Excerpt and images from Chocolates from Tangier: A Holocaust replacement child’s memoir of art and transformation
by Jana Zimmer
Schwer ist, a Yid zu sein. I don’t speak Yiddish, but I understand this phrase. It means, in plain English, “It’s hard to be a Jew.” In the aftermath of the reciprocal rocket and bomb assaults between Israel and Hamas in May 2021, and the explosions of anti-Semitic rage in our streets, and around the world, I am questioning, yet again, where I belong. Historical context and even facts are fluid, apparently, so I turn again to mining my parents’ stories for their wisdom, and to review my own story, in relation to theirs.
My grandfather was a Kohn, so I have chosen to believe that, regardless of my ambivalence toward religious prescriptions, my genetic and historical connection to Palestine must go back to the Iron Age, at least. In the Jewish biblical tradition, all Kohanim are direct descendants of Aharon, Moses’s brother, the original Koh(e)n (Hebrew: כֹּהֵן, [ko’ (h)en] “priest”). But my sense of genealogical entitlement is challenged, as soon as it arises in me, by the equally ancient tradition of the patrilineal line of succession, which holds that this special priestly status can only be transmitted through the males of the tribe. This is incongruous because, in folklore at least, the connection to being Jewish flows through the mother. I am only an old Jewish woman. Not as old as Sarah, when she birthed Isaac, but old. This gender problem, and the sense of simultaneously being blessed, and cursed, are among the many contradictions that have made it difficult for me to permanently fix an identity—or even a geographical location—for myself as a Jew in the world. This, and the fact that I do not fully belong anywhere as the only daughter of two Holocaust survivors, a refugee from Communism, and an immigrant twice over, myself.
I have never felt the pull of political Zionism. I was born less than two years before the founding of the “modern” Jewish state and raised with a vaguely comforting notion of Israel as a refuge for Jews, a place I have a Right of Return to, if necessary. My mother had been a Zionist as a young woman but gave up on the idea of emigrating when other Jews returned to Europe, in the late 1920s, disillusioned with the difficulty of the pioneer life in the inhospitable swamps and deserts of British Mandatory Palestine. Not to mention the murderous threat from Arabs—as they were then called, and called themselves—hell-bent on driving the Jews out of Palestine, beginning a hundred years ago.
No one—or hardly anyone but Jews with long memories—talks anymore about the Arab riots in Jaffa in 1921, or the massacre of sixty-seven Jews in Hebron in August 1929, and other places where returning Jews had lived on land that had been sold back to them—at market rates—by Arabs a century before. I don’t mention these facts to justify anything or anyone now; I just feel despair that they have been erased entirely from the current narrative. “Why do some people have the power to remember, while others are asked to forget?” A Palestinian-American lawyer said this, but everyone who hears it, thinks it is about them.
My own mother gave this history little attention in her life manuscript, where she alludes to “very difficult times” for Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s. I don’t know if she was aware that the alleged instigator of the 1929 anti-Zionist pogrom, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who had been arrested and then pardoned by the British, was appointed Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921. He had gone into exile after the Jaffa riots of 1936, but he went on, in about 1941, to meet with the Nazis in Berlin to develop a scheme to eliminate the Jews from Palestine entirely, once the genocide in Europe was completed. Some historians have asserted that he was particularly close to Eichmann, and Himmler. It is undisputed that the Nazis had a special unit planned, called “Einsatzgruppe Ägypten,” to exterminate the Palestinian Jews. The timing and extent of the Mufti’s “suggestions,” to his German hosts in Berlin, and of his involvement with the Nazis have both been vigorously debated, but there can be little doubt about his own endgame: expulsion or death to the Palestinian Jews.
“Nazi Antisemitism & Islamist Hate” by Jeffrey Herf, Tablet, July 5, 2022
My mother wrote:
“I have to mention now that (around 1926) when I was about 14-15, I started to drift more toward Zionism, my group of friends also changed. I preferred the company of older people and by that, I mean young adults, whom I found more interesting to listen to. I learned Hebrew and, had it not been for the very strong family ties, I might have given very serious thoughts to going to Palestine. I also had at that time a friend who, with her older brother, did go to live on a kibbutz; their parents were big Zionists and very enthusiastic about emigration. Absolutely not so in our family.
“However, both young people came back after a year, terribly disappointed and critical of the whole situation. That was around 1927, very difficult times for Palestine. I dropped my desire and thoughts of emigration right then and there, thinking that this way of life is not for everybody. Unfortunately, the years 1939-45 proved otherwise.”
The years 1939–1945 proved otherwise. In March 1939, after the Nazis annexed the Sudetenland, Hitler’s troops marched into Prague. Hitler’s demands for Czech territory had been viewed as unimportant—“a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.” Thus spoke Neville Chamberlain, as he capitulated, and set it all in motion.
My parents met and married soon after Liberation, in early 1946, each the sole survivor of their immediate family. They all had been deported, first to the Terezín ghetto, then to points east, to slave labor, or to death by the gas. My father lost his mother, his brother, his wife, his only child. My mother lost her mother, her only brother, and her husband. There were many, many more—cousins, uncles, aunts—all wiped out. I have the lists. But I am speaking here only of the nuclear core of the two families.
After the war, when they had barely settled into a new life together, with a new child—the repository of all their hopes for the future—the Communists took over Czechoslovakia in 1948, and my parents considered Palestine again. My father was on a business trip to New York when the coup occurred. My mother wrote:
“But in February of 1948 there were big changes in our government; the Communists took over and a small panic began. People with experience, who didn’t want to join the party and were afraid of closed border crossings, looked for any reasonable route of escape. I promptly started going to different consulates and Jewish organizations but found out that the best that could be done for Jana and me, Daddy still being in New York, would be to join a transport of camp survivors in Poland, which went through Italy to enter Palestine illegally. I wouldn’t be allowed to take anything with me, not even a handkerchief with an initial, because they were not sure under what name I would be traveling. It was understood that I could get off the train in Italy and eventually meet daddy there.”
My father’s reaction to this plan was negative:
“I spoke with Klara by phone, and she told me that the only way she could get out would be with a transport of Jews from Poland to Palestine. She could join the transport illegally but only to Italy. No money, no baggage, without any belongings and in Italy she would be on her own. Without any money or visa to another country, even without a passport with one-and-a-half-year-old Jana, we both said no. I promised to be back in a day or two.”
Back in June 1944, my father had been duped by the Germans into leaving his first wife and daughter behind in the Terezín Ghetto, to “volunteer” to build a “new family camp,” where it was promised that Kitty and Ritta would be allowed to join him, and that conditions would be better. Fresh air. Food. The “new family camp” was in fact the Auschwitz death camp, where a few months later, Kitty and Ritta both were gassed. So, it is understandable that my father would not willingly agree to a separation from his new family. Apart from this, he was a confirmed anti-Zionist, and an atheist. He would not have gone to Israel of his own volition except as a desperate last resort, which it almost was. It took many months to secure a place of refuge, and to make clandestine arrangements to go. The Canadian visas came in May 1948 via my father’s friend Vogel, in New York. No doubt money changed hands. Once again, the United States did not welcome us. We landed instead in Halifax, on the ironically named ship “Samaria,” in the dead of winter 1948, about six months after the State of Israel had been declared to exist. To this day, I cannot stand not to know exactly where my passport is. I would like to have two, or more, just in case.
I was raised with my father’s disdain for everything to do with religion and Zionism. He would never voluntarily set foot in a synagogue, let alone pay to join as a member, and my mother did not dare to do it without him. On those rare occasions when I attended religious services or a social club at the synagogue with friends growing up in Montreal, I dutifully put coins in the blue collection box—donations I was assured would be used to plant trees in the “empty” desert of Palestine—without much thought to the politics of what that support represented.
We were shown pictures of the new trees. I felt I was doing good deeds. I was twelve.
In Montreal, we used to receive packages of Jaffa oranges from Israel. My only surviving cousin, Peter—who spent the first six months of his life as one of the youngest prisoners in Terezín—had been taken from our family home in Kroměříž, Moravia, to Haifa by his mother in 1949. I know for certain that packages were sent from us to Israel, because they—I was told—were living in greater hardship than we were as new immigrants in Montreal. Life was even harder there, my mother said.
I remember how sweet the oranges smelled. I had no idea until I went to Israel in 1995 where Jaffa was, what it represented, or that Jaffa oranges were evidently first cultivated in the nineteenth century by Palestinian Arab farmers. As a child, putting my coins in the donation box for Israel at the synagogue, I had been led to believe that all of Palestine, before 1948, had been an arid, empty wasteland, and it was not until the Zionists came that the desert began to bloom. This, like every other categorical statement, was only partly true. There are the thousand-year-old olive trees and the oranges to consider.
When Peter’s wife, Hagar, died, I went to their house in Northern California to join him for the last day of the Shiva, the week-long mourning period. Peter brought out a beige jacket my mother had sent him when he was a teenager in Haifa. He told me he had been very proud of receiving a gift from Canada and he had kept it for over six decades. It was still in pristine condition. He had been told this gift had come from his Aunt “Klari,” but he was never told, until two weeks before he came to California to study, as a twenty-year-old, that his father had died in Sachsenhausen, that he had been adopted, or how he was related to us. The silence about the Holocaust in his new family in Israel had been complete.
I don’t remember thinking much about Israel as a young adult. I wasn’t very interested in Peter’s life in Israel. I never questioned why he was my only cousin. In college, I had deliberately moved away from anything connected to Judaism. It didn’t seem to matter to my parents. At nineteen, I had married an American. I was looking for security. I was eight months’ pregnant in June of 1967, and feeling quite vulnerable, physically, when I heard on my car radio about the Arab attack on Israel. I think it was the first time I actively became afraid as a Jew of what might happen if the war were lost. Somehow my own safety was still tied up with what happened over there. I didn’t share this fear with anyone, and it was not on my mind much for the twenty years after that.
My mother finally gave herself permission to visit Israel for the first and only time in 1985, the year after my father’s death. She brought along my son, her only grandson, the trip a gift for his eighteenth birthday. When she returned, she described viewing the parades at the “Jewish” Olympics, choking back tears. “It was beautiful to see so many Jews together, marching, and not to the gas.” My mother died peacefully and safely in her own bed in October 2000. She never knew her great-grandchildren, who were born three weeks before 9/11. They are twins: the boy was named Max for the compassionate American soldier who gave my mother a gift of chocolates when his unit liberated the Mauthausen concentration camp, in May of 1945. Max scoffs at religion, like my father did. His sister, Sophia, goes to synagogue to stand on the bimah and chant the prayers I still do not understand, on Rosh Hashanah. I go for Yizkor. My mother would have been so proud of them. But I can’t dwell on what my mother missed. So much has happened since her death, to the world and to the Jews, that I am grateful she did not live to see.
My only trip to Israel occurred in 1995, the era of the Oslo Peace Accords, when I believed that peace and reconciliation were around the corner. We toured the Golan Heights, in what was billed as a “Peace Tour,” with American journalists and academics—and I understood, viscerally, for the first time how it might have felt to be living in the valley below, in constant fear of being shelled by the Syrian army, before the Six Day War in 1967. We drove through the West Bank to reach the kibbutz in the Golan. I am embarrassed to admit that until that trip, I hadn’t understood that the “West Bank” I had read about referenced the bank of the Jordan River, and that Jerusalem was only a ten-minute drive from the Jordanian border, in a slow-moving tank. Two dimensional maps cannot tell the whole story.
Being physically present in that topography woke me up. I found myself taking sides. Was I a daughter of Zion, after all? But still, I was not a full convert to orthodoxy: I had compassion for the Israelis who had settled the Golan, they were the good, old fashioned labor Zionists. Real kibbutzniks, like my mother would have been. They had worked the land. We decided after a single day trip that they should have the right to stay. But I had contempt for the religiously inspired settlements elsewhere, in Gaza and in the West Bank. The Orthodox in general made me feel uncomfortable, and ashamed.
Despite the tears of identification that flowed as I stood before the Western Wall—relegated to the “women’s side”—I knew I would never exercise my own “right of return.” Even then, I could feel how soul crushing it must be to live in a constant state of alert, to not be able to breathe freely, to have to harden one’s heart against compassion for the Other, to have to listen to prescriptions from people who had never been there, chanting simplistic demands, meaningless slogans.
But I had fallen in love with Jerusalem. I hoped vaguely that a solution would be found, and that Jerusalem could be shared by the three Abrahamic religions. I wondered how many people know what the 1937 Peel Commission map looked like, which proposed the British retain control of the city. It also gave substantial land to the Palestinians. And I wonder if there are any regrets in the Arab world for having rejected the next version of the map made in 1947 by the U.N.
These warring maps remind me that Holocaust denial began almost simultaneously with the establishment of Israel, when the Arab States objected, in 1952, to the first German reparations programs. They wanted that money to be paid to Palestinians who had been dispossessed in the 1948 war. That would have been a good idea, but the other European colonizers who carved up the Middle East in the nineteenth century also had responsibility. Still, the Arabs shouldn’t have worried that the survivors might get rich. My parents never saw a penny in reparations payments until 1971. My mother, who applied, was required to prove a mental disability directly connected to her experience in the camps and the German psychiatrists didn’t believe her. At one point they classified my mother’s trauma at “only” 23 percent disabled, when the threshold was 25 percent, or some such ridiculous number. The small payment they finally did receive did nothing to relieve my father of the nightly dreams, for forty years until his death, that he was back in Auschwitz.
I went along vaguely hoping for a change for the better for about fifteen years after our visit. Things shifted inside me again, in January 2009 when I read an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times written by the propaganda minister of Hamas. It stated: “Without debating here the fictive, existential right of the Zionist state, which Israel, precisely, would the West have us recognize? … Is it the Israel that illegally settles its citizens on other peoples’ land, seizes water sources and uproots olive trees? …” In response, I made the body of artwork I called “Impasse.”
“Fictive, existential right…”?
Something insidious in the sentence structure made me feel like I was being waterboarded. Unable to breathe, unable to find words, other than, “No, No, NO!” I began to make digital collages, using my original monotypes as backgrounds, and incorporating historical maps, text from newspaper articles, and altered family photographs—in particular, a childhood photo of my uncle Fritz holding a toy gun, circa 1916, and a record of his arrival in Bergen-Belsen on February 14, 1945.
By putting Fritz into work about Palestine, I think I was trying to pull his memory and his spirit out of his miserable final months in Bergen-Belsen and Sachsenhausen. Or it could have been simply the fact that his face represented a generic child of Semitic origin, which could have been Arab just as easily as Jew. Ishmael and Isaac.
I wrote in the gallery notes about the “Impasse” exhibit: “…our inherited memory of the founding of the State of Israel ignores some inconvenient facts about those other Semites then unhappily sharing the land with the Palestinian Jews. Yet, the stories of those advocating for Palestinian statehood and a right to return, despite their relative nearness in time to the shock of dispossession, are not dissimilar in their essential elements from the Jewish story throughout history. In the end, there are harsh truths to be faced on both sides of this conflict, and perhaps the greatest obstacle to moving forward is the fact that the political agenda of each people depends on continuing to deny the narrative, experience, trauma and memory of the Other. This work suggests some of the ways this denial manifests. How to create acceptance is another project.”
I later placed the oversized, ambiguously Semitic boy, dominating the three-thousand-year-old olive trees, in a landscape vertically divided, and underscored by my father’s quote: “Nobody knows when his time will come.” A version of this image of Fritz was exhibited in the Jerusalem Biennale in 2015. I was somewhat anxious about how this piece would be received, and I was surprised that there appeared to be less hostility to critical thinking about Israel, in Israel, than in the United States a decade ago. At least I did not get the sense that there was any interest in censoring artwork. The title, “A Land with No People, for a People with No Land,” is a quote misattributed to Golda Meir. It did reflect the belief system that I was given as a child, and that I was shocked to learn, as an adult, had been quite untethered from facts on the ground.
What is most painful to me, at this late stage of my life, for my own sake as well as for my Jewish grandchildren, however much they see their Jewishness as a choice, is that just as overt acts of Jew-hatred have multiplied around the world, Jews have been increasingly isolated, excluded, as unworthy of partnership in the common struggle for a more just and equitable world. Jews are being systematically shunned by advocates of intersectionality. This is extremely dangerous, and I am frustrated that people who I used to believe were allies cannot bring themselves to dig into history deeply enough to understand why.
Jana Zimmer was born in 1946, the only child of two Holocaust survivors from Czechoslovakia, who fled with them as a refugee from the communists to land in Canada days after her second birthday. Zimmer became a collage/mixed media artist after her mother came to live with her in 1995. In her artwork, through text and image, she explores issues of memory, exile, and responsibility. Her recent art memoir, Chocolates from Tangier (Doppelhouse, 2022), was nominated for the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Award for Jewish Literature. She currently resides in Santa Barbara, California.
Image List, in descending order of appearance. All works digital collage except where noted.
“There was room for both” (2023)
“The collaborator” (2009)
Early Tzedakah Box, circa 1930
“Night 3” (2023)
“Fritz, Prisoner # 89525” (2010)
“Ishmael and Isaac” (2009)
“A Land With No People for a People with No Land” (2015), Collage on wood, 11 x 11 inches
The Nomadic Journal 