Oldal 312 [312]
COMPOSITION OF AN IDENTITY
In the postwar period he had converted to Christianity, probably frightened
that the killing would never end, and then recovered his identity. He was in
charge of the maintenance of the temple. He opened it for us, my wife and I,
while my father remained with my mother at the hotel, not very interested in
our quest.
The old man opened the doors that led to the hall, and I cried. I had
never seen such a beautiful temple, the enclosed area where my father and
grandfather had celebrated the Shabbat, surrounded by the silence of the
sacred, clean, with walls painted in pastel tones, that today were repainted
white, drawings of palm trees that evoked East Jerusalem, bordeaux velvet
cloths covering the altar; only the Jews were missing, all murdered.
The place was prepared for a beautiful ceremony, but the faithful were
not there. It was then that I understood that the genocide, and I don’t say
Holocaust, because it was not a sacrifice but murder, maybe the cruelest
that humanity has known, was not only defined by the dead but by erasing
memories.
No more rites, chants, clothes, food. The Nazis and their allies wanted to
eliminate all traces, all imprints of Jewish life.
There was the temple, empty.
Thanks to the old man we found written in an old notebook with black
ink and gothic calligraphy, the name of my grandfather, Lazarus, with the
location of his burial place.
With Cora, my wife, we went to the Jewish cemetery in Sighisoara, and we
found a chaos of tombs strewn around, covered with moss, so the numbering
indicating the location was of little use.
We found a spatula and slowly scraped the stones until we were able to
identify my grandfather’s. I told my father, who looked at me incredulous;
I forced him to follow me, and when he saw the tomb, he looked at me and
exclaimed: It’s my father! and hugged the stone.
I have said that it’s not easy being Jewish in Argentina. On one side is
history, because there is a long-standing anti-Semitic tradition, nurtured
by a Catholic nationalism that has had different political expressions. The
long series of military governments supported sectors sympathetic to Italian
Fascism and the Axis during the Second World War.
As in other parts of the planet, anti-Semitism is part of the common sense
of idiots, according to the words of the famous writer Imre Kertesz, or, as
Marx said, anti-Semitism is the Socialism of fools, because he had not seen
today’s populism.
The violent anti-Semitism that my country suffered during the twenties
in the twentieth century in which there were pogroms, and which again
reappeared in the sixties when organizations like Tacuara y Guardia
Restauradora Nacionalista persecuted and stigmatized us, an anti-Semitism
e 311"