Why is Every Jew Writing a Book Like This?

Passover reminds me of my answer to this question, which I get a lot.

The most frequent question I get about my book is “Why is every Jew writing a book like this?” I get it mostly from other Jews, many of whom are or have written a book like this, a book about their family history. And while I expect every writer has their own reasons, I also think we share a common one: we are writing books like this to reclaim a history that is largely lost to us unless we go and look for it, and the only way we get to spend the time and energy to do that—either because our jobs demand it, or because otherwise we feel like we aren’t being “productive”—is to have something tangible to share when we’re done.

The thought that began this project, in its current form, was an awareness sparked by Passover. I was at a Seder, and I remember thinking, “It’s so weird that my knowledge of my family history ends at the end of the story we are telling tonight, and doesn’t begin again until we get to my grandfather’s generation.” And it was weird, but it was also true. When I asked where we’d come from, the answer was always “Lithuania or Latvia, somewhere like that.” Nobody talked about the years A.I. and his brothers spent pack peddling, and all the stories from both Europe and the early days in the US were lost. My family, and maybe yours, were so fervently American, so very grateful to be here where Jews were citizens of equal standing, that they didn’t share or preserve that history. Even though I’ve seen the town we came from now, and cousins Joanie and Ronald have both done the hard work of uncovering documentary evidence of earliest years here, I will never know what life was like for that first generation beyond what I can imagine, and I will never know what it was like before they left Lithuania, except in the ways it was like the lives of all other Jews living in small, rural towns there.

What’s left of the shul in Linkuva May 15, 2022

I think that would be a loss even if we were a family of, say, Methodists, because family stories are interesting, at least to those in the family. But I think it’s a different sort of loss for Jews, who need to know our histories to understand what’s happening when, as it is at this moment, antisemitism again becomes a daily force. Without that history, we are left to the mercy of the stories other people tell about us, and those stories are sometimes horrific.

Yesterday, at the urging of

Erika Dreifus

, I read the story “From/To” by David Bezmozgis in the latest issue of the New Yorker. In telling the story of a man whose mother, born in Russia, has just died, and whose daughter is at first reluctant to leave her university’s encampment to come to the shiva, he makes clear in a way I haven’t yet been able to why these stories matter so much. They are the context of our lives, and if we don’t know them, that means that we can’t situate ourselves.

In an interview about the story, Bezmozgis says,

Inchoately, I had been seeking a way to write about what life had come to feel like for me and for most Jews I know since October 7, 2023. Last July, the premise came to me very vividly, and I knew immediately that I would need to write it: a grandmother dies and a granddaughter who has been living in an encampment at her university must come home. I felt that only a story that dealt with life and death could address the gravity of the moment. It also needed to have a dispute between generations, something that has particularly plagued Jewish families—not for the first time, but that’s little comfort. I had published an op-ed piece not long after the war started but, even as I tried to be ecumenical, it was still too partial. Fiction affords a chance to dramatize the full complexity of a situation and immerse a reader in a way that an essay or an op-ed cannot.

As much as I hate to give that ground to fiction, he’s right. It’s impossible to explain this moment without both explaining the moments that came before it and finding some way to situate the person to whom your explaining in the lived experience of it.

So, as you prepare for the Seder, I have two humble suggestions. First, read “From/To”. Then, at the table, after you’ve read the Haggadah, talk about your own family’s story, the one that occurred between Egypt and wherever you live now. We have to know ourselves if we are to resist the stories others tell about us, and now—as always—we must resist those stories.

Chag Pesach Sameach.

Next year in Jerusalem.