History is tired
Some personal reflections on entitlement, the misuses of history, and watching wars on the internet.
At her Yom Kippur break-fast two years ago—my first ever—a friend said that the only thing Jewish about me is my last name. Streshinsky, or Streshinskaya as it is rendered in Russian, to reflect the fact that I am a woman, meaning of Streshin. Streshin, Rogachev county, Mogilev province—founded by “Jews who did not own their own homes and rented temporary housing, known as komorniki, arrived in Mogilev and the adjacent territory in the late 16th century,” according to documents supposedly held in the National Historical Archive of Belarus. Part of the Pale of Settlement from 1794. In 1880 there were 350 houses of worship in the province—a shul for every community of over thirty homes, a synagogue for those exceeding eighty. Under Soviet power, in 1920, all local property, including the shuls and synagogues—nationalized. By the mid-1940s, “the community as a whole was abolished.” The five Streshinskys above, my great-grandfather Ruman standing next to his sister (I believe her name was Esther) were photographed in Odesa, most likely in the early teens of the 1900s. In 1905, the year of the First Russian Revolution, between the 18th and 21st of October, there had been a pogrom in Odesa, three hundred Jews killed.
I do not know which pogroms the Streshinskys above survived; I do not know if they had ever seen Steshin; I do not know when they ended up in Odesa. I know that within the same collection of photographs is one of a relative, a young man, if not still a boy, with a face like the Gioconda’s, an uncle to my grandfather, or maybe a cousin—he emigrated to Beijing; later, he, or maybe only his son emigrated from China to San Francisco. I think it might be that only Ruman stayed in Odesa. The Streshinskys above were running from something, but what it was is not part of family lore.
Here are the things that are: mentions of Abram, Feiga, Golda, Dota, Sura, Shaia, Silva, Moishe, a Yiddish-speaking early childhood, hen-plucking, a week’s worth of dinners from that hen. Corn kernels popping on a cob stuck into the sand while in evacuation in Uzbekistan, impaired vision from being in the cotton fields, Odesa, Sevastopol, Tallinn, Moscow, Kyiv, Tel Aviv, Moscow-Moscow-Moscow. A bear on a warship, then a monkey, four hours of piano practice a day.
On my mother’s side: A Kaufman turned Borev while fleeing from a death by firing squad (not directly for reasons of Jewishness), both parents fighting for the Red Army in the civil war. Great grandmother Leah, hen-plucking, a week’s worth of dinners from that hen. Evacuation, illness, wandering through the ruins of a school. Communal apartments, cats named Mishka and Dasha, Countess Bunin in the neighboring room. Kharkiv, Odesa, Riga, Moscow, Magadan, Chukotka, Moscow-Moscow-Moscow, six hours of piano practice a day, a declined job offer at a university (directly for reasons of Jewishness).
None of the familial lines from which I was drawn left the Soviet Union, assimilating to the urban masses of Kyiv and Moscow, unclear if hush about their provenance, or simply not imbuing it with much significance—just never again, not even said out loud. Dissolution. I grew up in the Russian Orthodox Church, as many children of my generational cohort did, their parents, in search of an identity, any identity, once they were no longer Soviet citizens. On a hungover morning last summer, my older brother, thirty-six years of age, announced that he was having an identity crisis of his own. “Dad, are we Jews?” he asked, searching for confirmation of a familial history rooted so deeply, so out-of-sight, that it was an inadvertent secret. “So what if we are?” said our father.
Like a magician pulling a rabbit from his top hat, I can call forth an entire history from which to forge a legible identity, its caveats gently folded into the gaps within, prepared for elaboration through a process of narrative mise-en-place. My last name allows me to do that; it could be that my friend is right. But in my mind, I am a Jew simply because there is nothing else I could be. My Jewishness was shaped in negation of the things in which I wanted no part—It has been an escape from the corrupt, violent, and sinister; where my beliefs, absent of religion, are grounded: that one should never take for granted that their home is always going to remain such and, exceeding in importance, that nobody belongs anywhere more than anybody else.
Since October 7th, Zionists and those aligned with them, whether they are consciously so or out of some rhetorical instinct, have oft invoked the Holocaust. In statements, newscasts, articles, the chambers of the UN, by politicians, commentators, representatives of organized entities of various kinds exploiting it to justify the genocidal violence with which Israel has been bombarding Gaza. On social media in viral photographs and videos, and infographics, where it was deployed with a tedious, trivial, trickle-down insidiousness. There, the Holocaust is a shorthand for the cause of death or suffering of every Jew who has ever died or suffered. That is not to diminish or ignore the gruesome scale and nature of the attacks carried out by Hamas. Rather, it’s to say that the wash of propaganda and its use of these over 1200 deaths, 240 hostages, to prop up the flagpole of Jewish victimhood up which Israel runs its appeal to the guilty historical conscience of the West has been successful in obstructing both the true depth of their tragedy and rationalizing the exponential, continuous infliction of tragedy upon Palestinians. One is defeated by corralling the official counts—the death toll keeps growing. Over 23,000 deaths in Gaza at the time of writing.
Have we learned nothing? In this time, the question has been asked many times too. Perhaps we’re not looking in the right place, if we’re even capable of learning in the first place; what if we aren’t? And now? Are we supposed to learn from all of this too? As Israel prevents another Holocaust, Russia continues to fight the Nazis in Ukraine; a global condition. What has the use of all this history been? Adorno, In section 33 of Minima Morialia: “The logic of history is as destructive as the people that it brings to prominence: wherever its momentum carries it, it reproduces equivalents of past calamity.” No use. In Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, the narrator, a woman from Ramallah who becomes obsessed with a gruesomely small fragment of history, finds her own death in its repetition as the result of her frantic attempt to recover it. The novel, terse and powerful, delineates a number of borders, both real and imagined, which often prove to be one and the same, and the arbitrary cruelty with which they exist. One can’t help but think now about how the narrative limitations of politics render history into a border. It’s a minor detail within the borders of this moment, but the postponement of Shibli’s reception of an award titled LiBeraturpreis carries a bitter irony.
Since I began my attempts to articulate these thoughts, a few days after the start of Israel’s siege of Gaza, the one thing that I kept, mostly untouched, was the beginning. Why was it that my first response was to examine my Jewishness? To pull up repeatedly this photo of my great grandfather and his siblings, as if to affirm to myself the objective ways in which I am Jewish? The longer I think about it, the stranger this response feels.
I keep returning to a conversation I had with a cousin who lives in Russia in the days following October 7th. She and I had begun retracing the faint lines of our Jewishness, that which we share by blood supplemented by a symmetry of provenance in the parts of our ancestral lines that don’t overlap, around the same time I did; the difference was only that I was doing so in New York, while her trips to Tel Aviv were increasing in frequency, following her friends, who, like many Russian Jews of our generational cohort, born in the ‘90s, found some refuge from the liberal discontents of Russian citizenship in the city’s lively bar-café scene. As the gruesome scenes of Hamas’ massacres flooded the screens of our phones and computers, we commiserated; I had asked her if the people she knows in Israel are okay, she thanked me, said that yes, everyone is okay, though those who lived in the south would constantly hear the shootouts nearby. She wrote another, longer message, which read like those we would send each other in the spring of the previous year, recapping who had been crossing our minds as being in potential danger, the unexpectedly vast network of people one ends up checking up on. In addition to the worry over those she knows personally, she had been reflecting on five years of traveling to Israel, that, of course, in this time she had been charmed by the idea that there was a shared home just for us, that this home stands there for us, like a communal apartment to which you gain entry by being a jew, that this was a place that helped her recover her own identity; that she felt a lot of pain for this place.
Choosing to read her message as a statement of disenchantment with this idea, I wrote to her that, of course, pain is pain, that pain isn’t subject to ideology, that “the cognitive and the emotional can exist in complex entwinement with each other,” that I understood and thought of my time in New York in similar terms, that there I found “an Israel of sorts for myself,”. This was why, I wrote, I could and can afford to avoid Israel because I have—well, had—New York. She did not respond to this; the next time we spoke, we did not touch on the matter. But, in the subsequent weeks of watching her posts, it became evident that I had chosen to read her message incorrectly.
Those aren’t necessarily terms in which I’d put it now, but the sentiment remains: luck has always played a big role in where a Jew ended up when escaping something if the opportunity to escape presented itself in the first place. Israel has resolved the question of where to go for many Jews; in doing so, it has also created a feedback loop between the legitimization of its ethnonationalism and its appeal to one of the lowliest human impulses—entitlement and vengeance. The targets of these appeals are often people of obscured backgrounds, like my cousin or me, and how effective it is depends on what choices are available at a given time. In any case, I write these sentences from my childhood bedroom in Moscow—so much for luck and the availability of choices. Still, Adorno, again: “it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.” For me, this is what should have been learned from history; but history, I am now convinced, is a pointless place to look for lessons. History can only tell us that at certain junctures, what was thought impossible previously, becomes possible, and that it can be replicated with even greater efficiency and more horrifying yield.
The paradox of history is that nothing is ever new, and yet the ways things manifest themselves are always native to their time. This is what I’ve been tugging at in all of this writing, I think: the set of resources at humanity’s disposal, as well as the set of that which it lacks, is unprecedented, and is not likely to be the same again; not with the velocity of technological progress, which moves like an aggressively accelerating treadmill. And so, in geopolitics too—the only reason to attempt molding rhetoric in the familiar shapes of the past is to obfuscate present evils, to elevate the haphazard, deathly movements of the power-hungry to grand historical designs.
Wars are broadcast in real-time on the internet now. To watch a war on the internet is to experience the disorientation of distorted reality, most privy primarily to what a given algorithm dispenses to them. Perhaps therein is the discomfort in wielding the emblems of suffering produced by viral imagery as a tool of rhetorical strategy: it identifies tragedy with the individual, leaning on the notion of an event’s singularity—a tricky category that, at best, in direct terms lays bare the component parts of a tragedy and, at worst, serves as a convenient lever of propaganda, spurring reactive nationalisms of the kind that we see the Israeli government performing. The war in Gaza is singular, but it also exists within a greater pattern of expansionist greed and aggression utilizing ethnic cleansing as its chief method—absurd, irreconcilable with modernity, wherever and however it happens. And yet.
In this context, I think a lot about Azerbaijan's expulsion of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) which followed a nine-month-long-blockade of the region. All of it is well-documented by those subject to it—from the war in 2020, to standing in weeks-long lines day and night for the mere chance of obtaining bread, to the armed offensive against a depleted population, to the unending line of cars as this population leaves its home in its entirety, forever. Accompanied by a measly amount of coverage in English, this happened right before our eyes just a few weeks before the events at the forefront of global news now. The lack of intervention, the practical absence of the matter from public conversation seemed unfathomable to anybody watching and few, it seems, were, be it by dint of the algorithm’s movement or simple neglect. This is, of course, not to compare or measure the scales of devastation against each other. Rather, it is to point out the global, shared nature of the crisis we find ourselves living through—the weapons with which Azerbaijan mounted its final attacks on the formerly Armenian enclave in Karabakh were bought from Israel; these final attacks were conveniently timed to a moment when Russia was too busy with its own imperial assault on Ukraine to enact the CSTO commitments which were in a state of lapse to begin with, due to friction between Armenia’s prime minister Nikol Pashinyan and Putin.
It’s hard not to resort to various shades of pessimism in all of this. Often, it feels like there’s not much else available. But increasingly, one hopes, the fact that the profound failure of global politics is streaming live, means that it will finally be seen. I won’t propose anything so hopeful as the idea that a collective realization of the profane absurdity of the systems to which we are subject—our governments which insistently purport to represent us—and the suffering borne of them, might result in a greater sense of solidarity. But I am tempted to, if only for the fact that my own current state of suspended citizenship and civic belonging, or exile, as I now refer to it in jest, makes it feel like it may be an inevitable place to arrive.