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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"
