Last night, there was an interesting Haberman Institute for Jewish Studies program featuring San Francisco author Lois Silverstein talking about her recent book, When Crying Stops: Echoes of War in Romania. I had never heard of the book, and I think it has been far from a best seller, but I would like to read it based on what I heard last night. The book is a novel. It is fiction. But it is based on a series of interviews that Silverstein, who is in her 80s, had with three Romanian Jews who had survived the Holocaust whom she befriended years ago. They were considerably older than she was then, and are no longer alive.

At first, I thought that Silverstein’s presentation was a bit scattered, with some reading from the book, and some ruminating on her personal reactions to her conversations with the three survivors. But as she went on, and particularly in the extensive Q and A period, I was more fascinated by what she was saying. She was talking about “belonging” and described herself (she grew up in New York, went to college there, and then got a Ph.D. from McGill in Montreal, before moving to California) as someone who never felt she belonged where she was, and never could imagine a place where she felt she belonged. She viewed the Romanian survivors who were, as she called them, “ordinary people”, as also not belonging in Romania, where Jews had lived for a thousand years, and not really belonging anywhere else. She said that she thought she could have written about any other ethnic group in the same situation anywhere in the world at any time, because she was basically writing not specifically about the Holocaust (although obviously she was), but about the universally common situation of not belonging.

It’s not a feeling that I personally have. I feel that I belong here in the United States, but I know there are a lot of Jews who felt the same a few years ago, but who now, with increasing antisemitism, are now concerned that maybe they no longer “belong”, or perhaps never did.

With such dramatic changes to the American psyche developing during Trump 2, American views of their country may radically change. And once one’s views change, one’s memory of the past may change as well. Or, if memories of the past may not change, some individuals may hide their memories of the past, both to others and to themselves.

Silverstein quoted Martha Gellhorn. Remember her? Hemingway’s third wife, American war correspondent, and – most importantly – native of St. Louis. She was in Germany in 1945 and wrote the following:

“No one is a Nazi. No one ever was. There may have been some Nazis in the next village, and as a matter of fact, that town about twenty kilometers away was a veritable hotbed of Nazidom. To tell you the truth, confidentially, there were a lot of Communists here. We were always known as very Red. Oh, the Jews? Well, there weren’t really many Jews in this neighborhood. Two, maybe six. They were taken away. I hid a Jew for six weeks. I hid a Jew for eight weeks. (I hid a Jew, he hid a Jew, all God’s chillun hid Jews.) We have nothing against the Jews; we always got on well with them. We have had enough of this government. Ah, how we have suffered. The bombs. We lived in the cellars for weeks. We welcome the Americans. We do not fear them; we have no reason to fear. We have done nothing wrong; we are not Nazis.

“It should, we feel, be set to music. Then the Germans could sing this refrain and that would make it even better. They all talk like this. One asks oneself how the detested Nazi government, to which no one paid allegiance, managed to carry on this way for five and a half years. Obviously not a man, woman or child in Germany ever approved of the war for a minute…..”

After I heard this last night, I wanted to share it.

Having read it again now, I have another thought. America at some point, we hope, will get beyond the Trump years, and again be a beacon of freedom. When that happens, what will his former supporters say or think?  Will it be a version of the Gellhorn quote?

Could be.