CYNTHIA OZICK
37
knows to be her own, the city she has "come from." So here is Peggy
O'Brien, choosing Dublin; and Dorothy Wilson, choosing Glasgow;
and Carolyn Johnson, Stockholm; and Maria Viggiano, Naples. But
Allegra Sadacca-whose family is recently from Turkey, a remnant of
the Spanish Jews expelled by Ferdinand and Isabella in I492-Allegra
Sadacca picks Toledo. And I, whose forebears had endured the despots
of Russia for a thousand years, I, eight years old, in the borough of the
Bronx in New York City, claim Jerusalem. I do this with no sense of
symbolism or mysticism. I do it unencumbered by history or meta–
physics. I do it because I am a Jewish child, and understand that
Jerusalem is my inheritance.
The name of this little girls' game, by the way, is War.
In the summer of 1936 there is a war in Palestine, and Gershom
Scholem has been residing in Jerusalem for thirteen years. On August
26th he writes to his good friend Walter Benjamin:
We've been living under a state of siege in Jerusalem for three
months. Every evening you hear more or less incessant shooting,
and from time to time one spends a few hours standing guard on a
'strategic' rooftop at the edge of the quarter. In between, you wait
patiently for the latest news. The terror is considerable, and it has
required enormous restraint on the part of the Jews... .Several
days ago my colleague, the assistant professor of Arabic Literature,
was murdered while reading a book in his study....You become
accustomed to a certain measure of fatalism, since nobody knows
whether or not a bomb will be thrown at him at the next corner.
He goes on, "We undoubtedly have a tumultuous six months ahead of
us. On the other hand, immigration continues
to
be quite large despite
Arab strikes and acts of terror."
Scribbling on a sidewalk in the Bronx with my piece of chalk, I know
nothing of this. But three years later, in 1939, I am in the kitchen with
my grandmother. She is standing before me in tears, clutching a Yiddish
newspaper and beating her breast with her fist, as she does on Yom Kip–
pur. The immigration that Gershom Scholem alluded
to
in 1936 is now
prohibited by the British White Paper of 1939. Far away, in the waters
off Palestine, the refugees from Germany's depredations are being
turned back
to
their doom, and in our little kitchen in the Bronx my
grandmother is weeping over Jerusalem. Will anyone scoff at her for
mysticism, romanticism, sentimentalism? Who will tell her that her grief
is less because her kitchen is in the Bronx and not on Abarbanel Street?
