It’s hard to say anything this week

It’s easy to cry. It’s easy to despair. It’s easy to be haunted by images of depravity. But it’s not so easy to string sentences together.

There’s one connection that’s been particularly hard for me to shake.

About two weeks ago, I wrote a story based on an interview with Alexander Smukler of Montclair, the Russian-Jewish American who has analyzed Russia’s war on Ukraine for us.

This story, though, wasn’t about that war. Instead, “Remembering the Night of Murdered Poets” was about the way that Vladimir Putin’s predecessor, Josef Stalin, had exterminated the 13 Yiddishists, writers, scientists, and all-too-public Jews whose embrace of Israel seemed inconvenient to the murderous dictator.

This year, Tisha B’Av — the day when we commemorate some of the worst horrors the Jewish people suffered until the 20th century brought us the Holocaust — fell on August 12.

On August 12, 1952, Stalin’s willing executioners, who had imprisoned and tortured these 14 Jews — one an informant, who got no mercy for that, and another a gerontologist who was spared because dictators age, too, and her work might have been useful to him — unloaded their guns into their prisoners’ torture-crippled bodies, in the dead of night, in the bowels of the grim KGB fortress called Lubyanka.

It is impossible not to hear the echoes of those murders in what happened in the tunnels under Gaza, when Hamas unleashed its barbaric medieval savagery on the six young Israelis — one of them, Hersh Goldberg Polin, was both Israeli and American — who had committed such sins as going to an all-night music festival near the border.

Like the poets, the six hostages were kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured — the Russian poets to the point that their judge, in Stalin’s pocket, could barely bring himself to pretend not to see it; Hersh’s arm was gone — and then shot, mercilessly and repeatedly, until they were dead many times over.

Next week includes September 11, the anniversary of the day, 23 years ago, when Islamist terrorists hijacked planes, crashed them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and killed 2,977 people. (The terrorists died too, but they’re in a different category.)

And of course October 7 is now just a month away. That means that this week, mourners who have said kaddish for the victims of that massacre for 11 months will be finished with that part of their mourning. They will never, ever forget, but they are supposed to be able to move on from the focus on grief.

This is supposed to be the time of year when we all move from rebuke to consolation, from the desolation of Tisha B’Av to the introspection, confession, and then release of the High Holy Days. Something seems to have gone wrong here. We are moving from horror to horror.

Meanwhile, the physical world around us is cooling, the light is changing, the summer is ending, and that signals the start of a new season — new school year, new shows on and off Broadway, new TV series, new clothes, new shoes, new school supplies. Not old hatred, old fear, old pain, old grief.

Please, let it stop here. Let it end. Let us know no more terror. Please.

—JP

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