At First Glance Archive

Welcome to At First Glance. Here you will find quick takes by the CLAL faculty on new books, articles and movies, new music and fashions and on cultural trends more generally. Here we will keep you abreast of what we, in our journeys around the country, find most interesting and notable in Jewish and general culture. And, in just a few sentences, we will try to indicate why. Every other week you will find something new on this page.

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Alan Weisman, An Echo in My Blood

By Robert Rabinowitz

I first encountered Alan Weisman's passionate writing as part of my ongoing research on potential Jewish contributions to the development of an environmentally sustainable economy. In Gaviotas, A Village to Reinvent the World, Weisman describes the founding of a settlement that has pioneered environmentally friendly technology against the backdrop of a Colombia riddled with violence, corruption and wasted resources. Weisman is a crusading journalist who has made his career reporting from scenes of injustice, suffering and devastation around the world, from the lands of displaced indigenous groups in the Amazon to the nuclear wastelands of the Ukraine. In An Echo in My Blood, Weisman has turned his honesty and passion to telling the story of his own family history, creating a powerful narrative that is both deeply personal and a classic contemporary American Jewish story.

The leitmotif of An Echo in My Blood is that 'the legacy of what is forgotten… is as powerful as what is remembered'. Whatever our feelings towards previous generations, their memories and narratives profoundly shape the direction of our lives. Becoming conscious of our inheritance means understanding the values and motivations of those who preceded us. Such understanding allows a greater sense of connection with our ancestors and heritage and also gives us the freedom and power to change the direction of our own lives. There are at least three interwoven legacies that Weisman confronts: the age-old legacy of Jewish exile and insecurity, the more recent legacy of the American Jewish experience and the personal legacy of his over-bearing father.

An Echo in My Blood centers on Weisman's relationship with his father, a tyrannical character and pillar of the Minneapolis legal establishment. The book begins with a conundrum. As a child, Weisman had often heard his father tell the family legend of how the Communists had murdered Weisman's grandfather in the Ukraine, forcing his grandmother to flee with her small children to the United States. Many years later, on meeting with his father's estranged brother, he discovers a different version of the story. This sets him on a search for the truth and the reasons for his father's estrangement from his brother and their conflicting narratives. In a remarkable coincidence, an assignment takes him to Chernobyl, close to the village in which his grandfather was murdered. Thus begins the compelling and painful process of uncovering his family's past and becoming reconciled with his heritage.

As Weisman explores his family history looking for the origins of the anger that drove him apart from his father, he uncovers memories and narratives, "the echoes in his blood," that stretch as far back as 'my own ancestral dust swirling around me in the hot breeze blowing off the Dead Sea.' Weisman vividly demonstrates how his passionate advocacy of the rights of indigenous communities in the Third World has its roots in the insecurity engendered by the history of repeated Jewish displacement and exile that shaped so much of his father's character. In one powerful scene, Weisman breaks down in tears while watching school children enjoy their recess in a gym in an area of southern Chile threatened by the expanding hole in the Ozone layer. Although he had witnessed many communities 'being ripped from the places they loved… it wasn't until I watched a bunch of white kids who looked like me playing ball in a gym that looked like some school in Minnesota that I finally, truly understood. In that moment I'd seen a mirrored image of my own home at the other end of the earth, and my blood sensed that something terrible could be happening here… This stuff wasn't just happening to remote forgotten people. It was happening to us all… I was one of the diminishing percentage of humans on the planet who still had a home. I wanted to go there.'

Weisman describes people around the world being displaced in the name of economic development and market forces as having been 'deprived of their birthright. They'd been amputated from their source. They'd been profaned'. Weisman's use of the terms 'birthright' and 'profaned' recalled for me Esau's 'exceedingly great and bitter cry' (Gen. 27:34) on discovering that Jacob has cheated him of both his birthright and his father's blessing, 'amputating' him, as it were, from the Abrahamic line. So powerful was this image of bewildered anger and loss in my mind that I mistakenly convinced myself that the comparison was actually drawn in the book, as if all the world's displaced people were giving voice to Esau's howl. While the Jewish tradition has not generally viewed Esau with much warmth, this Torah passage demonstrates tender concern for the pain of the dispossessed. It is just this concern, reinforced by the historic Jewish experience of exile, that Weisman feels so clearly.

The major historical episodes of the book, however, are archetypal of the American Jewish experience. In passages that are times quite dense, Weisman writes of his family's origins in Eastern Europe, evoking the sense that, despite his family's good fortune in having escaped to America, something authentic was left behind in the Old Country. He vividly describes the poverty of the immigrant generation and the color of their lives as they labored to become Americans. His parents' generation, growing up in an era of neighborhoods and professions that excluded Jews, is characterized by their drive for success and inclusion that led them to discard so many Jewish traditions. The sixties turned these attitudes on their head, with Baby Boomers reacting against the conformity of their parents. Weisman captures the defining features of the different generations of the American Jewish experience, such as the sense of loss and the drive for inclusion, helping me, a British Jew, to understand how they shape contemporary American Jewish identity.

Attempting to grasp the very real human needs and desires that drove his parents' generation does not lead Weisman to accept their values. It does, however, allow him to develop a mature, loving understanding of why his father became the over-bearing character from whom he had previously sought escape. Weisman also comes to understand how much of his character was shaped by his father. In painfully candid and unsentimental prose, Weisman describes the anger that he inherited from his father that destroyed many of his relationships. Some of these passages are shocking and painful in their emotional and personal explicitness, but Weisman understands his need as a writer to be ruthlessly honest with himself and his audience. It is only through understanding the origins of his father's anger that Weisman gains the power to change himself while satisfying his intense desire to be a good son. This message, which Weisman forcefully conveys on a personal level, is equally applicable to Judaism as a whole. In a time of tremendous change, it is important to understand how social conditions shaped the Judaism of our ancestors. This does not mean that we are tied down to their understanding of Judaism. On the contrary, it gives us the opportunity to shape a Judaism with equal spiritual depth but that responds to the needs of our age.

The strength of Weisman's convictions, his honesty in exposing both his own and his father's character to examination and the way he is able to weave a pattern of meaning from the interplay between family and broader history make this a deeply compelling and informative read. As the book closes, the author begins to ponder not just the Jewish past but also the Jewish future. He states that he feels Jewish 'to the depths of my DNA' but wonders whether future generations of Jews 'who, sufficiently removed from pogroms and immigration pangs and strategic incentives to assimilate, will know the blessings of spiritual community and tradition that I never could.' I can think of no better summary of the challenge facing American Jewry.

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