The Classy Broad

Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it—-

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?—-

The nose, the eye pits,…

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

This is one of my all-time favorite poems, not just because of the above final stanza, but also because I have a weird fascination with how some distant relatives of mine died at Auschwitz. I saw my family tree laid out as an actual tree diagram for the first time sometime last summer and gasped when I’d seen how certain branches had been entirely pruned. So many names discontinued; and to think that of the 14 of my great-great-great-grandparents’ 16 children that survived past childhood, 4 died in 1944 and 7 died “date unknown”. Which for Jews in Eastern Europe who had very good bookkeeping means they most likely died at the hands of someone who didn’t care to keep a record.

Yet I don’t know my relatives who are related to that side very well at all, so my connection is mostly grounded in imagining how much of my genes and traits I shared with them. Well, and also, my distant relation to Elie Wiesel, Auschwitz survivor and author of Night. My grandma’s side of the family goes back to Sighet, Hungary, where in 1944, he and the rest of the village were deported. Since learning this last Hanukkah at my distant cousins’ Upper East Side penthouse — a luxury my branch could never dream of affording, which may explain why the two sides mostly have no idea who the others are — I’ve been bracing myself to re-read “Night” because now I know that it’s about people with names like Morko, Avrohm, Lazar, and Pearl Schreter who I somehow share blood with. Not to mention their children and grandchildren as well as almost everyone all of them ever knew. On one hand, I know I’m also distantly related to Holocaust survivors, which makes me proud. I haven’t had a chance to shake their numbered hands yet. On the other hand, it makes me feel comparatively weak — sure, there may be DNA strands connecting us, but do I actually have the strength in my blood to come out on top of such a thing?

And as a half-Catholic who grew up with various (and some, anti-Semitic) family members pushing her toward a very corporate form of Born Again Christianity(tm), Catholicism, and a very lapsed Hanukkah/Passover form of Judaism, I don’t know the first thing about religion. I visited Israel in 2008 because it was free through Birthright, and I really liked it. Not because I support the actions of their government or anything, but because the experience was altogether very powerful. That’s a different story. But it was moving even if I am one-leg-in, one-leg-out, with my nondescript English color of last name (changed because my grandparents found “Goodowitz” or “Zipnick” too “ethnic”) and blue-eyed, straight-nosed features. Even if I still couldn’t care less about organized religion, yet am willing to put a mezuzah on my door and somehow actually love chopped liver.

I got distracted from writing mode. Damn. I wish I could remember what I was trying to get at. Welp, in the end, the fact that I’m alive is a huge, wonderful, “fuck you” to Hitler, and keeping that in mind helps me appreciate my life and its quality thereof. And going back to the original point of this post, the Plath poem, somehow reading something that morbid helps me feel even better that I’m connected to people who survived it and can try my hardest to be as strong in my comparatively simple life. Silver lining and all that. Alright, I’m done.