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experiences changes have taken place. I remember a youth leader in my
hometown who was so much to the right and so antagonistic to anything
Jewish that in 1932 he published an advertisement in the local newspapers
publicly dissociating himself from all things Jewish. He went to Latin
America, made a small fortune as a mining engineer, and then disappeared
from view, but as his recently published recollections show, he has become
very much a man of the left and virulently anti-American. The problems
of the Quechua and Aymara are definitely closer to his heart than those of
his ancestors. But I also remember a friend whose sympathies were with
the extreme left, who went to a Latin American country, and whose
involvement with the culture of that country was so deep and his contri–
bution in this respect so important that his picture can now be found on
the stamps of his adopted country. Another became deeply involved in the
culture of the Ibo in Nigeria, so much so that they made him a honorary
chieftain in the end; and yet another was last heard to be in a Buddhist
monastery in Sri Lanka-all of which shows that generalizations are diffi–
cult, and that roots could be grown even in places which did not seem very
propi tious.
There has been a single-minded preoccupation with the Holocaust
among some, but also the opposite: the attempt to push it aside--not of
course to deny it, but to return perhaps a little too hastily to normalcy, or
perhaps to dissociate one's own fate and emotions from that of the group
which was persecuted. This can be found in some of the memoirs which
stress that the authors have not visited Holocaust museums or been preoc–
cupied with the subject in any other way; it can be found even in books of
history. Thus in a history of our age entitled
Age
if
Extremes
(Eric
Hobsbawm) , the reader will look in vain for an entry about the Holocaust,
even though there are some perfunctory remarks about the persecution of
Jews. There could be a number of reasons for such repression-political,
psychological and others-and they too deserve further thought and inves–
tigation. Much is to be said in favor of not being overwhelmed and
paralyzed by the horrible memories of the past; but if this process is forced,
it loses conviction.
There was a time when the "need for roots" was very much stressed.
And the complaint about "rootlessness" ("where do I really belong?")
does appear in recent memoirs. But it is my feeling that it is less acute than
it used to be. The concept of the need for roots belongs to some extent
to
the age prior to the invention of the airplane and the period of the mass
migrations which have taken place allover the globe. It has not disappeared
but it is often felt less acutely. Self-consciousness about the need for roots
is for obvious reasons least felt in Israel, more in the United States, and
most of all in Europe. Gad Granach, the son of one of the leading actors
