7: From Bangkok, after Budapest, Cluj-Napoca, and Bucharest (or "So long, Europe!")
Beloved friends,
I came to Europe in part to look for roots. But the nourishing ground I sought is dark with frozen blood; littered with skeletal corpses, thin and discolored like gnarled ancient trees; the sky a dull, lifeless grey. Especially this last week, in which I was most dedicated to my search for family ties, I walked about feeling tired and heavy, as if I carried with me a leaden cloud. (To be fair, the clouds were not just on me — until my plane rose above the fog in Budapest, it had been weeks since I had seen the sky, let alone the sun.) I didn’t really understand. I thought I could go and see the memorials to the dead and the museums of sorrow and the empty synagogues proscribed from prayer and happily skip on with my day. I thought I’d spend the evenings making new friends, drinking a beer or two, seeing “normal” things. But the darkness exacts a toll, and I lost my FastPass.
I had planned on something like this facile approach: see the sights, hear the stories, shove them under the emotional rug. But this intergenerational trauma demands vivid acknowledgment. I dream of boxcars filled with children’s frozen bodies; of skeletons forced to carry stones back and forth and back again; of zombies ambling behind me, clamoring for blood.. I watch in meditation as civilization is coerced into the dreadful task of industrialized dehumanization and destruction. I wonder how it happened. I wonder what I would have done. I examine my own moral failings: moments of fear and cowardice, of violence, of a heart unmoved in the face of human suffering. Or worse, of a heart that feels sorrow and hands that remain stubbornly by my side.
My shoulder hurts, a piercing blade of ice where the shoulder girdle meets the head of the humerus. I know this pain. It is the pain of a heart afraid to feel, afraid that the grief will wash everything away and leave only the embrace of Arctic waters in the long night of winter. It terrifies me, this thought. Sadness in general frightens me, and grief of this magnitude is petrifying. I will contain it. Even if I know that this only causes more pain.
And there is also this: I had chosen to read Sophie’s Choice, William Styron’s moving, brutal narrative of a Polish survivor of Auschwitz (apparently also an award-winning film). I wanted to experience the sorrow and the darkness through the well-crafted eyes of another. The words wormed into my head, wedging themselves like dark shadows somewhere between my eyes and my brain, casting a smoky pall the blueish tinge of burning flesh on the world before me… I am reminded of a small episode, memorable and instructive: I had arrived at New York’s International Airport from vacations in Brazil, heading back to New Haven for another semester of college. Placing my hand on my pocket, I did not feel my wallet. My body became all tension and I started to hyperventilate, edging closer and closer toward panic. Then I listened to the music. “Oh,” I thought, with a slow buildup of understanding, “This might have something to do with it.” I removed Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8 from my ears, regained my composure, and calmly opened my luggage to find exactly what I had been looking for.
This quartet is incredibly dark: It carries within it melodies of past suffering and persecution and also a haunting premonition of coming despair. In that moment, without my conscious awareness, the music had taken over my emotional state, coloring my world with its own stormy hues. Standing in the arrivals hall, luggage in hand with a train to catch, this experience was unwelcome. But sitting in a concert hall, or on a couch, or lying in bed, the experience can be sublime. It can be a surrender to an emotion that is buried within, a release of that which has long been hiding under the rug. There is a time for sorrow. There is a time for grieving.
And so I cried. Walking back from dinner at a nice little raw vegan restaurant in Cluj-Napoca, crossing over a canal, I was smacked with the weight of this history and my eyes welled with tears. I cried, thinking of my grandfather, who was from here, of my grandmother, who hid so far away, of so many faceless, nameless Jews. The next day, I spent the morning looking at the surviving burial records of Cluj, formerly known as Kolozsvar (Hungarian), searching for lost relatives. I found no Kerns. There were some Karns and Korns, who might be different spellings for the same name, and a Stern that looked so close, and many, many Rozas, whose names in cursive looked like Rafa and always gave me pause. And yet none of these encounters had the weight of recognition. I felt no closer to knowing anything about my family from finding a book filled with names of might-have-beens, names with no stories. These names would reveal no secrets. I closed the book and walked. I went to the town’s remaining synagogue, and there I cried again. I thought, “Ah! Maybe my grandfather came here. Ah! Look how pretty it is. Ah! These signs commemorate the death of the Jews. They are so little…” Behind the synagogue is a music school. I cried. Thinking of Sophie, and of the architectural power in Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante, and of Bach’s Passion, I thought: “It could only be. Music will redeem us. Art will save us.”
And I began to let go. The next day, I finished the book. In its last pages, Styron asks a haunting question, and a powerful, profoundly Jewish response. “The query: Tell me, at Auschwitz, where was God? The answer: Where was man?”
“Here!” I wanted to say, despite my acknowledged moral shortcomings. “Hineni”, as the prophets and the forefathers said: “I am here!” I turned to the world around me, looking around with fresh eyes and a hunger for life. And so I began to see it again. In the aestheticized ruins of Bucharest and the ruin pubs of Budapest (retroactively), I saw life born again from the depths of destruction. And it was Hanukkah and I lit a candle at the synagogue in Bucharest, where they commemorated 400,000 deported Jews and they gave me a delicious donut, and in the darkness I began to see light.
And now, for something completely different, I am in blue-skied, sweltering Bangkok with my family. More on that next time.
Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas (belatedly), and much, much love,
Rafa
