In the year 1905 my paternal great-grandmother, a Jewess from Austria-Hungary, left her homelandâalthough perhaps âfledâ would be a better wordâwith nothing but a suitcase, the clothes on her back, and the potential promise of finding work with a distant cousin who had been living in the slums of Victorian Glasgow in Scotland since the 1890s.
During that time she married my great-grandfather, an Irish Catholic immigrant who lived in the notorious âRat Pitsââso called because the Irish (and therefore inherently Catholic) residents âbred like ratsââand worked as a boat smuggler (meaning he smuggled people and other commodities into Scotland from Ireland on a boat, he was not in fact a smuggler of boats), a shoe maker, a wood carver and general jack of all trades master of none, with a stereotypical love of drink and a violent temper to go with it. But he provided for her and didnât force her into sex work like so many girls her age were, so she forgave a great many things that would no longer be forgiven and had lots of children, many of whom died.
Dad tells me he remembers her âsingingâ their names and lighting candles at specific times, but only when his grandfather was âoutâ (smuggling, or visiting another woman, he never elaborated on this) because she sang her prayers in Yiddish and theyâd spent many years trying to hide her Jewishness.
Being a Catholic in the turbulent streets of Glasgow where Protestant faith is still practiced militantly in some areas, was troublesome, but it was infinitely less trouble than being Jewish during the years that would lead up to two world wars. So she hid behind his Catholicism and his large family, and watched as the world turned against her and her people once more. And despite her pale skin and bright eyes and her passing status as an equal among the Irish matriarchs of the slums, they still woke to blood smeared over their front door more than once, or were spat on in the streets. She told my father, jokingly, it was her nose, though to look at photos youâd never notice she was different from anyone else. That was the joke.
After her husband died she became unapologetic about her Jewishness. She spoke Yiddish at home and made sure my father, who had been living with her from the age of seven, knew some words too. He was fourteen years old when he heard her âsingâ his motherâs name and watched her tear the clothes she was wearing, having now outlived all of her children. She outlived many of her grandchildren too. And when no one was left to make the meal of condolence, my motherâa gentile girl from the neighboring streetâfound out, she tried her best to make one.
Dad tells me it was largely inedible, not least of all because it wasnât kosher, but for his Maw (Scots slang for mother) it was one of her first memories of someone not of the faith acknowledging her Jewishness with kindness. She was sixty years old and had been living in Glasgow for forty five years.
And she spent the majority of that time forced to move from slum to slum by her faith, until eventually in post World War Two Glasgow, the local authorities either had to dig mass graves or deal with the conditions of the poor and chose to be merciful and built better housing instead. She was eventually moved to a housing estate where she could look out and see a garden rather than squalor and degradation and no one charged her extra rent because everyone knows people like her have secret stashes of money and will pay anything not have their windows broken or pigs blood slashed over the door. The history books never tell you that sort of thing. They only tell you about the selective moments in history when tyrants had the audacity to threaten other tyrants, and only then does mass discrimination, abject poverty and genocide through the former become an unpalatable evil that needs to be stopped.
Nothing much has changed.
She lived long enough to hear about Holocaust deniers and my father tells me, spat their names with all the vitriol of an ancient curse held dormant in the fires of the earth. And when she was buried, the man who cut her tombstone informed my father it probably wasnât a good idea to put a Star of David on the stone, because those were the stones that were the most often attacked, the graves desecrated and the grass salted so nothing would grow.
And this is no ancient history. This was in the UK, in 1979. This was less than forty years ago. And still whenever my father visits he will find some form of vandalism enacted on her tombstone. Itâs her name you see, even in death it doesnât sound right.
Margarethe Ingrid Fehrenbach Patton. Or âMaggie Pattonâ as she was known for most of her life, never hearing her own name save for the few times she went back to the degradation of the Gorbals, usually when someone had died and there were traditions to be kept. And forty years on some dull and depraved bastard still feels the need to paint a swastika on her grave in neon paint or tip it over and smash the urn of flowers, because not even death is free of persecution.
And this is not just my family history, it is many family histories told over and over again, and I get to recount it from the safety of 2015, with my gentile name and baptized gentile faith.
So yes, it matters that we are seeing a new wave of antisemitism, online and in the physical world. It matters that there are blogs being set up for the purpose of sending images of dead bodies and gore to Jewish people and their friends. It matters that those people are losing friends because itâs the only way to not also be harassed and retain their own freedom of communication the way they like it. It matters that people feel the need to ask what is wrong with Nazism in the same way one might ask what is wrong with a little rain. It matters that Jewish characters in popular media are stripped of their ethnicity and faith and made not only into Neo-Nazi sympathizers, but volunteers to a Neo-Nazi regime (if you canât work out why this is horrifying, here). It matters that a family in Houston Texas found the mezuzah of their door violated with the symbol of a Nazi swastika. It matters so much because this is not the past, nor is it some distant land you can pretend you can neither see nor hear. We live in the age of constant communication, we are no longer blind, except to things we do not wish to see.
We cannot pretend that horrific acts of violence are not enacted against others on a daily basis, because if we do so then we are enabling these acts. You cannot stand silent against hatred, otherwise you enable things like this:
Itâs happening in the way in which people insist on calling the black people being murdered by police âthugsâ while white protesters are cited the rules of Baseball (three strikes and youâre benched with a fine or jail time, not murdered), itâs happening every time someone says âwell maybe they shouldnât name their children ghetto names" as a means to dehumanize another human being, itâs happening whenever someone cites free speech in the protection of hate crimes. It happens every time you think âwell itâs not happening to me so it canât be that badâ and close your eyes and make the horror of it all into a mere inconvenience interrupting your enjoyable browsing time between mainlining netflix and cat gifs.
Itâs happening. And we donât have the excuse of ignorance to hide behind, itâs there.
And I donât know what the fuck to do. I can block and report all the live long day, but it doesnât solve the issue of tumblr and other social media platforms being like âjust ignore it, dont feed the trollsâ, like sticking a band aid over a gaping sore in need of urgent surgery in the hope that it will somehow go away. You might think someone receiving gory images and threats is not the same as an act of physical violence, but it is undoubtedly violence. Itâs people painting pigs blood over my Great Grandmas door and telling her she doesnât belong in the country that she thought was safe and being told snidely to be thankful it wasnât worse.
To you it might be petty and mildly distressing, but to another person itâs salted earth and the promise that not even death is safe.
And you are either complicit in this, or you are against it.
Iâd say sorry for reblogging this again, but I just had to read Nazi apologism with my own two eyeballs in the year 2017 and Iâm this close to hauling off with an axe.
I reiterate my previous statement from two years ago: you are either against these atrocities, or you are complicit in them. Decide.
[edited to fix the use of language in original post, if you reblogged this earlier, please delete and reblog without the unintentional use of a slur word used to describe sex workers.]Â
