Something called The Devil's Arithmetic had been popping up as a suggestion on one of the streaming services over and over, so Friday evening I thought I'd give it a try. I didn't know anything about it, and didn't know it was based on a YA novel written over 30 years ago to try to teach young people about the realities of the Holocaust. Realities I suppose the author thought young people might not have learned about at the time. Realities I'm sure even fewer people, young and old, actually know about now, three decades later. Or know about, but consider to be old, irrelevant, or even fake news.
The film tells the story of a Jewish American girl, played by Kirsten Dunst, who takes a Wizard of Oz-like voyage from her family’s Passover seder in New York in the film’s present of 1999 to her great-aunt’s home in a Polish shtetl in 1941. She then witnesses and endures firsthand the experiences of her older relatives, experiences she had formerly not been interested in hearing about when they had tried to tell her about them.
When it was over, I found myself sobbing. Besides the film's depiction of the horrors of existence in a concentration camp, which should make anyone sob, no matter who the victims are, all I could think of was my grandparents, and their family members who didn't make it out of their own villages in Poland, and might have gone through exactly the same sorts of things as the film's characters did before they were murdered. And I wished Grandpa Morton and Grandma Thelma were here so I could hug them.
And I was reminded for the umpteenth time that if Mordka Berkiensztat and Tema Gliksman hadn't immigrated, hadn't left their homes and all they knew, and in the case of Mordka almost his entire family, and come to this country; if they hadn't made it past the arbitrary borders that people create, and the rules and the obstacles they impose to make it as difficult as possible to do something that is already more difficult and painful than I can ever imagine, and started a life in a new and scary country, from nothing, then they might have shared the fate of the people they left behind. And I'm sure "real” Americans then thought the same thing about them that "real” Americans think now of people fleeing horrors in other countries and seeking asylum and refuge within the borders of this country.
The same is true of other brave people who had to uproot and face the unknown and cross borders at various times in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to escape the horrors of Jewish existence in countries that, to greater or lesser degrees, had no use for Jews. Samuel and Louise Freund of Bohemia, who settled in New York and whose son Milton, my grandfather, was born there. My grandmother, Edith Blinick, born in London during her family's time there, part of a journey that would take them to Montreal and eventually Toronto from Vitebsk in the Russian Empire. If they hadn't left when they did, they or their children would eventually have faced the Nazis and the other people in the countries they left behind who were also only too happy to see the Jewish problem handled. If they had been turned back at the borders, would they have found refuge elsewhere? Or would they have been sent back and suffered the fate of so many of their friends and relatives?
People seeking asylum in this country, people fleeing extreme poverty and violence and other horrors, deserve to be welcomed in this land of abundance. It's amazing, and horrifying, and depressing, and infuriating that in 2019 this actually needs to be said. But apparently it does: in our country, in our world, still so full of hatred and fear and hollowed-out spaces where love and empathy should reside.