The Endgame

Newsletter #14 - Lonely as a cloud

The Endgame is taking a detour for a couple of weeks. My new book-- Antisemitism: An ancient hatred in the age of identity politics—will be published in Canada on March 7. This week and next the newsletter offers a brief excerpt to whet your appetite.

Toronto, March 5, 2023

Lonely as a cloud

The story of Jews in the world is a story of constant movement, of the half-packed suitcase, of the shadow of the Holocaust, of fear and trembling, of the Jewish community dwindling and divided. It is a story of losses and farewells. It is the story of people who wander the world and—so it seems—have always done so.

At the beginning of the 20^th century my father’s family lived in Cherkasy, in what is now Ukraine, then part of Russia. Cherkasy is on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River, about 200 kilometres southeast of Kiev. My grandfather, Volodya Slavouski, was born there in 1885. He left as a young man and went to Kiev in search of a better life. In 1907, following a fresh wave of pogroms in Russia, Volodya fled to Berlin with his new wife Manya Brainos. Manya was disguised as a boy for the trip. Later they went to Paris. In 1914, Volodya and Manya moved once more, this time to London. In May 1919, a particularly brutal pogrom took place in Cherkasy, where Volodya’s two brothers and his sister still lived. Hundreds of Jews were murdered and three thousand houses were looted. The three siblings fled Cherkasy and, following a route much-travelled by refugees, went to Odessa, then by boat across the Dniester River to Bucharest, then to Paris, and finally to London to join Volodya, who by then was a successful businessman in the fur trade. One of these brothers moved to Canada in 1935, and, after World War Two, one of Volodya and Manya’s two sons moved to the United States and the other, my father, to Canada. More distant members of the Slavouski family went at different times to Colombia and other countries in South America. Following the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union in 2020, some of Volodya and Manya’s descendants living in Britain, who had a non-Jewish German father, obtained German citizenship, thinking thereby to protect and enhance their future; the irony did not escape them. This is not an unusual story for a Jewish family across the generations, wandering the world, going back and forth, packing and unpacking, seeking safe haven and a better future, shuffling allegiances, always on the look-out.

Jews have always been on the move, restless, nomads by necessity, roaming across countries and continents, thinking of the next place to go, a place where they may be welcome and not in danger, a place free of antisemitism and persecution. The allure of Israel has been that it seems to offer an alternative to that history of wandering, as intended by Zionism. As we shall see later, it is a problematic alternative. Today, the patterns of the past continue, if somewhat attenuated. French Jews move to Britain, Israel, and Canada; British Jews move to France and Germany; Israeli Jews move to Germany and Canada; South African Jews move to Israel; Russian Jews move to the United States and Britain; Ukrainian Jews go wherever they can; United States Jews move to Israel. Jews have sometimes been called “rootless cosmopolitans” (the epithet was a favourite of the Soviets). This implies that Jews have little commitment to whatever country they live in and are rightfully an object of national suspicion. Here is a deep paradox, for Jews in history are always searching for place, desperate to belong, to not be rootless, to find a home.

Stefan Zweig wrote in 1942, shortly before he committed suicide in Brazil: “For many years I thought that my deliberate training of myself to feel that everything was temporary was a flaw in me, but later on, when I was forced time and again to leave every home I made for myself and saw everything around me fall apart, that mysterious lifelong sensation of not being tied down was helpful. It was a lesson I learnt early, and it has made loss and farewells easier for me.” Zweig described a scene he saw in a London travel agency before he left for Brazil: “It was full of refugees, nearly all of them Jewish, and they all wanted to go somewhere, anywhere. It didn’t matter what country, they would have gone to the ice of the North Pole or the blazing sands of the Sahara just to get away, move on…” In his suicide note, addressed to the president of the PEN club of Brazil, Zweig spoke of “my spiritual home, Europe, having destroyed itself… my energy is exhausted by long years of peregrination as one without a country.” He and his wife had spent years on the move—Ostend, Zurich, Calcutta, London, Bath, Moscow, Ossining (a suburb of New York City, home of John Cheever, and of Don Draper, the fictional hero of Mad Men), Rio, Buenos Aires, Petrópolis, other places. A friend of Zweig said, “no matter where you met Zweig, his manner suggested a half-packed suitcase in the next room.”

Stefan Zweig