A few fraught thoughts on Yom Ha-Shoah 5784 (Holocaust Remembrance Day), hurried a day after. I wanted to open this fragment with a content warning yet the list of potential triggers proved inexhaustible. All I can ask is that we proceed with caution.
I struggle with memory, especially when it is confiscated by states, boxed neatly by nationalisms, or welded into weapons of oppression. Our memory is our critical consciousness, our ancestral cartography of liberation, our personal ecology of puzzles. It is the internal architecture we build to make sense of how transformation unfolds. How much do we lose by relinquishing curiosity and care for our storylines?
Many traditions teach of the "open past", suggesting that our past is as wide and possible as the person remembering. In this way, our memory mirrors our capacity to imagine the future. How we envision what was, arranges what we imagine can be.
The health of our memory is found in its aliveness, its creativity, and our collective commitment to its curation. It is certainly unconfinable to an event, to a day, to a minute of silence, or a solemn thought.
The effort of profoundly honouring memory, especially in the shadow of genocide, especially in the midst of genocide, is brutal in its challenge. It isn't just recalling statistics or hearing testimonies; it's tuning to the silences in an elder's voice, conducting a forensics of their fear. It's reading a ruin not as an ending, but as a key to an entire world. It's translating a fragment - a smell, a name, a breeze - into a stitch within a vast embroidery. It’s viewing a list of names as a forest. It’s hearing the scream sequence before a mass grave, and promising to one day sing it into safety. It's choosing, again and again, to stubbornly remember against the severity of erasure, to refuse to ignore that plural pasts are woven into the present.
Yesterday many spaces around the world marked Holocaust Memorial Day, with bold declarations, admonitions and pronouncements. In the better cases, these were invitations to never ignore trajectories of atrocity or dehumanisation, irrespective of origin. In the worst cases, these were blatant justifications of the unfolding khurbn (devastation) of Gaza and Palestine as a whole. Across all of them, was a rejoinder to never forget, to do the utmost to dam the currents of forgetting.
Hearing these insistences, I couldn’t help but think of the Russian memory activist Irina Flige’s reflection (I paraphrase via Masha Gessen): it’s wrong to talk about forgetting because ‘forgetting presupposes remembering’, and often in totalitarian or post-totalitarian contexts, remembering is something that hasn’t actually happened.
Cheapened by school textbooks, Hollywoodised by film producers, framed by states to fit their interests, cordoned to silence decolonial readings, whitewashed to ignore its subversive possibilities, and numbed to make way for militarist conviction, the Holocaust is for many a tamed historical affair. But memory as we know from our mere being, spills. And perhaps, following Flige, the memory of the Khurbn - as with multiple unfathomable abysses - hasn’t even really begun to emerge yet.
I return often to a sense of shock at the scale of unremembering across our societies, and the amount of ungrieved grief. There are so many collective traumas suffused in the lands we live on, demanding our attentions and reparations. These can never be addressed in a monoculture of competitive memory, and only in more generous cultures of multidirectional and collaborative memory, to borrow Michael Rothberg’s invitation. Our lineages may be different, but we can encounter each other, bound by an acknowledgment of the limits of our understanding, and a reverence for the sacred motions of memory.
To remember a genocide by definition involves humility before its scope. As Irena Klepfisz teaches, catastrophe (read this as your closest example) often erases everything other than the catastrophe. It takes imagination and commitment to revitalize even a spark of what was.
To remember is an active verb, and like with any action, we learn and reshape it with others. In this way, our memory is always ecological. We build it in relation, in conversation, in contrast. After all, recognition starts with being open to hearing an echo, or being one.
On February 25th 2024, Aaron Bushnell lit himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in DC, affirming his refusal to be complicit in the genocide of Palestinians. For various days I could barely speak. My grandmother’s shtetl witnessed mass communal self-immolation in 1941, as people refused to let Nazis choose the time and locations of their deaths.
My grandmother survived the Khurbn through escape and evacuation with her mother and sisters to the ancestral lands of the Udmurt people. Just three years ago, a key elder in the Udmurt nation self-immolated in protest over the colonial language policies of the Russian state.
These are resonances we feel rather than summarise. How can we be asked to not compare when our bodies, our instincts, our hearts do, in many directions at once? I fear that too often the theft of comparison becomes the theft of shared recognition, the theft of mirrors, that is bridges.
I struggle with memory, because I struggle with injustice, with mass death, with the multiplicity of horrors surrounding us. We are commanded to remember, following Heschel, because we must strive to never normalise the present, to never stop surprising ourselves with joy or adjusting ourselves to horror. Our memorious amazement before what was, is and could be may be what can save us, especially from the worst trajectories of trauma.
Against the constrictions of cruelty, living memory can jolt us towards liberation. In these times, I’m jolted by an old mayse (story) of Yekutiel Halberstam, the Klausenberger rebbe, who lost his beloved wife and ten children in the Holocaust. Asked about the horrors he had lived through, he said it could have been even worse. ‘What could be worse than the Holocaust?’, asked the puzzled followers. “It would be worse if we were the killers," he replied.'
May we all continue to be challenged, humbled and stretched open by memory, and the blessed possibilities left by our ancestors.
There is no conclusion here. Perhaps, I can only leave with a glimpse of hope, a reminder that you cannot bury what exceeds, what spills, what lives. Today, after almost three decades of conversations with my grandfather travelling the homelands of the past, today like a patient rain finally unashamed of drought, he offered me two new names. Now they are verbs.