Most of my dreams and plans had been tied up with Father. He was the one who brought home the great travel books, the exciting adventure stories, the boyish surprises. One evening he took me to the Roxy and we saw Charles Lindbergh fly over the Atlantic in The Spirit of St. Louis. Another time we went to the Castor and saw Danny Kaye in Up in Arms. I really liked Danny Kaye, who in a way was one of us and whose real name was Daniel Kaminsky. Father looked like Danny Kaye. Especially when he laughed.
Father was our tie to the outside world, to friends and fellow workers, to grand dreams and wild plans. But it was an attachment connected to the most fragile of foundations. And when the foundation broke, our ties broke with it. A few months later the remainder of the family, a widow and her two children, left Södertälje for Stockholm. After yet another year, with our suitcases barely unpacked, we ascended.
How far down were we? We were probably a bit more rootless than most people around us, but we weren’t really in such a bad way. Our grief was great, but grief can be overcome. The ties broken could have been mended and remended. Many that we already had would prove to be for life. In our case, emigration was not a final desperate choice but one of many possibilities. Materially and socially, Sweden actually seemed to promise more.
But who has never dreamed about beginning a new life in a higher place? Swedes with apparently deep roots also emigratedto Australia or the United States. Restlessness was not a Jewish monopoly, and at this particular juncture of my life I was restless for other than historical reasons. Mother was getting reports from her Jewish neighbors that I had taken up with a bad crowd down at the kiosk near the Hägersten subway station. Which in one sense was true, but not really. We were thirteen and in the seventh grade and smoking on the sly and discovering our bodies and fondling our curiosity, in the expectation that something different and better was on its way. On the other hand, we weren’t all that certain what that something might be. And we were even more uncertain about what we actually had. Sweden was already pregnant with that great existential child who was to mature a few years later and bring forth a whole new generation of rootless beings. Of course nobody saw it coming back then, but it must surely have had some impact on a young boy’s dreams and yearnings. In any case, there were very few of those expectations that I could not rather painlessly transfer to a new country and a new life.
So when all is said and done, maybe it wasn’t the low starting point that seemed to make our ascent so steep. Perhaps it was the height after all. We were supposed to climb to the top of the collected dreams of the West, where the air was so thin that you could see whatever you wished to see. To the mountains of Zion, the gates of Jerusalem, the fields of Saron, the house of David, the walls of Jericho, the garden of Gethsemane, the deserts of Judea. To a meadow flowing not only with milk and honey but with millennial dreams of divine justice and human redemption. To the mother of Utopia, the cradle of Messianism, the soul of Salvation, the fulfillment of prophecy. This was the Promised Land, and no other land had ever promised so much, to so many, for so long.
Translated by Peter Stenberg and Lena Karlström in collaboration with the author.