✡ 
I am preparing for Yom Kippur around the house and am listening to Fresh Air. It is a recap of an interview with Daniel Mendelsohn about his book The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. It is astonishingly moving. The pain of the missing of his greats and grands is palpable over the radio.
I am thinking about how I am pretty lucky to live in the place where I live and the time I live. Where I am not afraid to be who I am. But more importantly, I am aware of how I am willing to die to not be who I do not what to be. The survivors, those who died in the camps, and those who were forced to convert in 1490′s Spain will be on my mind as I sing up Kol Nidre in a few hours. As will the stories from Legends of Our Time, specifically, Testament of a Jew in Saragossa.
Oddly enough the NPR webpage and I thought the same clip was worth calling out:
“The physical remains — the synagogues, the storefronts with Yiddish lettering still on the bricks … the ritual-bath buildings, still with Stars of David carved above the lintels — all of these things are still there. … To be confronted with that is [to know that] Europe is completely other than it would have been, in a way from which it will never recover.”
Wow.