I began my life as a white girl in the segregated South, and I’m likely to end it as a Jewish woman in Berlin. Lest you suppose I’m tracing an arc that strides the space from perpetrator to victim, let me complicate the story. The question of whether Jews should count as white people was not quite settled in the South where I was born. “There’s an old saying,” Reverend Wheeler Parker Jr., who was Emmett Till’s cousin, told me. “If I was Catholic and I lived in the South, I’d be worried. If I was Jewish, I’d be packing up. If I was black, I’d be gone.”
When I was eight years old, my best friend solemnly declared she could no longer play with me. We had a lot in common: a preference for building tree houses over playing with Barbie dolls, a love of books involving games in the woods that often revolved around searching for a door to Narnia. Still, she ended our friendship after hearing that the Jews had killed Jesus. The temple where my family worshipped had been firebombed, and most of the Jewish community kept their heads down. I am proud that my mother did not. My parents had moved from Chicago to Atlanta in 1955, shortly before my birth. My mother’s involvement in the campaign to desegregate Atlanta’s public schools was sufficient to earn her a photo in Look magazine and a number of late-night calls from the Klan.
If we were not considered to be perpetrators, neither did we consider ourselves victims. Jews had been slaves in the land of Egypt and, as such, were obliged to liberal solidarity with other oppressed peoples. That was the major tenet of my mother’s homespun theology. Much later, it must have played a role in my decision to study philosophy, and to find my way within philosophy to the work of Immanuel Kant, that dry Prussian professor who wrote the metaphysics of universal justice. It was Kant who insisted that all rational beings should obey the same moral law, and not even God is exempt.
None of my family was a victim of a concentration camp or, as far as I know, a pogrom. Safely landed in Chicago by the early twentieth century, my grandparents never spoke of the Eastern Europe they’d left behind. On the contrary, the only grandfather I knew was fiercely American. The first in his family born outside of Odessa, he had a touch of Yiddish accent, but he adored Teddy Roosevelt, visited all the national parks, and served in both world wars. His love of Lincoln was so strong that when he came to visit his Atlanta grandchildren, he taught us all the words to “Marching Through Georgia,” which we blithely sang in an open convertible, oblivious of any impact it may have had on those Atlantans disinclined to celebrate the march that burned their city to the ground.
Today, it’s easy to smile: no wonder I never felt at home in the place.