(Perseus Books Group)

This guy ain’t a mother-fuckin MC,
I know everything he’s got to say against me,
I am white, I am a fuckin’ bum, I do live in a trailer with my mom,
My boy future is an Uncle Tom …
And never try and judge me dude
You don’t know what the fuck I’ve been through.
But I know something about you,
You went to Cranbrook, that’s a private school,
Whats the matter dawg you embarrased?
This guys a gangster?
His real name’s Clarance.
And Clarance lives at home with both parents,
And Clarance’s parents have a real good marriage,
… fuck Cranbrook.
Fuck the beat I go accapella,
Fuck a papa doc, fuck a clock, fuck a trailer, fuck everybody,
Fuck y’all if you doubt me,
I’m a piece of fuckin’ white trash I say it proudly,
And fuck this battle I don’t wanna win I’m outtie,
Here tell these people something they don’t know about me

—Eminem

In the climactic scene of Eminem’s biographical epic film 8 Mile, Rabbit, a white rapper, wins a freestyle battle against a rival black rapper. To the racially naïve, the color of the winner’s skin might come as a shock. But as illuminated in this contest, where the winner acknowledges his own whiteness and then reveals that the black rapper attended a private school, skin color alone no longer decides the champions of hip hop’s future. It’s a magnificent moment in the history of hip hop: In this brave new world, class trumps race as an overwhelmingly black audience ushers Rabbit into victory because they identify with him, socio-economically speaking, more so than his black counterpart. This is, of course, part of the mythology Eminem has created for himself, one that has made him the bestselling hip-hop artist of all time and immensely popular with whites and blacks alike.

Class act

In Bakari Kitwana’s new book, Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop, the former executive editor of The Source projects Eminem’s narrative onto all of hip hop’s white listeners: White kids love hip-hop because it addresses their increasing alienation from mainstream society. Citing a host of statistics ranging from growing unemployment rates to the rising cost of higher education, Kitwana argues that an increasing number of white youth are facing the same problems that African Americans have faced for decades: a lack of economic opportunity, deplorable school systems, the inability to earn a living wage. And then he asserts that hip-hop engages these issues more seriously than any other popular art form today.

Unfortunately, this argument loses sight of a few crucial facts. For one, there have always been a substantial number of broke white folk, and not all of them have turned to African American culture to vent their alienation (though many have, as evidenced by the early days of rock n’ roll). There are certainly other cultural outlets for alienated white people that do not involve direct appropriation of black culture. Punk, rockabilly, heavy metal, and grunge, to name a few, have all provided alternative vehicles for poor whites to voice their anger about class-based oppression. How the decline of these genres coincided with the rise of hip hop’s popularity is a fascinating topic, but unfortunately Kitwana does not fully explore the subject in his book.

Kitwana’s analysis of hip-hop as a tool of resistance for young whites also doesn’t fully take into account that poverty does not negate white privilege. Whites, as a racial group, cannot be alienated from mainstream society thanks to the very fact that they, as a racial majority, define mainstream society. While a host of class, gender, sexual, cultural, and personal issues may alienate them (or at least make them feel alienated), their race does not alienate them from the mainstream.

Compounding his book’s troubles, Kitwana asserts that “white youth’s love for hip hop, more often than not, extends beyond music and pop culture to the political arena.” Contrary to what Kitwana would have readers believe, most white kids who love hip hop are not urban, active in leftist politics, and immersed in black culture like Eminem; they are suburban, affluent, politically apathetic, know few, if any, black kids, and have much to benefit from preserving the racial and economic status quo. That is precisely why the idea of the white hip-hop fan is so fascinating: How can hip hop appeal to those who are divorced from the reality it reflects? How can a rich white kid decked out in FuBu, for example, recite every word of 50 Cent’s oeuvre while driving across the Long Island Expressway in a Lexus sport-utility vehicle?

Instead of addressing this inherent contradiction, Kitwana wastes a considerable chunk of time trying to debunk what he sees as the myth that white kids constitute the majority of hip hop’s audience. Whether whites buy more hip-hop music than blacks is irrelevant; majority or not, white audiences are responsible, at least in part, for hip hop’s tremendous explosion over the past decade. This fact, I suspect, is less the result of the politics of alienation than a long history of whites constructing black music as “cool,” dating back at least as far as the first half of the 20th century, when throngs of whites would flock to Harlem to hear all-black jazz ensembles, only to return to the world of white privilege and de facto segregation when the performance was over. Then, as now, affluent white kids construed black culture (and black people, for that matter) as dangerous, unruly, and transgressive, and observed and emulated black culture as an act of teenage rebellion. Today, however, whites are increasingly able to filter their exposure to black culture through music videos and other media, which both renders unnecessary any direct interaction between people of different races and promotes the skewed version of the culture that appears on television. In this way, white kids who grow up in a segregated environment think “acting black” means drinking 40s, packing a gun, and acting like a pimp or gangster, just like 50 Cent, Game, and Snoop (among others) do every night on MTV. Of course, such imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery and reinforces age-old stereotypes and prejudices.

In with the old, out with the new?

While Kitwana fails in his assessment of white alienation, he succeeds in asking some provocative questions about the future of hip hop: Will hip hop, like rock n’ roll before it, be completely divorced from its black roots, abandoned by blacks as the popular cultural vehicle, and reappropriated by mainstream white America? As absurd as an all-white future for hip hop may seem, one need only listen to Gwen Stefani’s recent hit “Hollaback Girl” to get a glimpse of what a predominantly white hip-hop future would sound like. One of last summer’s biggest hits, the song got equal airplay in black and white markets and was produced by the Neptunes, the ubiquitous behind-the-scenes duo whose work has defined the sound of Top 40-hip hop for years.

Though partially nonsensical, the song’s lyrics draw heavily on hip hop’s language and attitude, including the use of clever word plays to disrespect rivals — a device that hip hop inherited from the longstanding African American verbal tradition of “playing the dozens,” or taunting an opponent with a series of increasingly insulting (and humorous) accusations in front of an audience. In this case, Stefani’s unnamed opponent is grunge icon Courtney Love, who publicly denounced Stefani as the music industry’s “cheerleader.” Stefani sets the record straight, challenging Love to an after-school fight, during which she is “gonna make you fall, gonna sock it to you,” until “that’s right, I’m the last one standing, another one bites the dust.” It’s an old school hip-hop battle between two former alternative rock queens and, perhaps, a foreshadowing of the future of pop music.

To complicate matters, Stefani’s song illuminates the difference between what Kitwana terms “old racial politics” and “new racial politics.” According to Kitwana, the old racial politics is “characterized by adherence to stark differences — cultural, personal, and political — between black and white,” while the new racial politics is “marked by nuance, complexity … and a sort of fluidity between cultures.” By extension, Stefani, in the terms of the old racial politics, is a white person trying to be a Japanese person trying to be a black person. But according to the new racial politics, there are no fixed rules and everything is fair game.

While mainstream hip-hop, as seen nightly on BET and MTV generally reinforces the stereotypes of black men as armed, dangerous, and oversexed — and black women as dumb, materialistic, and promiscuous — Kitwana offers another possibility: hip hop as a tool for social change. Calling for a hip-hop underground movement, Kitwana advocates the political mobilization of hip hop’s listeners and creators “to correct social ills that are negatively affecting all Americans, including young whites.” These “hip-hop activists” abide by Kitwana’s new racial politics, with “the vision and capacity to leave the old racial politics on the pages of history where it belongs.”

Kitwana goes as far as declaring that “Em[inem] represents the new racial politics,” though he admits that “in a society where the caste system of whiteness often prevails and bestows privilege, he’s a part of the oppressor class.” What’s so new about that? Even Kitwana’s subtitle, “Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America”, reinforces the old racial politics by evoking racist stereotypes. (“Wigger” is a particularly egregious offense. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever been called a “Whafrican American”.)

A world where a white musician appropriates an African American art form, adds his own white twist, and makes millions of dollars while many of the art form’s pioneers die broke sounds suspiciously familiar. Today’s incarnation of Elvis is Eminem. That is not to say that Elvis and Eminem are not true artists who transcend race. But in the making of these powerful cultural icons, we must acknowledge what was lost, and from whom, in the process. If Eminem represents the new racial politics, as Kitwana claims, I’m not sure I want to say goodbye to the old.

After all, genuine progress in the racial arena will only materialize when we recognize the history of injustice against racial minorities in this country and vow never to repeat it.  

Hope for hip hop

An even more pressing question remains: Is a new racial politics possible in a world steeped in old racialisms? While it’s true, as Kitwana aptly points out, that the hip-hop generation is the first to grow up entirely in a post-civil rights era, with youth from all races “socialized around the dream of an inclusive America”, inclusion remains elusive. Racial inequalities proliferate in virtually every field of American life, from de facto segregation in public education to the racist response to and media coverage of Hurricane Katrina.

Quite simply, given the large role played by racism and racial identity in contemporary American society, it’s difficult — almost impossible — to conceptualize a new, large-scale rainbow coalition whose members, like Eminem’s 8 Mile audience, rally around issues of class, rather than race. It’s even more inconceivable that hip hop, with its racist archetypes, will be the driving force behind this revolution. But still, Kitwana’s ultimate assertion that “against all odds we must organize across race” remains compelling, even though his claim that “hip hop is the last hope for this generation and arguable the last hope for America” is exaggerated.

Amidst the larger question that Kitwana raises about the reality of race in America, his reduction of hip hop to a mere tool for political change precludes him from exploring hip hop as an art form. As a result, he overlooks the elements of hip hop that transcend race and class — namely addictive rhythms, clever word plays, and life-affirming beats. In other words, the main reason why white kids and black kids (and everyone else in between) love hip-hop: Like its predecessor, roll n’ roll, it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.

Michelle L Caswell

(The Penguin Press)

For those of mixed heritage — who straddle more than one race, nationality, faith, class, or whatever else — uncovering a coherent identity can be a complicated emotional journey. There are multiple, potentially conflicting, avenues and models, and choosing one or melding several is difficult business. This may be part of why Zadie Smith — herself the product of an English father and Jamaican mother — returns to this endlessly rich topic in her third novel, On Beauty, which was short-listed for the 2005 Man Booker Prize. As with her acclaimed debut novel, White Teeth, published when she was a mere 23 years old, and her less stunning second book, The Autograph Man, Smith ambitiously mines the cultural morass of mixed worlds. Now, with her latest work, she paints her most vivid portrait of the challenges and ecstasies of multiculturalism.

Her tool for this project is the skeleton of E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End, restyled by the liberal, chaotic family of Howard and Kiki Belsey, residents of the imaginary college town of Wellington, Massachusetts. As with Forster’s story, On Beauty opens with an awkward sexual meeting of two families of different ilk — the Belseys and the Kippses. An unlikely friendship grows between Mrs. Kipps and Kiki, resulting in one secretly bequeathing an invaluable object to the other. But whereas Forster focused almost exclusively on class and sex, Smith takes the plunge into the messy nexus of every potential category of identity and difference. Howard is a white British art history professor who escaped working class London for the almost ivy halls of Wellington University. Kiki, his intuitive and (now) obese black wife, grew up in rural Florida and works as a hospital administrator. At first glance, the Belsey family’s most glaring difference is written in black and white. But Howard, Kiki, and their three children navigate an array of cultural confrontations within their own home: intellectual versus intuitive, rich versus poor, urban versus rural, British versus American, secular versus Christian, and so on.

Each of the three children has latched onto some piece of what he or she perceives as the family’s true heritage, and has generally rejected the rest. Jerome, the eldest, has found God and turned to Monty Kipps, his father’s neoconservative nemesis in the culture wars, after a stint in London and a leave from Brown University. A Caribbean-British public intellectual and a famed man of faith, Monty has recently published a bestseller on Rembrandt — also the subject of a sprawling, perpetually unfinished treatise penned by Howard. Zora, the middle child, is a self-absorbed overachiever. She has taken the intellectual route, joining her father at Wellington, where she’s fast become an outspoken figure on campus, crusading for whatever may further her academic career. Levi, the youngest, has renounced his middle-class upbringing for the streets of Roxbury, where he swaggers under too-big hoodies and sagging denim, feigns poverty, and “hustles” DVDs alongside the truly desperate.

This already fragmented household is roiled by the revelation that Howard has had an affair. To add insult to injury, his lover is Kiki’s exact opposite: a white, exceedingly thin university colleague. Things get rockier still when Monty Kipps is invited to be a visiting scholar at Wellington, threatening Howard’s tenuous untenured position on campus, challenging affirmative action programs, and generally upsetting the college town’s (and the Belsey family’s) progressive equilibrium. The utopian ideals of the Belseys are further tested by a social experiment with Carl, self-taught poet/rapper, who is charitably folded into academic life, for a time.

In this fractured world, identity is an unpredictable and highly malleable phenomenon. Despite whatever ostensibly unites people — the same shade of skin, the same faith or lack thereof, the same aesthetic or intellectual mien, the same politics, the same weight, the same income or need for it — all of these only thinly connect one person to another in reality. Nothing is universal.

Again and again, characters are faced with embarrassment, rejection, or awkwardness when they assume too much likeness or difference based on outward appearances. Almost every character adjusts his or her language or manner to negotiate emotional situations and relationships, both intimate and distant. When Kiki gets ruffled over her kids’ behavior, she takes on the no-nonsense Southern parlance of her own mother. Likewise, when Howard visits his father, a butcher, in the drab old neighborhood of his youth, he hears “his own accent climbing down the class ladder a few rungs to where it used to be.” This mimicking of elders extends to the next generation of Belseys when Levi attempts to organize his co-workers against working on Christmas day at a music megastore. His normal voice dissolves into an urban drawl to woo LaShonda, an African American single mother of three. Unlike the mostly middle-class white kids who join the protest, Levi is shocked that LaShonda is eager to pick up the extra shifts at time-and-a-half.

Levi in particular collides with the world in his search for an authentic sense of self. In Wellington, he assumes every passerby is eyeing him suspiciously because of his skin color. And some are. However, even in Roxbury, where he at least externally fits in, he is divorced from those around him: “How strange it was to see streets where everybody was black! It was like a homecoming, except he’d never known this home.”

Smith often blunts these interactions with curious humor. In one scene, for instance, Levi is taking a break from protesting for fair wages for his “crew” of mostly Haitian immigrants who work $4-an-hour jobs or hawk knockoff purses on the street. When his brother Jerome appears walking the family dog, Levi introduces his friends, who’ve “got his back.” He then says of the dog, a Wienerschnitzel, “And this is my little foot soldier. He’s my lieutenant. Murdoch always got my back.”  

Ironically, the weakest and most tedious moments occur where Smith attempts to bend her characters, particularly Kiki and Mrs. Kipps, into Forster’s scenes. The too close adaptation of Forster’s dialogue between Margaret Schlegel and Ruth Wilcox seems out of step with Smith’s otherwise cleverly updated story. The book would likely have worked just as well without the overly obvious nods to Forster.

Smith is strongest when she orchestrates jarring social interactions: Howard’s sexual exchanges with a student or his meeting with his racist father, and the Belsey children’s slow awakening to the politics of suffering. Despite the creeping sadness and depravity of such scenes, Smith does not leave the reader with a completely bleak outlook on this jumbled landscape. There are no clear or tidy answers but, like Forster, she shows that as long as one deals with others in good faith, one can find unbounded beauty in differences.

Nicole Marie Pezold

(HarperCollins)

Two sights illustrate the gentrification that has crept into New York’s East Harlem: On one block in the neighborhood, known as El Barrio by its largely Puerto Rican residents, a Starbucks has opened and welcomes white newcomers and Latinos who choose the trendy cafe over the old corner bakery. Up the avenue, the Salsa Museum attracts tour buses full of outsiders eager to discover the neighborhood’s musical gift. It seems that El Barrio has become known as a “cool” place to visit and live.

The Starbucks and the tour buses, both unthinkable in the area until a few years ago, provide context for Ernesto Quiñonez’s new novel, Chango’s Fire. Much has changed since the author’s first novel, Bodega Dreams, garnered acclaim upon its release in 2000. That book was set in an East Harlem where the hulks of apartment buildings burnt down for profit still laced the streets. They had done so since the 1970s in many New York neighborhoods, as a physical reminder to residents that their community and even their lives were expendable to authorities and absentee landlords alike.

By the time Quiñonez’s latest novel was published a mere four years later, much of the arsonists’ work had disappeared from East Harlem. In its place is gentrification, and Quiñonez is there to breathe life into this troubled phase of his neighborhood’s history. As in his first book, he does not simplify events; there are no clear good and evil forces here. While at one level the story is charged with politics, it is also a very personal tale about one man’s drive to be true to himself.

The story’s narrator and central figure is Julio Santana, a young man who works on a demolition crew by day to pay for college and the mortgage on his family’s condo. At night he supplements his income by setting fires, usually to vacant suburban houses whose owners want to collect the insurance. Downstairs from Julio, a white woman named Helen moves in, and soon she and Julio are a serious item. With their divergent views of the changes in the neighborhood fueling tension between them, Quiñonez cleverly brings them together to mirror the larger drama playing out in the neighborhood with the onset of gentrification.

A strange and uneasy transition

When the first white people start venturing north of 96th Street to fix up and buy condos, the reaction from the locals is often openly hostile. People who have lived through disinvestment know it wasn’t their own people who arranged for their homes to burn. But that isn’t why they’re angry at the newcomers. They are angry because many of the gentrifiers show little interest in or respect for the customs brought from the island by Puerto Ricans in the 1950s. In fact, many whites seek to bar the old culture from invading their new enclaves, socializing inside, rather than on their front stoops, and building gates to privatize these spaces.

But not all the new folk are oblivious to or uncaring about the hurt their arrival causes. Helen, for instance, knows the culture shock her family experienced when they moved from the liberal college town of Ithaca, New York, to a small rural community, Howard City, Wisconsin, where their foreign cars and Helen’s mother’s protest of the arms race aroused suspicion. Helen, then, is not wholly ignorant of what her presence in East Harlem implies. She wants to meet people in the community, partly because she wants her budding gallery to fit into the neighborhood’s Latin-inspired art scene. Still very much an outsider herself, she is also far more sensitive to injustice. But she still doesn’t see the animus she encounters as justified.

Here Quiñonez tries to show how underneath the surface, outsider and native-born have quite a bit in common. Helen brings her feminist sense of outrage with her into a culture where machismo has always ruled, but then observes a crowd of women who attack a child rapist in the street with their brooms. Curiously, Quiñonez stops short of making his point in this scene, sidestepping what seems to be Helen’s moment of awakening, her entry point into what is otherwise an unfamiliar culture. Instead, he dwells on her inability to grasp why no police car appears to take control of the situation. Julio is then able to educate her that the people in El Barrio do not share her assumption that cops serve and protect. Quiñonez does give Helen credit at many points in his book for making sense of the community’s problems. In this scene Helen might not only understand the problems, but have her own insight on how to address them.

Meanwhile, another wrinkle appears in the gentrification tale. The whites with money aren’t the only new faces in the community. Immigrants from Mexico have arrived, too, opening restaurants on avenues once dominated by the Puerto Ricans, and they board, 10 to a room, in hovels that have been subdivided several times over. They take the jobs on construction sites that the Italians (who were poor immigrants in Spanish Harlem before it was Spanish) see as beneath them. The Mexicans’ presence doesn’t seem to throw the neighborhood into a fit the way the whites’ does, but their arrival could mean just as significant a shift in the population.

Eddie is one of the few Italian holdouts who didn’t flee to the suburbs or Queens when the Puerto Ricans arrived after World War II. He has made a living over the years burning down people’s homes, sometimes with people still inside. He probably burned down Julio’s first home, forcing him and his family to move into the projects they occupied for the rest of his childhood.

Interestingly enough, Julio goes to work for Eddie as a young man, since the pay from construction work is insufficient to pay for his condo and get him through college. Like the Bodega Dreams lead character who was employed by a drug hustler who doubled as a housing developer, Julio has a job people in so-called normal neighborhoods can only wonder about. The arrangement works well for Julio until he slips up, leaving behind evidence that one of his house-burnings was no accident. Then, as in the first book, the illicit nature of the local economy shows its true colors, as Eddie forces Julio to pay dearly for his mistake.

Here Chango, the Santeria god from the book’s title, comes into play. One in a pantheon of deities of both African and Catholic origins worshipped in parts of Latin America, the god is represented by fire and lightning. The proprietor of the neighborhood botanica tells Julio a legend about how Chango made a great error and, realizing this, hung himself to extinguish his fire. But Chango lived on because he was not in the fire itself, but in the heat it generated. As Julio’s nighttime profession gets him into trouble, he looks to Chango to teach him how to compensate for his transgressions and give himself a life beyond the flames.

The politics of politics

Quiñonez’s artistry in depicting the sudden changes in his neighborhood adds context to the stark public policy questions being raised in East Harlem and other gentrifying communities. Should a percentage of housing built by developers, scrambling to respond to the influx of yuppies, be set aside for people who have been there through the bad times? If so, should there be a racial component to this set-aside? Should local community boards ask developers to build their courtyards and entryways in a way that respects the cultural traditions of the low-income and non-white groups?

Puerto Rican residents have yet to respond to this challenge, Quiñonez suggests. Day by day, they watch as newcomers stream in, and some grit their teeth, but they don’t get organized. This inaction isn’t uncommon; local groups often don’t begin to seek political solutions to gentrification until the population has been transformed and the storefronts appear unfamiliar.

Quiñonez is responding to that lack of action. At a 2004 book signing at East Harlem’s Carlito’s Café, he characterized his book as a protest, a way of bringing attention to gentrification. At the same time, he wants to point to positive examples from that community, rather than dwelling on the negative aspects of ghetto life. As a comparison, consider Jonathan Lethem’s lead character of color in Fortress of Solitude, who went to prison and couldn’t fit in when he returned to his gentrified ‘hood. Quiñonez is drawn to Puerto Rican characters who are ambitious (like Julio and the narrator of Bodega Dreams, both college-educated) or entrepreneurial (like businessman Willie Bodega). Julio and Bodega suggest that prosperity can be found without gentrification.

It is probable that many residents of East Harlem would have trouble relating to Julio, however. For them there would not be a question, as there is for Julio, whether to enter the Starbucks or the bar where whites gather — they simply can’t afford to.

While Julio has dreams that may take him out of East Harlem, he also feels a strong attachment to the neighborhood. Perhaps the most authentic aspect of his character is his nostalgia for the days when he played on abandoned cars in vacant lots. Just as the neighborhood is spruced up, it feels somehow alienating to its own people. Besides, moving out would mean a tremendous loss for him and others who have made their own world within a few square blocks. As Julio says, “Helen’s people don’t seem to have mystical places like ours. They don’t have poor, holy places that speak to your soul …”

In The Fray Contributor

Always remember. Never forget. These seem to be the unwritten tenets of Judaism, not just when it comes to the Holocaust, but when it comes to embracing one’s Jewish identity. (How can one forget her Judaism when she smells gefilte fish or watches a Woody Allen flick?). Thanks to a series of coincidences — the reviewer who vanished, along with the review copy of Nick Ryan’s Into a World of Hate that I had sent her, the last minute collaboration with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop that resulted in a special issue of ITF concerning “home” — that left me frantically searching for a topical book to review for OFF THE SHELF for our July 2004 issue, these maxims are also what drew me to David Bezmozgis’ recently published Natasha and Other Stories.

There were plenty of other newly published books, both fiction and non-fiction, concerning migration and citizenship that I could have reviewed instead. Perhaps I would have chosen the one concerning immigration along the U.S./Mexico border had I felt a deeper personal connection to Mexico or the Texas valley, or had the book’s synopsis not sounded so trite. But instead, I chose a collection of short stories about Latvian Jews struggling to fit into the North American Jewish Diaspora. At first, it was just the emigration tale of the Soviet Jewry that attracted me; when I became a Bat Mitzvah more than a decade earlier, in the midst of the Jewish exodus from the U.S.S.R., I was paired with a Soviet “twin,” a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl living in the Soviet Union whose government prohibited her from becoming a Bat Mitzvah. Though she and I exchanged numerous letters about our families and schools, we barely discussed Judaism, much less her experience with it in the Soviet Union, for rather obvious reasons. Peculiarly, at that moment when I was directly encountering another’s religious persecution and becoming an adult in the eyes of my religion, I don’t think I grasped, not even remotely, the direness of my twin’s circumstances, the importance of free expression, or the disparate experiences of Jews in other parts of the world.

My naïveté didn’t stem from too much focus on the social aspects of becoming a Bat Mitzvah or a failure of my elders to educate me about the Jewish experience in other parts of the globe. The mere existence of the twinning program and my participation in it were, of course, steps in the right direction. But simple statistics and even the occasional, dry letter from a young Soviet girl couldn’t really put a human face on these alternative realities. Even now, years after the collapse of the Communist bloc, persecution of Jews under the Soviet regime is still unimaginable in ways that the Holocaust never can or will be — this despite the fact that countless survivors of the former persecution still wander the earth while the number of Holocaust survivors is rapidly dwindling. So as clichéd as it sounds, I selected the autobiographically informed Natasha and Other Stories to better understand the predicament faced by Soviet Jewry, to understand what it was like to be prohibited from choosing, much less practicing, your religion and carrying it on to the next generation, to relate to those who were not entirely unlike myself.

But as I read Natasha, with its focus on the struggles of recent Soviet immigrants trying to assimilate into North American Jewish society, I didn’t feel like I was gaining a better understanding of the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union. That was, I realized, exactly Bezmozgis’ point: assimilated Western Jews can’t relate, we have forgotten some of our own, we have failed to always remember. For me, the most poignant aspect of this realization lies in the fact that I have always been a bit disconcerted about my own relationship to the Holocaust. During two class trips to concentration camps — Dachau when I was 13, another on the outskirts of Berlin at 21 — I felt more isolated than ever as my classmates became deliberately more solemn around me, the sole Jew in each group, from the time that we arrived at the camp until hours later. When they did speak to me, it was to offer an, “I’m sorry,” with the understanding that I knew what they were apologizing for. Or to ask if I’d lost anyone in the Holocaust. (I hadn’t, aside from some distant relatives of my long-deceased maternal grandfather.)

Each time, I couldn’t help wondering: Why did they apologize to me? I wasn’t looking for them to be hostile or indifferent, but another six million non-Jews died as well. Were they also going to apologize to the closeted queer in the bunch who would soon make his sexual preferences known? Did they not feel sad for their loss as humans as well?

And why was I perhaps the least visibly moved by the camp? Certainly not because I’m indifferent to human suffering or because I’m an anti-Semite or a Holocaust-denier. When you attend Hebrew School three times a week for a decade and live in a culture where politics and the media refer every atrocity back to the Holocaust, you are reminded to remember at every turn.

But somewhere in the process you do forget — people who have been persecuted for other reasons, at other times, in other places, people like Bezmozgis and his family. And that’s where the problem lies, in focusing so much on remembering one atrocity at the cost of obscuring others.

Reading about characters like the Kornblums, Holocaust-centric Jews who so readily conflate Judaism and the Holocaust, feels like something of a teenager’s homecoming, somewhat uncomfortable, perhaps even annoying. In other words, the perfect environment to rile us up and make us get to know those not much different than ourselves.

Laura Nathan-Garner