Remembering, forgetting and distorting the past

Freud and Santayana delivered the same mantra: those who forget the past are destined to repeat it. True, but the aphorism also truncates a more complex process. Our personal past differs from our collective past and ‘never the twain shall meet’.

Each of us remembers the same events differently, whether we witnessed them ourselves, heard about them from our parents, read about them in the news or learnt about them from texts written a thousand years ago. Different memories of the same scenario carry different emotional resonances and come to acquire different meanings and in those differences lie the seeds of conflict.

I can summarise my remembrance of my own past as follows: I was born into a South African Jewish family when the Second World War was in its darkest days and reaching a crescendo of horror. My earliest memories were founded in the uneasy privilege accorded me by membership of a minority white society. In the face of black-white tensions, the drumbeat of antisemitism, ever present, was only a distant sound.

My parents did their best to shelter me from their anguish and grief at what was happening to their relatives ‘left behind’ in Lithuania but enough of those emotions trickled through to me to permeate my adult identity. My personal awareness was sharpened by the stream of newspaper reports, photos and film footage of the barbarities in Europe and by disturbing memories of Afrikaner race hatred closer to home.

I soon learnt to identify with ‘my people’, the Jews, and to feel compassion for those, Jews and non-Jews alike, who were being oppressed and persecuted.

From those memories of the past I worked out a personal solution which, along with that of many South African Jews, lay in Zionism – the dream of a safe future for the Jews in a land of their own. Israel was to be the idyllic state, a Phoenix risen from the ashes, a nation replanted. The past would be remembered as a nightmare to be consigned to outer darkness with the ringing slogan, ‘Never Again’. Newly arisen enemies would be kept at bay by a strong young community, imbued with all the traditions of the Jewish people and reinforced with modern technology. Sadly, that dream has begun to dissolve.

My commitment to Zionism has remained unshaken, but it is tempered by the awareness that there is no such thing as an eternally safe haven for the Jews. The Israel of today is a nation like any other, with its strengths and weaknesses, its resources, talents and inner strife. Its cultural identity is essentially Jewish, but it is having to face the reality of coming to terms with its multiethnic population composed of more than one religion.

It is my memory of the past, both personal and historical, which has defined my Jewish identity. And it tells me that Israel has the right to nationhood within the global community. Having wandered through the world innocently, like Candide, I now know that some of my fellow Jews, together with a worldwide network of antisemites, have distorted the past in furtherance of their own ideological aims, which I am unable to share.

Conflict, in this case, feels irreparable, but I have not abandoned hope. Even though my personal memories are indelibly inscribed, the collective past is an ever-changing landscape. There is a corollary to the truth offered by Freud and Santayana: those who remember the past have the power to influence the future.