Exile & Austerity, Montreal, Night 86
I’m in voluntary exile this summer. In so many small ways, though, my exile can be traced to my own brokenness, a “personal” narrative that is also constructed by the contemporary social conditions, which in turn are shaped by the “catastrophe” of history. Thus I experience a twist on another Améry essay, ”The Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew”: the necessity and impossibility of being at home in this world.
Exile & Austerity, Montreal, Night 86
by Cindy Milstein
Outside the Circle
July 18, 2012
I’ve been thinking a lot lately of home, history, and exile, and the intertwining legacies between them. Of the wreckage.
I’m in voluntary exile this summer. In so many small ways, though, my exile can be traced to my own brokenness, a “personal” narrative that is also constructed by the contemporary social conditions, which in turn are shaped by the “catastrophe” of history. Thus I experience a twist on another Améry essay, ”The Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew”: the necessity and impossibility of being at home in this world.
His essay speaks volumes to me, a godless Jew, in the wreckage of the Holocaust (which Améry survived and didn’t survive) and the state of Israel. As an assimilated Jew prior to the Shoah, Améry had no relationship to Judaism and didn’t identify with being Jewish; with the onset of National Socialism, he couldn’t avoid being Jewish, or rather, it picked him out, tortured him, and put him in a concentration camp; after the Holocaust, he conjectures, it’s both necessary to embrace our histories and impossible to do so. “With Jews as Jews I share practically nothing: no language and no cultural tradition . . . for me, being a Jew means feeling the tragedy of yesterday as an inner oppression. On my left forearm I bear the Auschwitz number; it reads more briefly than . . . the Talmud and yet provides more thorough information.” Hence his further query, in another essay in his collection At the Mind’s Limits, “How much home does a person need?” after he and millions of othered Others — Jews, Roma, queers, those considered mentally or physically impaired, and more — were forcibly exiled, and if not annihilated physically, then annihilated culturally, emotionally, materially. Their communities and worlds, often even a memory of them, were forever gone.
