Zenia Larsson Excerpt

What then is my Judaism? A natural fact, an inherited characteristic, or the sum of all life experiences? I used the phrase ‘fellow believers.’ But my fellowship does not rest on religion. Honestly—I know nothing about it. In my childhood home one didn’t celebrate religious festivals; one considered priests, prelates, and rabbis to belong among the blackest reactionaries who delayed and inhibited the liberation of the working class. That we were Jews was as natural as fighting together with other workers from all countries for our fundamental human rights.

Socialism, Jewish cultural autonomy, international solidarity— these were the first steps out to the yard that leads to the street that leads to—the middle of a hostile and anti-Semitic world.

Recently a young Jewish student asked me how I could consider myself a Jewish woman without the religious anchorage? In our religion, in our tradition and history lies the foundation for our entire existence, doesn’t it?

I have never asked myself that question. It does not imply any complications. Except in those cases when I meet deeply believing people of all persuasions and I become aware that I don’t understand their language, that I am mute before the mysticism of belief. Often I am filled with impatience and anger before such trusting confidence in the mercy, love, and wisdom of the divine power, and in humankind’s need of support from an imperceptible higher being after what has happened—and is still happening!

I am who I am—and as such I have always accepted myself. The people I belong to have built their own country and the percentage of believers is probably not much different from that of other countries. That a small group in Israel still discusses who is a Jew and who isn’t does not affect me.

I am the one I am. That is what I said after I arrived here.

I am here, I added a bit later. A human among humans.

Because the society, too, has accepted me as such, and that was the most transforming intoxication in the first few years. The kaleidoscope had once again been turned around and had shown a new life pattern: art is boundless and you make your own demands. I am I—first and foremost an individual, life is a bountiful horn of plenty, time without limit and my life was mine.

And I was no longer alone. Friends came to my and Per-Axel’s little nook at the art academy, and like me they had been washed ashore on this strange coast by chance—and we had a common language. Around us there were artist friends: sculptors, painters, and graphic designers—and we too had a common language. The impenetrable national walls from childhood fell apart, I was a citizen of the world, a cosmopolitan who lived in the middle of a cosmopolitan microworld, and with the power of self-centeredness I gave myself moral rights to suppress the past and forget.

Because my parents’ world of international solidarity lay in ruins, because the process of suppression continued out of pure self-preservation—and because, for the first time in my life, I could breathe freely in a society where I had learned to feel at home.

I turned my back on politics, didn’t read any papers, didn’t listen to the radio—Europe had nothing to do with me, the Jewish people’s problems were solved with the birth of Israel and its grandiose progress—I was above all responsible for myself as an artist and human being.

The testimony I carried disappeared as I drowned myself in my clay sculpting—the flight was complete.

Until I dared to look around ten years later. Because no matter how far you run away, you can’t run away from yourself; it is only shifting life experiences that will change the kaleidoscope’s pattern—even when loyalties and responsibilities expand. Deep down you are who you are. And any phony change will soon collapse in the face of reality’s own laws.

Time was ripe for the war-weary world. A debate flared up in the newspapers about what had happened to mankind under the Nazi boot—and about those prisoners who had managed to escape from the incomprehensible nightmare—and about those millions who didn’t.

But the debate did not concern me—the people who wrote did not know, did not understand, and in their ignorance a terrifying danger lay hidden! If they did not know, or understand—then what had happened could happen again even though Israel had already existed for years and even though the admiration for the country, which had made the desert bloom, was limitless.

Translated by Lena Karlström and Peter Stenberg.