Posters

According to Nim Shapira, the Israeli-American documentary maker whose new film, “Torn,” is about the posters with the faces of Israeli hostages, and the intense emotions they’ve evoked on both sides of the issue, everybody has a story about the posters.

Okay. What can “both sides of the issue” possibly mean in this context? Most of us wonder how anyone can look at those posters, with the pictures of young, hopeful people, older, still-smiling people, and grinning red-headed babies and feel anything but grief and fear, but the people who tore them down, crumpled them up, flung them on the ground, or drew all over those faces see the hostages as enemies.

Although most of the posters are down by now, just about everyone does have a story about watching or even confronting a hater.

We are so tense and divided right now, and living so closely with each other, that anything could explode.

It’s led me to wonder how this period that we’re living through now, as Americans in general and as American Jews in particular, is the most tense in our country’s history, or if there have been others. It’s hard to tell by reading history; it takes a scholar to unearth, understand, and retell what happened, but it demands a brilliant writer to allow readers to understand the emotion that accompanied an event.

It’s why it’s hard to write (or read!) good historical fiction; it tends to be either filled with facts, so you’re basically reading an encyclopedia or how-to guide, with the explanations put in the mouths of cardboard characters, or modern people playing dress-up. We can’t really know what it would have felt like to live in a time and place where most babies died soon after birth, the chances were good that a woman would die in childbirth, life expectancy was in the 30s, almost no one could read, and there wasn’t much to do other than tend to the cows or chickens. So it’s hard to say if this time that we’re living in is unique. But it certainly is unlike anything that most of us who are alive today can recognize.

Many decades ago, when I worked at Prentice Hall in Englewood Cliffs — ancient history, right? — I worked on a book whose author and title escape me entirely, but whose message stays with me.

It was a work of American history, about rural life in the colonies during the Revolution. The author said that although emotions about which side to take during the war of course ran high among some people, among others, in rural areas, the prevailing desire was to be left alone. The war was personal, almost intimate — the country was small, everyone knew everyone, and when the war came to town it happened in gardens and orchards and barnyards. It took relatives and friends. Most people just wanted it to go away. They didn’t care who won. They just wanted it to be over.

I keep thinking about what’s going on here now. There are very strong feelings. The issues are strong and the boundaries are not porous; many of us believe that truth is very clearly on one side, while we know, with shocked disbelief but also resignation, that others see the exact opposite.

And then there are people who entirely understandably want the whole thing to go away. They didn’t ask for it, and they don’t want it. They don’t tear down posters with hostages’ faces, and they don’t repost them either.

This is a hard time. Spring is coming — maybe.

—JP

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