makes Jewish literature into a kind of anti-literature—one that should make everyone question what they want out of a work of literary art.

It is certainly true that Fry was supremely happy and confident in Marseille. But there is something tautological about claiming that the traits that foster righteousness can be expressed only in a situation involving righteous conduct, and they can be painfully absent during the remainder of one’s life.

Varian Fry’s oddness was not that of a Marcel Duchamp. It was that of an Ezekiel. The real reason that no one today has heard of Varian Fry is because the gift he had is not one that we value.

At the end of the show, on-screen survivors talk in a loop about how people need to love one another. While listening to this, it occurs to me that I have never read survivor literature in Yiddish—the language spoken by 80 percent of victims—suggesting this idea. In Yiddish, speaking only to other Jews, survivors talk about their murdered families,

which it later spread through its client states in the developing world and which remains popular today: it was not antisemitic, merely anti-Zionist. (In the process of not being antisemitic and merely being anti-Zionist, the regime managed to persecute, imprison, torture, and murder thousands of Jews.)

Yiddish, the language of the culture that was successfully destroyed, one doesn’t find many musings on the kindness of strangers, because there actually wasn’t much of that. Instead one finds the overwhelming reality of the unavenged murder of innocents, along with cries of anguish, rage, and, yes, vengeance.

We were told that our ancestors were definitely not humiliated people facing the reality of American antisemitism, even though that is demonstrated by thousands of court records.

living in places where you are utterly vulnerable and cannot admit it.

Ours is a broken world. Rebuilding is hard, daily, constant, endless, the marriage that follows the wedding, which is not a happy ending but an imperfect beginning.