Survivor

“You don’t look Jewish!” Meant as a compliment. She’s smiling. And wearing a “Free
Palestine!” pin.

Umm… thank you?

When I was a child, my mother’s family was five generations deep, five generations alive
at the same time. Some of those people lived well over a hundred years. They were living
history. Their stories and the stories they told of their ancestors’ ancestors were part of a six-
thousand-year-old oral tradition.

By the time I was seven, I was consciously saving up stories that had been in the family
for generations. I became a reliquary. I would guard and preserve these treasures for the
generations to come. And when I grew up, I would be one of these Old Storytellers.

I soaked up random memories from my grandma’s childhood in Russia, my dad’s
memories of his long years at the orphanage, my great-grandmother’s tale of her youngest child,
my grandma’s little brother Georgie, running off to be a gangster–which I later realized was how
my mom and dad eventually met each other.

At the family table, it was understood that nobody under the minimum age of 40 had
anything to say of any imaginable interest or importance. Shah, shtil… Shut up and listen–you’ll
learn something. Those old people had outlived the pogroms, the post-WWI influenza epidemic,
the great depression, Hitler… They had survived to tell the tales. So would I.

Early on, I was aware of becoming the Old Storyteller I would be. I had lots of very old
people as role models among my mother’s mishpochah: very old musicians who’d played
forever—I still have the violin that belonged to my grandfather’s grandfather, Dovid. Very old
singers of songs from a hundred years past—I still have all those Russian and Yiddish songs that
belonged to my grandmother’s Grandma Masha. They are a kind of mitochondrial DNA.

That whole gang left the shtetl of Kremenchuk, a Jewish ghetto near Minsk, back around
1910, when Grandma was a little girl. The Cossacks had made it clear it was time for them to go.
They arrived at Ellis Island, the battered and scarred sole survivors of a pogrom that took out the
rest of the shtetl.

“You don’t look Jewish!”

I’ve just completed an hour-long program of songs and stories from my 60-plus years in
the theater. The encore was, as always, a couple of the old Yiddish songs I learned as a child.

The open wound of the October 7, 2023, slaughter still festering, I muse on similar
events. Last December, as always, my family assembled for the first night of Hanukkah—a
thousands-of-years-later, annual remembrance of the Maccabees, a resistant little family of Yids
who, by a miracle, survived a lengthy siege designed to wipe the Jews off the face of the earth.

An ancient iteration of Hitler’s Final Solution.

Most Jewish holidays are exactly the same: They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat.

Babylonia, Egypt, the Romans, the Spanish Inquisition, the Cossacks, Vilna, and worse…
And all these centuries later, the resistant little progeny of that tiny percentage of Jews that even
Hitler couldn’t kill are still here, refined through the determination of their exterminators to an
unfathomable level of resilience.

Left unmolested we’ll dink around and amuse ourselves with astrophysics and medicine
and music and maybe comedy. But after thousands of years of unintentional genetic engineering,
mess with us at your peril.

They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat.

“You don’t look Jewish!”

You clearly don’t perceive my formidable 5000-year-old survivor DNA. But you have
reminded me why it’s there.

So, thanks.

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