I stopped updating the blog for a while, although I still didn’t use all the posts I carefully prepared in January and February. Focused on other writing projects, literary adventures, interesting libraries and wonderfully happy personal events I thought that I should be modest enough to portion my energy and, unfortunately, the permanent feed to this blog entered the last positions of my priority lists. When I realized how many things changed and continue to change since the end of April, I am still wondering, but trying to keep myself careful to accomplish the daily challenges.
I studied, read and thought a lot lately, but I preferred to keep the lessons learned for the daily family discussions. However, when I finished yesterday this book about the operations to rescue the Ethiopian Jews – Rescue, the Exodus of the Ethiopian Jews, by Ruth Gruber – I felt guilty. For taking everything too easy and for granted, of getting lost in various intellectual juggling instead of doing something – one of the reasons I didn’t like The Finkler Question although I am more and more aware of the reality of the character, all over the world and times, of failing sometimes to infuse to the others the power to resist and fight for their beliefs. And I was thinking, how prepared are the kids to tackle such a big death-or-alive trick? To go for hundreds of kilometers, in the middle of nowhere, barefoot, only because they wanted to see Jerusalem? Risking death, torture, health, an insecure future? Maybe some will think: because they were poor, they were ready to do anything…You will not see heroism in Brooklyn…but at least we should try to understand and evaluate through the lessons our behavior. I was impressed to read about the stories of the Soviet Jews in Gal Beckerman’s When They Come for Us we´ll be Gone. In Europe we are very often tempted to disregard them, criticize them or ironize them: look at them, talking Russian all the time, unable to adapt, too extreme in their behavior and standpoints. Possibly, but when you ever thought that you will be in danger after deciding to learn Hebrew, the official language of an officially recognized state, as French, Spanish, Portuguese etc.?
The fact that we read thousands of books doesn’t make us wiser or give as the legitimization to bash anything is not in our books. Now and in the past and in the future, we should better shout up and do. Actions speak louder than words.
