Why I read.

I've been compelled of late to blog about the books that I have been reading, which is slightly unusual for me, since most of what I think or feel about what I read I keep to myself. I feel the need to share, though, because the things I have been reading lately, especially of late, have made me think and feel quite a lot. Have made a connection with me, have hit close to home. The book I just finished (The Lost: The Search for Six of Six Million) is no exception, though you may wonder how this book could really hit all that close to home. I am, after all, not Jewish. I had no relatives killed in the Holocaust, I know of no family members of mine who were living in Europe through any of the troubles and tragedies that took place there (though I did have relatives who served in World War II, who were in combat and who saw, I am sure, unspeakable things of their own), and I had no grandfather or older relative who was especially talkative about the past. What made me react this way to this story?



I suppose this reaction has its origins in my lifelong pull towards persecuted and marginalized peoples. I sympathize with them, and, somehow, empathize with them. When I first started to learn of Native Americans and black peoples in our national past I felt drawn to them. I wanted to learn more about people, but particularly people who went through hardships. I wished I had been born black, or born Chinese, or somehow "other." I wanted to be Jewish. I immersed myself in African-American history classes in college, doing my senior honors thesis on miscegenation and passing. I had no idea at the time why I was drawn to these stories, these histories, these lives, but when I was reading The Lost it sort-of just hit me. The tragic and dramatic elements of these pasts and these peoples reminded me of my own life. I was not a care-free kid. I had a lot on my mind, a lot to think about, and a lot to feel, and all of that is really an understatement. It is the emotion that comes from learning the stories of these people that I felt and still feel, that kind of sad and tragic feeling that I think was such a large part of my own life (though it was a sadness and tragedy that was on a much different scale; I cannot in good faith compare my life to that of a slave or that of a Holocaust victim), and this is where I feel the connection. Through the feelings of hopelessness and despair that I get out of the stories. It mirrored the intense emotions that I was feeling in my own life, and gave me a way of realizing those emotions, of acknowledging them, of expressing them. Through reading these books and histories, feeling equally outraged and sorrowful at what I learned, I was able to release what I was feeling myself, what I was experiencing myself, in a way that I couldn't through other methods. I wouldn't talk about my feelings or anything linked to emotion to friends (never really had a whole lot of friends that I would have talked about this kind of stuff with, anyway, even if I had talked about it), not with family either, and really had no god way of dealing with any of the pretty profound thoughts and feelings that I was having. These kinds of books were a release, and they served in their own way as friends or family would - or should - have.

So when I was reading this book, all of this struck me. I thought about all of this as I was finding myself so eager to get back into reading about the Bolechowers and Mendelsohn's family, and was dreaming of what it would be like to be Jewish, wishing that I was Jewish, too. Because I realized that I want a connection to something. A feeling of community, a sense of belonging. The African-American experience, the Jewish experience, the experience of these minority groups - there is a shared sense of history, of experience, that is, perhaps by coincidence, linked by the unjust and immoral, shameful, treatment of these peoples, but it is shared. All Jewish people, whether they have a direct, nuclear link to something like the Holocaust, have some kind of link to the Holocaust by their mere Jewishness. They have a shared past. They have a shared history. They have a set group of people with whom they belong, and with whom they can share their feelings and their emotions, the feelings and emotions that inevitably come out of these tragedies. I never thought that I had anyone to share my feelings with, or my thoughts (whether that was because I really didn't have anyone or because I didn't feel comfortable sharing with whatever community I did have around me is another story), and I wanted this. I suppose I still want this. And maybe that's why I so readily pick up books, still, like The Lost.

It's so strange to think of me as a little girl, or me as a teen, or even me as a college senior, unconsciously shaping my academic life, and, to some degree, my future and career, around the stories of persecuted peoples because it is through these stories that I felt connected to someone, to something, to the world, and it's strange to be just now realizing that this is why I was doing it. I will, therefore, point to this realization, this light-bulb moment, as a reason why I read, perhaps the primary reason. Yes, it's to feel the connections to the characters that I am reading about, but it is also to expand my world. To learn more about the world around me, to connect me with the world around me, and to connect me with myself. If I didn't read and didn't have my stories, these connections, I would have very little indeed.