‘Tell me, what doctor, in his right mind, would do a nose job without anaesthetic? What kind of a father would actually do that surgery?’
The shyster looked amused. ‘So you doubt the truth?’
‘Yeah, man! That’s what I do.’
I was pacing back and forth, stiff-kneed. The world disappointed Leila Khaled. God, I wanted to bust this guy’s paternal amusement. Had Barbra told him that I was some naive little Jew-boy whose house they could ransack, whose dad they could blackmail, whose shit they could five-finger scrape from the pipes?
The shyster looked through another one of my stacks. My Palestine stack was in the middle of my Holocaust stacks. All my Holocaust books had been beaten up and defaced.
I did not know about Leila and the Nakba until I was twenty years old.
I’d been accepted late to York for a double major in English Lit and Jewish Studies and I’d just kept going, from undergrad to grad. My mother had encouraged me from her post across the country. She’d probably told the dean that I’d written my high school exams in and out of hospital beds. My mother always said that I was a very sensitive reader. She said that that would be a shame to waste.
At York, though, at first, I felt desensitized. Maybe from all the head drugs that my father made sure I was taking every morning. But I am not lying or hedging when I say that my desensitization was totally through after I encountered the York University Arab Students Association. In the rotunda, you could stand there for an hour in front of their video screens. You could stand there and watch the crowds of young men and boys throwing rocks at idf tanks. Faces prematurely aged, faces contorted. Jaws detached for screaming. The First Intifada, the Second, and maybe the Third. Kids my age bleeding from holes in their lips, cracks in their foreheads. I saw rubber bullets, clouds of tear gas, bodies smouldering and falling through warped Stars of David. I took all the ASA pamphlets. I went to their websites. I read about Fatah, Hamas, the Liberation of Palestine. And I swear, I felt this fucking caesura – something so huge was missing in me. I saw how the Jewish Students Association in the rotunda booked counter-tables, played TV screens with their own grim displays: spray-painted swastikas in Europe’s last Jewish graveyards, a get out kikes screed mailed to a Jewish school in Montreal. The jsa even published ads in the student newspaper calling the ASA Holocaust deniers. I was privy to this stuff in the Jewish Studies lounge – kids saying they were just opposed to material that they said ‘glorified Hamas.’ It is against the charter to preach violence against Jews at the university, they said. What I didn’t understand was this socalled, assumed primal animosity between Arabs and Jews in and out of the rotunda, even though, yes, I understood that war between them was ongoing…
But, like, why as a Jew are you opposed to someone just because that someone opposes you?
Tell me what exactly it is, I posted in some jsa chat room, that you Jew-boys are so threatened by? Arabs are not the ones knocking your ancestors’ stones down! Are you threatened by the Palestinian Right of Return? Or is it too painful to admit that the Israeli army murdered four Arab children playing on a beach?
I did not believe that my Jewish Studies comrades cared about those kids. I did not believe my father cared either. I wanted to talk to the ASA about this. What was missing when we were not mourning dead kids? I got jsa hate mail sent to my York U account. I was told that Hamas wanted to drive Jews into the sea, and if I didn’t believe that, I should go live with ISIS. When I asked the ASA about ISIS, they told me I should probably stop visiting them. Then, because rejection often happens in succession, Professor Sugarman kicked me out of her Interwar Jewish Lit because I questioned if the way she was talking about Bruno Schulz’s masochism was legit.
Later, I consulted Jim, and Jim reiterated, ‘Yes, Schulz was a textbook masochist.’
Look, I knew that my anger was all over the place. Sometimes I thought we should just all return to the fucking ice age.
Jim helped me out when I was rejected like this. I spent a lot of time at the store. Jim advocated sharing knowledge to combat all things. He prescribed me a general Arab literature primer. I read novels by Mahfouz, Yasmina Khadra, Nawaal El-Sadaawi. Then Jim ordered me a collection of Ghassan Kanafani as I read My People Shall Live and Orientalism. And yes, I knew that Leila Khaled was a problematic hero – that hijacking two planes was a sure way of losing international support for your cause. But nose job or not, I got the raw injustice. Leila and her family were expelled from Haifa by force in 1948. Their land was not for sale nor purchased. This was violent expulsion, a.k.a. ethnic cleansing. Entire Arab towns and Arab neighbourhoods: gone. I was taught that 1948 was a war of independence.
Jim recommended books by Israeli historians. I learned that the founder of Zionism was a charismatic wife-beater. I learned that he proposed a homeland for the Jews in Uganda. I learned that Zionism began as literal science fiction. I learned that in pre-war Europe, the Zionists and Socia
lists were opposed. In interwar Europe, Zionism was seen by most Jews as fringe.
Jim was the one during the first year of my master’s who pointed me toward the work of Ka-Tzetnik 135633. This was after I told him how Sugarman was making us write about The Painted Bird in tandem with Night.
‘Maybe you’ll find this fellow an antidote,’ Jim said as he handed me a plastic-wrapped pulp paperback called House of Dolls. On the cover was a faceless, breasty woman in a rippedopen prison gown.
‘An antidote to what?’ I asked.
Jim smiled too easily. ‘Don’t quote me,’ he said, ‘but an antidote to the way the Holocaust is taught to you young Jews.’
Above the woman’s cleavage, there was tattooed: Feld-Hure 135633.
I’d learned about the Holocaust in Hebrew school. I’d learned that Jewish people all over Europe were targeted, shipped, enslaved, and gassed to death. I’d learned the number six million. Jews were nearly annihilated. I’d learned in Hebrew school, too, about the ragged survivors. I’d learned that after the war, they needed a land to belong. I was taught that Israel was their empty Nirvana.
Jim said, ‘We have to examine the validity of the gas chambers.’
‘The validity?’
‘You tell me. Who counted the bodies? The British? The Americans? I don’t believe the Americans. We have to draw our own conclusions, us thinking men.’
‘Uh…’
‘House of Dolls,’ Jim continued, ‘is a very unique book. An example of the first wave of these pseudo-truths peddled, which has become an industry, as you know.’
Wait. My friend Jim was a Holocaust denier?
Jim winked at me. ‘I’ll give you a little Faurisson next.’
For the first time since I’d known him, Jim made me feel really weird. But I bought House of Dolls and I read it three times in a row. I read about Daniela, Ka-Tzetnik’s sister, forced into prostitution in Auschwitz.