On Charlottesville

Let me put it like this: I am neither shocked nor surprised that someone out there who never met me wants me dead. Maybe it's being Jewish. Maybe it's being foreign. Maybe it's growing up in Moldova and waking up one morning to the nationalists marching right outside screaming slogans that Jews and Russians should go home. What home? What do you mean? I have been born here, I grew up here, my father grew up here, where exactly is this home that I'm supposed to go to?

I have seen this hatred. It's the pure evil. It's the hatred of Palestinians who run and stab Israelis. They do not care that some of their victims are fellow Arabs, Druze, Christians, maybe even other Palestinians. What else but pure hatred would cause one to run up to a person to stab them?!

My friends are upset by the silence of fellow Americans. Silence is deafening, they say. They are very uncomfortable. They cannot believe that this is happening here, now, in 2017, on American soil. Me? I can believe it. It is evil. It is always here. I have never been able to get comfortable enough to believe that I belong, that I can pass as someone other than a Jewish woman who wears conspicuous clothing and speaks with an accent. I am "the other".

After being made to feel distinctively uncomfortable in my land of birth, I am not kidding myself. America was supposed to be different. But is it? I think that handwringing is over the fact that America turned out to be just like the rest of the world.

Growing up, the butt of the Russian jokes were Germans. Think: we were the third post-WWII generation, but the jokes about "the other" were about the Germans. But those same Germans are the ones that killed my great-grandmother. I have a hard time meeting Germans now. I know it's prejudice. but, deep down, I wonder: was it your distant relative who pulled that fateful trigger in Zaporojie in '41? What did he say when he came back home from war? Did he talk about it? Did he think about it? Why would he want her dead? Many years and many generations have passed. What would it take for you, the person conversing with me, to want me dead?

It's an uncomfortable feeling to walk around with. It is borderline paranoia. But I know that these things can happen. Even now. Even here. Even in 2017