I'm Not Really Here

A dispatch from the front lines of historical memory

This is a dispatch from the front lines of historical memory. My uniform is a fleece. My cot is a Casper. My men are dead. My base, which serves a population of one, is located in a small village just under two hours north of Manhattan. But I’m not really here.

I’m in Washington, D.C. It’s November 1941. I’m reconciling horny biographers’ descriptions of a young couple with far more reasonable observations made by contemporaries. They’re just in love. In ten days, Japan will bomb Pearl Harbor, and a few months after that, the man will seek revenge in the Pacific Theater. They’ll meet again, but they’ll never be more than a beginning.

I’m in Berlin. It’s still November 1941. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, has a meeting with Adolf Hitler. He wants the Fuhrer to announce publicly what he’s already said privately: Germany favors “the elimination of the Jewish national home” in Palestine. In exchange, Al-Husseini promises the Arab world will revolt against the English and French. “The Fuhrer would on his own give the Arab world the assurance that its hour of liberation had arrived,” but first, he had to oversee the “total destruction of the Judeo-Communist empire in Europe.”

I’m in the USSR. It’s the summer 1941. Reinhard Heydrich of the SS has received a directive from Berlin. They are preparing for “the total solution of the Jewish question.” Concentration camps are being built in Poland, where my grandfather and his family spent their last few weeks together as a family. This has been the plan for some time.

Now I’m in Israel. It’s October 2015. In a speech to delegates at the 37th World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem on Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Adolf Hitler initially had no intention of massacring European Jewry. He was just going to expel them, but Al-Huseeini changed his mind.

I’m back in Berlin. It’s still 2015. "All Germans know the history of the murderous race mania of the Nazis that led to the break with civilization that was the Holocaust," Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert said, denying Netanyahu’s half-truth. "This is taught in German schools for good reason, it must never be forgotten,” he added. “And I see no reason to change our view of history in any way. We know that responsibility for this crime against humanity is German and very much our own." Netanyahu confirms their version. Sort of.

Tomorrow’s panel at the NYHS: Gisela Perez Kusakawa is the executive director of the Asian American Scholar Forum (AASF). David Silverman is a professor of history at George Washington University and the author of several books on American racial history. Kevin Young is Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, former director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and author of 15 books of poetry and prose. And me! This event is hybrid. Use this code for $10 tickets: PRES324

I’m in NYC. It’s tomorrow. The sun is setting outside the New York Historical Society, where I’m moderating a talk on historical memory and reckoning. I’m among the living. I left my manuscript and everything that goes with it—the 50 open tabs, books teeming with stickies, and a self-warming coffee mug—back at the barracks. My panel joins me in imaginging the golden age of the presidency is ahead of us. We have presidents who tell us, in unflinching detail, who we were, who we are, and who we want to be. We’re no longer interested in nostalgia for a way of life that wasn’t because we’re living in a country full of what could be.

See you soonish! Until then, you can find me on Twitter and Instagram, and the books we’ve mentioned on Bookshop and Amazon.