelo is haunting my mom,” I tell Isac.

“Good,” he replies. We laugh. We both speak to Angelo. We hear his laughter. We know his humour. His friendship with my mother was strained during the last few years of his life. This is his ghostly revenge.

“He should break her window,” Isac jokes. It’s the window she insisted he install several months before he died, one which started a petty disagreement.

It took years for me to acknowledge the spirits around me. I’d catch a glimpse of something in the light. A quick movement in a mirror. A voice in my head just as I am waking up. It’s evolved from a feeling of fear to relief. I’ve lost something precious and then, when I least expect it, it appears and I’ve found it again. I would wish that joy on everyone.

“My mom would have loved you,” Isac told me once, out of the blue. I’m not sure if he heard her voice, or she his, but I can tell he’s channeling her. “But not your cooking. Definitely not your cooking.”

Read some of my other essays:

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(Spoiler alert! I will be revealing aspects of the plot in the following post.)

What Lena Dunham's "Treasure" gets right -- and wrong -- about Jewish heritage trips.

Growing up, my dad had this quirky saying that I was sure carried more meaning in its original Slovak than it did in his English translation. It went something like this:

“When they give, you take. When they beat, you run.”

I know, I know, but the jarring syntax and the elusive “they” aside, I understood the crude meaning of the phrase to be: know when someone is hurting you and act accordingly. Also, know when someone wants to treat you well and learn how to accept those gifts graciously. As a child that seemed absurd; of course you run if someone is trying to hurt you. I always took any gift that was offered to me.

As an adult, I realize that it’s not that easy.

That motto may as well have been the underlying theme for Treasure, a new film featuring Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry about a father and daughter (or daughter and father if you watch the film) who return to Poland on a heritage trip.

The trip has been meticulously planned by Ruth (Dunham’s character), a 36-year old journalist from New York who is still reeling from her mother’s death a year earlier and who mysteriously divorced her husband not long ago. We learn early on that both of Ruth’s parents were Holocaust survivors imprisoned in the Lodz ghetto before being deported to Auschwitz. While the couple survived, their family members did not.

Ruth’s father, Edek (played by Stephen Fry) has no interest in returning to Poland but insists on tagging along in order to watch over his daughter and only surviving family member. Edek spent a lifetime trying to forget about war, telling Ruth almost nothing, and takes this trip as an opportunity to further sabotage her research.

Phew. I think I got the basics.

Now what did they get right?

As a daughter of an Eastern European father born during the war, Stephen Fry’s character seems bang on — from the laissez-fair attitude towards clothes, to speaking with strangers, to being completely indifferent to certain social norms (he missed his plane because he wanted McDonald’s.) Also, many survivors never wanted to talk about their stories to their children, downplaying the severity while recreating a new existence for themselves outside of Europe. That internalized amnesia, of course, leads to problems, which the film accurately tackles, including:

* A strained father-daughter relationship from years of not opening up.

* For children, the internalized fear knowing something terrible happened but not able to put a finger on it, leading to distrust of partners, or really any outsider.

* The need to be perfect to make up for the loss, which can lead to things like eating disorders, etc.

* The lack of knowledge can also lead to an obsessive curiosity that some find macabre (uh, welcome to my world.)

What the film got wrong:

Where to start! As a filmgoer who normally starts crying during the previews and commercials and rarely stops until the final credits (I once cried through an entire oatmeal commercial) this father-daughter road trip to examine their family’s genocide really struggled to hit even a minor emotional note.

Ruth comes across as petulant and spoiled. As my friend who watched the film with me observed, does Ruthie need to be so fucked up? (My words not hers.) She has an eating disorder, she smokes, she is self-righteous, she has problems keeping relationships, she appears to have no insight into her father’s psychological state. In an early scene, she can’t understand why her father doesn’t want to get on a train. In Poland. If this is supposed to be a wink-wink nod-nod to the audience being smarter than this, it’s nauseatingly obvious.

When we discover that Ruth self-harms in the form of tattooing herself at night to produce her father’s Auschwitz tattoo, it almost put me over the edge. I couldn’t help but think of Girls, when Dunham’s character pierced her eardrum with a Q-Tip. It was just too much. She lives in NYC — surely she can find a good tattoo artist to do this for her, if she weren’t so messed up.

(NB: If you or anyone you know has a Holocaust remembrance tattoo, please contact me. I’m endlessly fascinated, despite being grossed up by this scene)

Ruth (Ruthie to her dad) is just generally unlikeable. She yells at the locals for calling Auschwitz a museum rather than a death camp not once but twice. She yells at strangers in an elevator for laughing in Polish. She storms off when she realizes her dad has hooked up with one of the two women they befriended (I’m sorry, but this seemed so bizarre. What 36-year old woman who grew up with an Eastern European father that easily discusses sex and who is comfortable with his body would be shocked to know her dad still wants to do it.) We want to see Ruth grow emotionally … but she never really does.

Ultimately, the film lacks nuance. Ruth never broaches the topic of Polish culpability. That was a hot topic in the 90s, when the war was reframed as only a German-instigated problem. Poland continues to rewrite history and has even made it a crime to accuse the country of involvement. When I visited Auschwitz in the 90s, one of the first things that blew mind was how close the town was to death camp.

(You can read my piece on my visit here or below.)

The film tied up (too neatly) in the end with her father revealing the “treasure” of papers that will prove ownership of their assets stolen in the war. I understand the filmmakers were suggesting a double-entendre, that the treasure is their father-daughter relationship, that they are now talking about what happened to Edek during the war, that Ruth now knows about her lost family members. But it’s really rushed and frankly Ruth doesn’t come across as evolved enough to appreciate this deeper treasure.

“Now you can go back and claim what was lost,” Edek tells Ruth and this really hits a sour note for me. It presents as more vengeful against the Polish family who overcharged them for their family heirlooms than anything else. Retribution — even a hint of it — isn’t a good look. It also misses the point that there is no quick fix when looking back, and even fighting for a decrepit building (which I imagine is no easy feat to reclaim) will not return Edek’s family.

Best Moment:

Despite what I think was a missed opportunity with this film, I’m so glad they made it. Their mistake was trying to pander to a broader audience. Larger chunks of this film should have been in Polish with no transcription, so that the audience can feel as isolated as Ruth. The ending should not have been so tidy (here is a box of proof that we own this factory and apartment buildings and now they can be all yours!)

However, there is one scene that will stick with me for a while. During Ruth’s first night in Poland, she falls into a fitful sleep. We watch as a bug lands on her arm. Then a second. Then a third, which she desperately tries to swat away. Frantic, they are everywhere and suddenly she can’t seem to smack them fast enough. They are bed bugs, the viewer assumes. Except when she turns on the light, nothing is there. Not even the remnants of the dead. They are all gone.

That my friends, is the real essence of what this film should be.

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Suffering from Nostalgia

Can you experience PTSD from writing a memoir? At what point does looking back switch from personal growth to a damaging obsession?

The other day I woke up to the sound of my dogs barking uncontrollably. Usually only the tiny Pomeranian makes a peep; my aging Black Lab rarely likes to leave his kennel unless food is involved. My boyfriend Isac went to investigate and discovered a homeless man resting on our porch. He offered him food and drink before suggesting he move on.

“The guy from the laundry room is back,” he told me when I inquired. This laundry room gentleman likes to sleep in the laundry room in the apartment building next door. Last time we saw him was a couple months ago, when the police took him away after a confrontation with a tenant.

“Why do you think he keeps coming back here?” I asked Isac. In his previous career Isac was a housing worker and he possesses an innate sixth sense about people.

“Something in this neighbourhood must be familiar. I’ve seen it before — when people feel lost, they want to come home.”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my desire to return home in my writing. I’ve always been predisposed to looking back, against my family’s wishes. I think of how many times in my life I’ve started and stopped writing about my family’s history, after a relative chastised me for “dwelling on the past,” and “not moving on.”

In the Orthodox Hebrew schools of my youth, we learned early on about Lot’s wife, an unnamed figure who, when escaping Sodom and Gomorrah had the audacity to look back and stare at its destruction. The story captivated me for years since what could be more human than looking back at a tragedy? I always related to that need — to explore what transpired even if it hurts, to understand where we came from even when others want to look away.

I’ve come to think of personal history as a wound. You can only bandage it for so long before it festers. At some point, you need to air it out. So you go back, and recall the sounds and smells that took place years ago. It sounds enticing but it brings with it all those long-buried emotions. Then, when you are out of the moment, you need to reflect on what it all means. It turns out, time travelling is really exhausting.

Yet we keep going back and pressing on that wound again and again just to see if it’s healed. Nope, not yet. Let’s poke it one more time. Ouch. Still hurts.

So, it intrigued me when I recently discovered that nostalgia was once considered a mental disorder. The context was a New York Times’ story about a newly re-surfaced slave narrative by John Swanson Jacobs, brother of Harriet Jacobs. The narrative was discovered by Jonathan D.S. Schroeder, a scholar investigating turning his Ph.D thesis on nostalgia into a book. He came across a reference Harriet Jacobs made about her son, who like her brother John, made his way to Australia, and later died by suicide. On death certificates, the cause of death in cases of suicide was sometimes listed at “nostalgia.”

Nostalgia, as a medical condition, was coined by a Swiss medical student, Johannes Hofer in 1688. Hofer observed that people living far from home, like soldiers, sometimes experience a psychological burden so oppressive they died as a result. The word is derived from the Greek — nostos meaning returning to your native area and algos — for grief or longing.

It was (is?) a devastating disease, with doctors at the time observing that it could lead to death by suicide, neglect or a “dampened immune system brought on by depression [that] sometimes left people more susceptible to fatal illnesses.” The only cure, it appears, was to return to where you came from. Ultimately, that wasn’t an option for the soldiers and slaves afflicted with the disease.

Back in the days when it was a devastating disease, some referred to nostalgia as “hypochondria of the heart.” I love that term. To me it suggests the heart, rather than the brain, is conjuring the pain up. The longing is an illusion. Home was never really the way we remember it. The good old days, were only ever good for some and according to a new data, our age plays a bigger role in determining when things “were good” more than anything else. It turns out 11 is the magical age, when families seem tightly knit, societies appear just and communities safe and close.

Maybe the “laundry room man” (as I have come to think of him) lived in this neighborhood when he was a pre-teen. If so, I feel his pain. I have for years resisted returning “home” to the apartment building where I lived with my grandmother. I often dream of the off-limits shared balcony space I used to sneak onto to write and smoke cigarettes as a young teen. It’s been 25 years since my last cigarette but even today, I would relish the idea of hopping that fence one more time with my pen and notepad and lighting up, hoping to recapture some of that magic.

By the Victorian era, the malady of nostalgia was often lumped in with melancholia, a common justification for institutionalization in an asylum. Only later in the 20th century, did the definition change to something more positive. But I still wonder, when does the feel-good sense of nostalgia turn sour? When does looking back become problematic? How do you turn back when the home you are nostalgic for no longer exists, or rather never did?

“Today, we no longer hope for a cure [for nostalgia.] The ‘passing ailment’ has turned into ‘the incurable modern condition…The twentieth century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia,” wrote Svetlana Boym, author of The Future of Nostalgia.

That leaves me with nothing to do but to keep pressing that open wound, which I do in this book I’m writing. Hold on a second while I poke it one more time.

I wonder if it’s healed yet.

Want to indulge my nostalgia? Read these posts:

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When Claudine Gay resigned as president of Harvard University, I realize I had lost my way.

It’s a strange reaction to have, considering I have zero connection to Harvard. Before her remarks at the congressional testimony, I doubt I would have been able to tell you who she was. Like other liberals (and Jews), I carefully watched her milquetoast reply to Rep. Elise M. Stefanik’s gotcha line of questioning — and cringed. I wanted to get on board that the universities-are-a-hotbed-of-antisemitic-propaganda narrative. But part of me couldn’t jump on the bandwagon and now I know why.

Millions of words have been spilled since Gay resigned — in the end for plagiarism, not because of her response to antisemitism. But who are we kidding? In the years to come, all everyone will remember is the line, “it depends on the context.”

I hate to admit it, but the more that line is used as a punchline to an unfunny joke, the more I warm up to it. Don’t get me wrong: I’m certainly not calling for a genocide against myself and my own people but context, is well, context.

It keeps me up at night imagining her foes, the Christopher Rufos and the Bill Ackmans and of course, the Stefaniks, wink-winking to each other in the background that they hit their target, giving them the energy and moral authority to keep going. They pushed out the first Black president of Harvard, a child of Haitian immigrants, a woman who as dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, pushed anti-racism initiatives and increased diversity — who will now, in some people’s eyes go down in history as a promoter of antisemitism.

Etan Nechin captured this sentiment beautifully in wake of Gay’s resignation in a piece for Ha’aretz.

This tactic weaponized genuine concerns for Jewish safety in wake of the Israel-Hamas war and some campus groups' reaction to it, to attack elite liberal institutions like Harvard. It was part of concerted efforts to undermine teaching for example, critical race theory (CRT) and promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives to artificially enflame the culture war conservatives have been waging against liberal America for years.

Have no doubt: this maneuver is less about safeguarding Jewish safety and combating hate and more about catering to a right-wing base.

He continues:

those who pushed for Gay's dismissal do not care about the safety of Jewish students or they are indifferent to Jewish safety, black and brown advancement, or the principles of free speech and social justice.

On the contrary, they—many of them Ivy League graduates from a past era —seek to turn back time so that a black woman as such a university president remains an unfulfilled aspiration, students protesting for Palestine are silenced, and Jews are coerced into aligning with their manufactured culture wars or risk being ostracized from their community.

Like Nechin said, these defenders of Jews, the Ackmans and Stefaniks, and others — they are not my friends. The question I’m struggling with now is: who are?

The war between Israel and Gaza has created some strange bedfellows, especially for liberal Jews like me. Early on, I wrote about feeling alienated from my progressive roots. Suddenly, language could injure so long as it was directed at Jews. Suddenly victims of sexual assault were questioned, but only when it happened to Jews.

Read: “Folks, Who are You Pretending to Be.”

That was over 100 days ago, and I won’t say that I’m not still angry and scared but I am looking at what comes next. There is a lot at risk: 132 hostages are still remaining, the already astronomical death toll in Gaza continues to climb, more journalists are being killed than ever before, Israel has been accused of genocide in the Hague and frankly the viability of the future of the State of Israel is in question.

But that’s not all. What happens next, to progressives, to academics, to intellectuals and to Jews when this war is over might push us down an even worse path.

I’m reminded briefly of The Women’s March, the organization, which after Trump’s inauguration, inspired rallies across the globe, with many donning the signature “pussy hats.” Not long after its inception, the organization was rocked by claims of antisemitism. What a distraction, I thought to myself at the time. Why can’t we put this aside when we have so many bigger issues to tackle. Don’t let them divide us.

I’ll say it out loud this time. We can’t let them divide us. The foes of Claudine Gay are not my friends, even if they claim to be concerned about antisemitism. I don’t want to wake up in bed next to them but rather with people asking the right questions — even if they are not uttered perfectly, even if they make me slightly uncomfortable — so long as the intention is to improve all our rights.

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In episode two of Still a Classic, Leah and Susan talk about the 1989 novel The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, which follows Stevens, a head butler with a long record of service at Darlington Hall, an English estate. It won the Booker Prize, was made into an acclaimed 1993 film, and was cited when Ishiguro went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017.

Things we discussed:

* The role of the unreliable narrator.

* What is the meaning of duty, especially when it comes to your employer? (Stevens struggles to accept that Lord Darlington was a Nazi sympathizer.)

* Did The Remains of the Day inspire characters in Downton Abbey? You be the judge.

* The subject matter is resolutely antiquated; the narration is unbendingly formal and the plot unfolds very, very slowly. More than three decades after publication, is The Remains of the Day still a classic?

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In Junkyard Girl, Carlyn Montes De Oca describes how she needed to rebuild her identity at 57 after learning that she was adopted. Not only did her entire family (over 60 first cousins and many more second cousins, spouses, etc!) know about it, even childhood friends and acquaintances did. The discovery led to meeting her biological sister and mother, all the while grappled with the secret her parents thought important enough to take to their graves.

The memoir is not only an adoption tale, but it tackles the issues of immigration, poverty, class structure as well as the impact of criminalizing abortion. You won’t want to miss this episode.

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Howard Lovy is a lifelong journalist, writer and developmental editor, who works with non-fiction writers and memoirists to bring out their story. “Everyone has a book in them,” explains Lovy.

In terms of non-fiction Jewish topics, Lovy recalls how in the 2000s, there was talk about Jewish identity in light of declining antisemitism. Now, with the rise again, he observes that many Jewish non-fiction writers consider the Jewish community woefully unprepared.

You can follow his Substack, Emet-Truth here.

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Also in this episode, Esoterica’s Susan Catto and Leah Eichler quiz Terry Fallis on the feminism in his books, how he captures the quintessentially Canadian ethos and if his engineering background helped with his writing structure. Spoiler alert: minor developments in Operation Angus are discussed if you have yet to read the book.

You can subscribe to Terry’s substack here.

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Joseph Kertes  was born in Hungary but escaped with his family to Canada after the revolution of 1956. He studied English at York University and the University of Toronto, where he was encouraged in his writing by Irving Layton and Marshall McLuhan.

His novel, Gratitude, won a Canadian National Jewish Book Award and the U.S. National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. Kertes has also been a finalist for a National Magazine Award and the CBC Literary Award. His latest novel, The Afterlife of Stars, has been described by Anne Michaels as “unforgettable and deeply moving,” and by Miriam Toews as a “masterpiece.” 

Get full access to Leah Eichler at esotericamagazine.substack.com/subscribe

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