This Is Where We Hide The Jews

October 19th, 2023

I have a joke I always tell when showing people the renovation of our barn. I point behind the false wall we made and say, “And this is where we hide the Jews.” It’s a kind of compulsion, really—I have to tell it, especially to my German friends.

There’s another one— my sister’s favorite in the world. It’s a spin on the well-trodden Israeli joke, What’s worse than taking a bite from an apple and finding a worm? Finding half a worm. And the spin: What’s worse than taking a bite from an apple and finding half a worm? Ha-Shoah!

These are terrible, terrible jokes. But they keep me—and my kin—sane. If you battle any kind of anxiety—let alone the epigenetic, intergenerational kind, as in this shit happened to my family in the not-so-distant past—you know that getting through the day is a never-ending exercise in reality-checking.

You live in a cabin in the woods in the north of Portugal, but when the fireworks, or a plane, or a motorbike go off, you look at your husband to see if he thinks the sky is falling. You don’t want to scare the kids, so you regulate your breathing—like you always do—and try to read his body language, gauge his level of ease. But sometimes you need him to say it: “The sky is not falling.”

Sometimes you need him to say it several times. Because you are Chicken Little, and for you the sky is always falling—and every second of every day is an exercise in convincing yourself that it is, in fact, not. That is how you continue breathing, how you tell yourself it is okay to bring children into this world (Spoiler: it’s not), how you manage to sleep at night (Spoiler: you can’t).

The Jews, and especially the Israelis, are notorious for their dark humor. But even an idiot can tell those aren’t jokes. They are reality checks. They are how we stay calm for the kids and regulate our breathing and decide whether it’s time to hide behind the wall—or whether it’s still a joke.

Spoiler: It’s not a joke.

 

This Is How You Do It Again

October 21, 2023

When my father was dying, I took up the radical practice of dancing in bus stations and hospitals. On the night of his funeral, I went dancing. I had hoped it would allow me the catharsis I so sorely needed. It did not.

The kind of dance I practice is a stillness that makes space for the body to speak. The body did not want to speak. Not to put too fine a point on it—it wanted, simply, to die. So instead, I let the beat speak to the body. The beat said: This is how you put one foot in front of the other. This is how you do it again. And again. The beat said: I know you don’t want to—but do it, nonetheless.

My father died in April, six days before my birthday, in a month that is a smorgasbord of Israeli memorials to our fights and flights: from Pharaoh, from the Nazis, with all of our current neighbors. It’s hard not to grow cynical from years of force-fed memorials, the expectation to look solemn for minutes of silence three times a year, to shed a tear to sad songs on the radio—from the constant admonition to “Remember, and never forget.” You grow so jaded that you use “Ha-Shoah!” as a running punchline for every joke, any joke. It’s so poignant you can get laughs with it just on its own. “Ha-Sho-Ah!” Even my second-generation Holocaust friends laugh.

So that’s how I found myself, mid-April 2023, in the harsh light of a Tel-Aviv supermarket, staring at the memorial candle aisle—completely frozen by orphan’s remorse. So many words for snow in Inuktitut, so many candles for the Israelis in April. I was trying to decide how many candles to buy, the kind that burn for a whole day. After all, I had two deathdays and two birthdays to mark each year, and lived in a country that didn’t fetishize death. Plus, I knew, deep in my belly—perhaps in my bellybutton—that there was a secret number of candles that would bring my parents back.

I put twenty in the cart, and then decided that was foolish and kept twelve. I figured I’d be back to buy more within three years. I figured there would still be somewhere to come back to. When I got to the checkout, the Arab-Israeli cashier counted my candles and said, “You know, there’s a sale. You should get eight more.” “Oh, no, it’s okay,” I replied, suddenly very self-conscious about my not-so-secret trove of grief. “I just have many dead. From natural causes. Not from war! Shukran. Ahem.”

I didn’t say, “From epigenetic disease, from intergenerational trauma, from being third generation to the Holocaust and orphaned pioneers.”

My sister keeps asking if there’s a German compound word for the feeling of both gratitude that your parents didn’t live to see something that would have broken their hearts, and a deep ache for their comfort and context. And I add: the posthumous, vicarious relief of those same parents—and all your ancestors, the same ones who’d be horrified that you chose to return to Europe—that you are, somehow, for now, safe.

Like all of my friends and family, I have spent the last two weeks glued to the screen, screaming. Others cry. And we are the lucky ones. Incredibly, unbelievably lucky. We tell each other it’s important to practice self-care. Touch a tree! Sniff your child! But we cannot leave the screen. People are wrong on the Internet, everywhere. And they live among us. Or, more accurately, we live among them. Perhaps not for long. That appears to be the literal writing on the wall.

We try to convince each other to look away, even for a little. We say stuff like, “Going crazy won’t help anyone.” We don’t believe it, even as we say it. Because what is there left to do but go crazy, in the face of this madness. Crazy is the new sane. We read harrowing testimonies, we watch videos we can never again unsee—because we feel that someone should be looking. Because we know we were incredibly, unbelievably lucky, and the least we can do is bear witness. Because somehow our favorite joke is no longer so funny. Because nothing is more sobering than the realization that the world cannot forget what it refuses to even see.

Anyway, I lit one of those candles today. We had a dance, our monthly women’s dance. I pushed the furniture aside, and my son’s sprawling Lego city, and my children out of our little cabin in the forests of northern Portugal. The body did not want to speak, it wanted to die. But the beat told it: This is how you put one foot in front of the other. This is how you do it again. And again.

I lit it for all of the dead and dying and kidnapped and survivors and all of their loved ones, all of those fearing for their lives, for the lives of their children, all of those grieving without being able to mourn, all of us unseen in our suffering, all of us afraid we are alone. I lit it for all those who resonate with my soul’s tuning fork, on this side or that.

I danced for us, too, because that is one of the only things I really know how to do. Or rather, that is one of the only things I know how to do that is real. That tunes into the universe’s tuning fork, the one that hums to us all.

 

Tal Shiran writes at the threshold of love and loss, where language becomes alchemy. Her lyrical, time-bending work blends memoir, meditation, and prayer. She lives with her family on a small homestead in Northern Portugal. Her ongoing exploration unfolds at: www.alloftheworlds.com.