Palestinians collect remaining belongings from the rubble of destroyed houses after Israeli attack Gaza City, Gaza, on March 25, 2024. (Yasser Qudaih)
Reading Jenny Erpenbeck’s remarkable novel, Kairos, I was struck by the moment when one of the characters was reading another’s Stasi records which were made available after the regime change that followed the Wall coming down between East and West Berlin on November 9th, 1989.
I had been in East Germany in April 1989 when I had made a pilgrimage to the Death Camps of Eastern Europe. We landed in Berlin and first visited Ravensbruck, the woman’s concentration camp which having been liberated by the Soviet Army remained in East Germany’s domain. Although the newspapers at that time were speaking of opposition to communism and the barbed wire delineating Hungary’s borders was being dismantled and repurposed on individual farms, and strikes and demonstrations were destabilizing Poland, the atmosphere was still very grim in East Berlin when we were there.
We had gone through Check Point Charlie and though it seemed impossible, a gray smog enveloped us as we walked to the nearby hotel, breathing air entirely different from the clear breaths we had taken the night before in a B&B art gallery in West Berlin, a very few miles away. From our hotel window, we watched a platoon of soldiers pass in front of the hotel on the hour.
We had been given the name of a friend of a friend and had brought a dozen jazz LPs which we gifted him after 10 pm at night, in an entirely open area in the middle of a very large park, where he hoped we would not see anyone spying on him and he could not be recorded without awareness. We asked if he thought the Wall was coming down in response to Gorbachev’s introducing perestroika and having stated that “there is no model of socialism to be imitated by all.” Our new friend did not answer, silently indicating that he was very pessimistic about the future. And then, the Wall did come down. But, I wonder, though scrutiny was not as sophisticated as it is now, were we observed after all? Are we noted in his Stasi records?
I am fascinated by the ability to read one’s own or others’ Stasi records made during the regime by the dreaded secret police. No surprise then that Erpenbeck’s novel should have taken me to Christa Wolf, the renowned, dissident writer, who when the Wall fell was confronted with her own Stasi record. In City of Angels, which documents nine months spent in Los Angeles, she speaks of learning that she had briefly been, as a student, an informant for the Stasi, had apparently, though she claimed she had not remembered, participated in a few conversations about colleagues and had given one written document before, seemingly, she had desisted; meanwhile her own surveillance was contained in 42 volumes. I wished I had been able to sit alongside her as she read through these notes, the record of the information she had given and the pages and pages of being observed by hosts of informers who the Stasi manipulated into such activities. But also, did she not exhibit extraordinary courage having been coerced into informing and then refusing to continue and then becoming a well known dissident writer?
A similar dossier, compiled by the Stasi on Timothy Garton Ash, The File, a young writer who had taken up residence in East Germany “to understand tyranny and freedom” and was writing for West German newspapers, “was a meticulous record of his life. Ash said, “For me, unlike for the Stasi, there is a very clear line between working secretly for a government and working (sometimes secretly) as a writer. … As the man from Speka, I was a spy for “intelligence,” in that older sense. A spy for the reader.”
Though I have obtained my own FBI records, my experience is not the same. The FBI records were essentially redacted, huge swaths of black covered almost every page. Names, places, anything that might identify the informants or reveal something about the FBI was withheld. Such was the same in the records a friend had requested about her father, who had been an FBI agent – very little revealed. The Stasi records, unlike the FBI, Freedom of Information Records, were complete and one could read what one had said, where one had been, who one was with, what they were wearing. Nothing and no one withheld, including comments, observations, impressions, details of all sorts. Even information about the informants and how they were recruited and controlled. Ultimately, my files only confirmed what I had suspected, that the police had followed me when I was suing the Board of Education for my job after being fired from a tenured teaching position for teaching an English unit on censorship, pornography and propaganda, and using a poem I had written to illustrate the significance of intent in literature, then bringing the student’s attention to another aspect of intent by focusing on sexual innuendo in advertising. Several years later, they had recorded my travels to Cuba and back. This was not news to me. I was not surprised by my files and how impersonal they were and the extent of the redaction. The Stassi files were revealed to serve the people after a Europe wide ‘velvet’ revolution while the FBI (and CIA) files are revealed reluctantly and are highly censored. The American agencies are still operative and do not want their internal structures and working mechanisms revealed. But what becomes clear is that every form of surveillance, the intimate and the dispassionate, is its own version of sinister.
Knowing it is occurring, knowing its implications and dangers, also asks us to consider how we will act, even so. These files ask us to ask what we would do under dangerous conditions when we are forced to choose between our deepest values and ethical beliefs and our own welfare, perhaps even survival, and / or discomfort in disrupting our familial arrangements, or maybe even something less ominous, an unwillingness to disturb our comfort zone.
In the last years, I have wondered increasingly how those living in Germany under Hitler and Nazi rule lived with what they knew was occurring to political prisoners, Roma people, homosexuals, mentally challenged people and Jews. How was it possible to look away or to cooperate? I wonder this as I see the direction this country is going having to tolerate book banning, violent responses to different sexual orientations, government control of women’s bodies, alarming curriculum restrictions from primary schools through universities, extreme violence through access to military weapons, and racism and prejudices of all sorts seeping from the unconscious of the citizenry into all aspects of government. Such conditions preceded the rise of fascism in Germany and and are recurring to one extreme or another across the globe. As if a plague. As if a virus. Jack Forbes an Indigenous scholar wrote a book, Columbus and Other Cannibals, in which he identified such a virus – he called it Wetiko. If you haven’t read the book, you probably want to, but perhaps you can imagine some of his analysis from the title.
A common phrase: We don’t know, do we, how we will act under such circumstances…? For some the restraints are economic, for some they are relational, for some fear and for some disinterest, obliviousness…
We don’t know, do we, how we will act under such circumstances…. and anyway … it can’t happen here, right?
I look back on my Facebook postings, and see that the first call for a ceasefire was on October 9, 2023, as Israel’s response to the horrific massacre was already looming as extreme. These photos appeared in the Israeli publication, +972, written by Israelis and Palestinians, started by Michal Omer-man. They knew what was coming; we knew what was coming. Asking for a ceasefire was considered extreme and so the slaughter has been on-going as we continue to send munitions — (Today the Biden Administration authorized the transfer to Israel of 2000 lb bombs and other weapons. Washington Post.)
The aftermath of an Israeli air strike on the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City, Gaza, October 10, 2023. (Mohammed Zaanoun)
Palestinians search the Khan Yunis municipality building after an Israeli air strike, Gaza Strip, October 10 2023. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)
Palestinians inspect the massive destruction caused by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City’s Al-Rimal district, October 10, 2023. (Mohammed Zaanoun)
This month I met someone whose grandfather’s company significantly supported Hitler’s war effort. A subcamp of the concentration camp was set up on the premises. “But,” the man said, “my grandfather was not a Nazi. He didn’t join the Party.” What was I as a Jewish woman whose father lost most of his family in the Holocaust to understand or feel?
There is frequently great anger and outrage when our behavior is compared to Nazi Germany in World War II. But, no less than 32,552 Palestinians have been killed and 74,980 wounded in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7. Attacks take place regularly at hospitals. Children are dying of imposed starvation. Aid vehicles are being attacked as as the hungry gather for the possibility of food rations. This horror is a consequence of the actions of the Israeli government, aided, abetted and militarily supplied by the US government. We are, I am, responsible.
I note my anxiety in writing this essay. It is my habit to write and rewrite obsessively, But, I wonder, is this more intense pattern I am observing today related to my unease in comparing our ways with Hitler’s ways and in writing these next words which have also been forbidden? I am hardly the only one to say this, people are in the streets, finally, saying this, but that does not make it easier. These words are taboo but if we allow the circumstances to continue unnamed they will be normalized and the world will suffer and decline inordinately because of our silence.
And so I say it with a broken heart – The war against the Gazans is committing genocide.
You understand, this is not said as an attack, this is said to stop it.
I want to note: Annelle Sheline and Josh Paul of the State Department have resigned over Gaza. Thank you.
When we look closely at the photos from October and the introductory photo from this March, we see that such is continuing to this day and understand that the war is also committing ecocide as do all contemporary wars. Grievously, we are not reigning in our ability to destroy Earth.
In Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel, Kairos, the actions of the state and the intimate actions between the two lovers ultimately mirror each other. When we get to the end, we understand that the thrust of the entire book is to reveal this pattern between the two. As I think about it, this is something of what I hoped to communicate in my essay, Personal Disarmament, Negotiating With the Inner Government, Tree, Essays and Pieces. We can not separate how we govern from who we are, nor who we are from how we govern. We are a reflection of the State, but the State is also a reflection of us. The divide we hope exists, against which we build a Wall, has no validity.
The moral harm that we and war are creating has no bounds. There is no future if we continue in this way.
I am so sorry – I say, hopelessly – to our descendants.
***
Please join us for the 25th Writers’ Intensive May 25-31 On the Land and On Zoom These times: Chaos and collapse cannot be dismissed — and at the same time, we detect undeniable spiritual presences, complex communications from more than humans and moments of heart rending beauty. A small circle of gifted and exceptional individuals, devoted to their writing, recognizing the dire conditions afflicting all living beings and thinking deeply about literature and how writing can serve these times and the future, will gather both on the land in Topanga, CA as well as on Zoom and form an intimate and conscious community
Please email Sarah at deenasassistant1222@gmail.com for more information.
The great Rabbi, Rebbe Nachman, told a story of the tainted wheat. The king’s advisors told him that the wheat for the following year was poisoned and anyone who ate it would go insane. But, they said, they had a sufficient portion for themselves which was safe and would allow them to govern the people. “No,” the king replied, “we will also eat the wheat but we will mark our foreheads so that when we look at each other we will know we are mad.”
We are all mad. We do not need to mark our foreheads to know this. The omnipresence of violence, individual and governmental, of war and torture, the extremity of the military budgets, and the devotion to discovering new and more powerful weaponry, different and more extreme poisons, the levels of distrust and the commitment to stirring up hate as means of attaining power are the unassailable signs.
The vicious, most terrifying massacre across Southern Israel by Hamas of hundreds of innocents, children, women, the elderly, and the savage bombardment in , the retaliation by Netanyahu and his cabal, reducing Gaza to dust and, again, killing innocents to the count perhaps of 15,000 are both the example and evidence that as a species we are inhabiting nightmare. Still, it is essential to find a path to the light through the embattled underground tunnels of our besieged minds.
It is as a gesture of hope or prayer that Hand to Hand has decided to reissue What Dinah Thought which was first published by Viking in 1989. It holds us responsible for our hearts and minds and asks us to imagine another way in the midst of the savagery and terror or because of these.
This is the Preface to the new edition:
This book was published 34 years ago, during the time of the first Intifada. Earlier, in the eighties, someone had asked me if I knew the Biblical story of my name and I began reading the Old Testament that had been given to me as a child and came upon the reference in the Glossary of Biblical Terms which is an epigraph to this book.
“Dinah, daughter of Jacob by Leah, was ravished by Shechem, a Hivite. For that reason, and with the help of a peculiarly low cunning, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s own brothers, revenged the insult.
“What Dinah thought of the whole matter is not recorded.”
***
And Dinah the daughter of Leah, which she bare unto Jacob, went out to see the daughters of the land. And when Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, prince of the country, saw her, he took her, and lay with her, and defiled her. And his soul cleaved unto Dinah the daughter of Jacob, and he loved the damsel, and spoke kindly unto the damsel. And Shechem spoke unto his father Hamor, saying, “Get me this damsel to wife.” …And Hamor the father of Shechem went out unto Jacob to commune with him. …And Hamor communed with them, saying, “The soul of my son Shechem longeth for your daughter: I pray you give her him to wife. And make ye marriages with us, and give your daughters unto us, and take our daughters unto you. And ye shall dwell with us: and the land shall be before you; dwell and trade ye therein, and get you possessions therein.”
***
If that had been the end of the story, perhaps we would be living differently now in kinship with each other, if the story hadn’t started with a rape, if Simeon and Levi had not gone against their father’s will and killed all the men to avenge their sister, if they had not ravaged and claimed the Hivites land, had not taken all the crops and the flocks of animals and the women as concubines.
The original motivation for the novel was to investigate this Biblical story, somehow still unacknowledged, the ancient core of the intergenerational conflict remaining very much in our collective DNA, the story which has not been mourned, for which amends have not been made, to see if the retelling of it in a new way, the reliving of it, even if only in the creative imagination, could offer healing to the terrible history which was (which is) once again exploding in violence.
This is, again, the motivation for re-issuing the book in the hope that it can inject a vision of possibility for this time.
Cover by Stephan Hewitt
I did not know then what I know today, when the circumstances were not nearly as horrific as they are now when we are engaged in unconscionable violence as those in power assert their desire to entirely eliminate the other no matter the damage to the innocent populations, including the children and the elderly. I say, we, above, as this is not a tribal dispute, but a most brutal war, immediately arising out of recalcitrant beliefs and prejudices that have global causes and consequences.
The Old Testament story resonates with the current combat, including rape which has become a weapon of war. Might the old story and those stories that evolved from it move toward resolution in the manner of the Hivites inviting the Israelites to live among them; they visioned the two peoples, whom I want to imagine now as Israelites and Palestinians, living together as one people.
In 1985, I had the opportunity to go to Israel/Palestine to visit the holy sites on behalf of the novel. I particularly wanted to visit the tomb of Joseph which is in Shechem, now known as Nablus, on the West Bank, even when there were dangers from both sides that made it impossible for a Jewish-American woman to travel there, particularly alone. But I was determined; Joseph was a dreamer, and I needed to be in his presence. Though we were separated by thousands of years, our stories were intermingling with each other. Inevitably, I or Joseph prevailed and my journey to Shechem/Nablus and to Israel was later chronicled in What Dinah Thought, an entirely different book emerging from the holy and besieged land than was first imagined.
What I came to understand through that pilgrimage, and the writing of it, was that the Jews and the Palestinians needed to see each other truly as they are, and if and when they did, love and appreciation would be inevitable. But if they continued to refuse the profound humanity of the other, and their equal needs for life and land, if they sought hegemony and domination rather than co-existence, then as their mutual inability to see the other worsened, the sieges and assaults would continue without safety for anyone, their grief and agony would persist and increase – as it has.
Some years ago two women, one Israeli, one Palestinian met in Los Angeles in a circle designed to create connection between the two peoples. After some meetings in which they spoke honestly to each other, each admitted that they had never seen the other, that the other had been entirely invisible to them as people, but not as enemies.
And so now, October, November, December 2023, even, or especially in the midst of such a war as is occurring, it is essential that we see the other, that we see whom we are killing although we could, if we allowed it, find deep alliances with each other.
In this novel, Dina Z, an American filmmaker is seeking to document the lives of people who dwell on ancient holy ground and to discover how that history affects them. She falls in love with a Palestinian activist and sees him and his people in ways that were not available to her before the ancient story of Dinah and Shechem was revived through their meeting.
I have an Israeli friend who, like Joseph, is a dreamer. And like the ancient texts, she dreams war and then she also dreams the antidotes to war. The old texts speak of war but they also speak of reconciliation, Hamor and Jacob, Jacob and Esau, Joseph in Egypt, and so on. Harm done, hurt inflicted, and then forgiven. It is this unlikely miracle of peacemaking, we must seek, even when it seems impossible, even when the urge to avenge and kill governs all reason.
The world has never been in such danger. We have become a species obsessed with developing technologies that destroy. Of the imminent danger to all life, Barry Lopez said in Horizon,
“… dramatic change in the near future seems to be in the offing, and if the species is to achieve its aspirations for justice, reduced suffering and transcendent life, and if it is to prevent the triumph of machinery that it so clearly fears, an unprecedented level of imagination is required.”
In this novel, the raped and the murdered, seeing who the other truly is, overcome the immediate horrors and meet in the heart. The reality is that the formerly innocent ones traumatized by current horrors world wide that result from our aggressions will ultimately become the leaders. Can we imagine that these ones, nevertheless, will also dream the antidote to war and become peacemakers? Can we imagine this? Are we willing to imagine this? When we are, the wars will be over.
At the end of the novel, Dinah asks Shechem, “Why isn’t there peace yet?”
This is the question we must all ask and for which we are all responsible.
***
Please accept What Dinah Thought as an offering to the times, to the ancestors, to history and the future. Though it seems so unlikely, may peace come, may it be created by our common efforts and hearts.
As I am overcome with grief for the violence against the Jews and Palestinians, not entirely between them, I am taken back to an early novel I wrote to explore that on-going relationship and conflict. In the late seventies, I was asked if I knew the story of my name. I opened the Bible my father had given me forty years before when I was a child and began to search the glossary. What I found astonished me.
“Dinah, daughter of Jacob by Leah, was ravished by Shechem, a Hivite. For that reason, and with the help of a peculiarly low cunning, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s own brothers, revenged the insult. What Dinah thought of the whole matter is not recorded.”
What Dinah thought of the whole matter is not recorded!
There was no other commentary in the entire glossary. What was the editor of this Bible thinking?
“And Dinah, the daughter of Leah, which she bore unto Jacob went out to see the daughters of the land to dance and to beat drums. And when Shechem, the Hivite Prince, the son of Hamor, saw her, he was overcome with love and he lay with her.”
He was overcome with love!
When one is a feminist, it is not possible to disregard the statement, What Dinah thought about the matter was not recorded. Clearly, the story was waiting for me to discover what Dinah thought.
***
The novel has two narratives. The first is perhaps an origin story of the continuous distrust and violence: Dinah, Jacob, Shechem and Hamor were seeking a peace between their peoples. The two lovers would have married and the tribes achieved that peace had Shechem and his people not been killed, all the wealth confiscated and the women taken as concubines by the fanatical brothers, Simeon and Levi.
The second is a reliving, thousands of years later, by a contemporary Jewish American filmmaker and a Palestinian archeologist/activist, acutely aware of the hostilities.
Today, October 30, 2023 as the Gazans are living, or rather we must say, dying, under an unconscionable bombardment and invasion intended to wipe out Hamas but already killing 8,000 as innocent as the 1400 that Hamas slaughtered earlier this month, I return to the opening pages of What Dinah Thought, (Viking Press, 1989):
I am Dinah. I loved a heathen. My brothers killed him.
I knew nothing of what was to come. The novel developed, as books do, revealing itself slowly and carefully so that at the end I and, I hoped, the reader understood the contemporary relevance and implications of the two stories being told. This novel was a work of imagination in the way that imagination is a vessel for revelation. Thousands of years of grief stricken history, at the hands of a few.
***
Sometimes we live a story. Sometimes we live in history. In 1985, I was invited to the Non-Governmental Forum, UN Conference on Women, Nairobi, Kenya to participate in the activities of the Peace Tent after a Jewish American woman, who was to co-present with a Palestinian colleague, was killed suddenly a week before the event. I was invited to be a substitute because I am a peace activist and because of What Dinah Thought. Sadly, but understandably, the tensions between Palestinians and Jews were too strong to be overcome so quickly. Still, I participated in one or more of the Peace Tent panels and led a workshop on Personal Disarmament, work that I had recently developed and which seemed relevant:
An individual is also a country, one contains multiple selves who are governed as nations are governed, and the problems and issues that afflict nations also afflict individuals. For most of my life, I have been completely unconscious of the real mode of government that is within me. Here are some of the questions Personal Disarmament asks us to pursue:
What is the form of my internal Government? Is it tyrannical, a dictatorship, an oligarchy? Is it a military government? It is it a police state? Is it a false democracy? Who are my ‘beloved enemies?” Whom do I identify as the enemy within? The enemies without? What are my defense systems? What weapons are stored in my arsenal? Do I stockpile? Am I in an arms race? What is the equivalent of my nuclear bomb? Will I sign a no first strike treaty?
Afterwards, I was approached by the Russian women’s delegation. In their country, they said, there was no attention given to inner or personal work. Listening, they had realized how much they suffered for the lack of it. They understood such personal work to be women’s work and necessary if peace were to be achieved. I appreciate this even more now, given the war between Russia and Ukraine.
***
In 1996, I went to Mt. Sinai, in Egypt, for my 60th Birthday. We found a hidden place to sleep on the summit when the sun came up illuminating the waves and waves of the great sea of stone that can only elicit wonder.
Mt. Sinai
When we awakened, I found a niche among the rocks and concealed a copy of What Dinah Thought as an offering. Doing it, I dissolved into all time — I was Dinah, and Dina Z, the filmmaker, and myself, Deena, performing an ancient ritual: May peace come.
In Sinai, we met a young Bedouin man, a devote of Michael Jackson, who drove us around and then invited us to his home for dinner. We were standing on one of the craggy hills outside his door when his mother appeared from the stony crest in a Bedouin black embroidered dress, carrying an armful of greens she had gathered for our meal. We could barely communicate to each other; I do not speak Arabic and she does not speak English. Her son and my husband faded away while we found a common language. Spontaneously, I took off my gold wedding band and placed it on her finger and she, in turn, gave me her silver band which I am wearing to this day. Later, she and her daughters insisted on dressing me in their ritual clothes and when my face was covered so only my eyes showed, I saw the Arab, the Bedouin, the Hivite woman I had seen in the mirror since I was a child.
Yes, we are kin. How can I think otherwise? Yet, according to the Guardian on October 21, 2023, “The most successful land-grab strategy since 1967’ [occurs] as settlers push Bedouins off West Bank territory.”
***
On 9/11, 2001, I was at Great Zimbabwe, an ancient site of imperial collapse. From there, we went to Egypt in order to take our Zimbabwean friends to Sinai. We were apprehensive being in an Arab country in the aftermath of this attack but we were treated with exquisite care and concern as we watched the news on television together.
We always have been kin though prevented from living accordingly by small cabals on each side who believe in the necessity of violence and in military economies. But, as I recently posted on Facebook, I awakened from a dream a few days ago with the following words: The only protection for my people is not going to war.
I fear for Palestine and I fear for Israel and, frankly, I fear for all of us as this warfare can too easily become global. No protection will come from the escalation of violence and the moral injury to each of us, of pursuing it, is great. Everything, everything we need and desire will come from opening our hearts to each other as kin.
I dedicate this piece to Dinah and Shechem, my ancestors.
These are their last words:
“Shechem, my love, it’s done, everything as it should be. Why isn’t there peace yet?” “Miracles, Dinah, work themselves out imperceptibly with the rhythm and form of history, that is very, very, slowly.” “And in the meantime?” “We live our lives as best we can, each time better than the time before.”
***
What Dinah Thought is out of print and we are trying to reissue it. When this occurs, we will announce it here.
RUIN AND BEAUTY 