Learning from art and history

At least some things are normal in this insane world. Spring is coming, and we’ve felt it in the air, on our faces, in our lungs. At the beginning of the week there still were some grotesquely filthy piles of black snow. They’re all gone now, melted almost out of memory. Now there are crocuses that must have grown under those piles.

The rest of the world, though — no. Not so normal.

The war continues, seemingly planless. Israelis constantly run to shelters. Maybe good will come out of it. That’s not at all clear now. Here, Israel continues to sink in popularity, and antisemitism continues to rise. These are extremely unpleasant truths, but ignoring them does not make them go away. (If only it did!)

Maybe one way to push back is art, and another way is history.

On Sunday, my husband and I went to see a one-man show I’d written about here. It was “Dedication,” by Roger Peltzman, at the Wilkins Theatre on Kean University’s Union campus. It tells the story of Mr. Peltzman’s mother’s extraordinary escape from the Nazis.

I have been given the emotionally challenging blessing of being able to interview Holocaust survivors — an honor that’s unlikely to recur, given how few are left now, 80 years after liberation. To be in the presence of any of them is to be awed. One thing I’ve learned from the experience is that no one survived without luck. They also needed courage and creativity and all kinds of strength — but without luck, without the kindness of someone from whom kindness had not been expected, courage and creativity and strength wouldn’t have been enough.

Mr. Peltzman’s mother, Beatrice Stern Peltzman, had courage, creativity, strength, and luck. Her son tells her story, along with the story of her brother, Norbert Stern, a brilliantly gifted young pianist whose talent was recognized but was not enough to keep him from the ovens of Auschwitz. Mr. Peltzman tells his family’s story as he sits at a grand piano, paces in front of it, or circles around it. He talks about how his own fairly recent career as a concert pianist has been helped by his uncle’s ethereal presence in his life.

And then, at the end, he plays Chopin, the composer whom his uncle understood and performed, and it’s magic. Pure magic. Powerful magic. It is hard to imagine being unmoved by this performance, or not learning from it.

The Yavneh Academy similarly is using art to teach about evil.

Last week, we went to a meeting to talk about “Be a Refusenik,” a book by the Russian-American-Israeli Jewish academic and activist Izabella Tabarovsky. I interviewed her a few months ago and was greatly impressed by her. The evening focused on the movement to save Soviet Jewry. It had been a genuine grassroots movement, it was surprisingly and overwhelmingly successful, and it’s been forgotten, speaker after speaker said. That matters because the antisemitism that throbbed through the Soviet Union, while not new, was molded by the government, using propaganda, in ways that were useful to it.

That propaganda still exists today, it’s still useful to some people who mean us harm, and the lessons about how to deal with it, hard-learned in the Cold War period, still work today. We just have to unearth them, dust them off, and use them.

—JP