I used to take pride in my excellent memory. But sadly, it got somewhat less excellent after my first marriage. Perhaps my psyche decided that certain scenes from that part of my life story were best left un-remembered.

With regard to memory, by far the biggest holes were dug in 2023, after October 7th and 8th. At that time, as you may recall, there was rejoicing all round the planet – but especially in the universities – over the atrocities committed against Israelis by invaders from neighboring Gaza. The atrocities were photo-recorded by their jihadi perpetrators who boasted of committing them!

It seems that my psyche found itself unable to bear these scenes. So it dug out craters, forgetteries – psychic oubliettes – into which those memory segments could be dropped. And, since emergency defensive measures can be imprecise, more was dropped into the forgettery than needed to be.

Aware that it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness, I’ve started to read books about memory, trauma and therapeutic treatments for memory loss.

The first book I read, Trauma and Memory: Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past, by Peter A. Levine, PhD, offers theoretical explanations of brain function and malfunction, as well as detailed case histories of successful treatments. I assume that the patients shown must have also agreed to be photographed. The differences between their expressions and body language at the beginning and end of treatment are both clear and dramatic. It’s also evident that practitioners who follow Levine’s methods need to be carefully trained and to proceed in a gradual, step-by-step manner when working with clients.

At present, I’m about a quarter of the way into a quite different book. It’s titled Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror by Judith L. Herman, MD. Her overview might be called the vertical view: she situates attitudes toward trauma within culture and political history. 

Some traumas, such as marital rape and incestuous abuse of children, were present long before the culture was prepared to recognize them. Women’s complaints were dismissed by eminences like Freud as fantasies or unconscious wishes – until the political empowerment of women in the latter half of the twentieth century made room for consciousness-raising groups and began the process of changes in the law.

As in Levine’s reports, it’s become possible to treat trauma because it’s now possible to remove victims from the scenes of their suffering. If you have been accurately diagnosed with PTSD, doctors no longer send you back into combat as they used to. Likewise, domestic abuse is now recognized as grounds for divorce and legal penalties. The judge won’t force a wife to go back to her wife-beater. And, although abused children can’t themselves take legal action, by now some attention has been drawn even to their predicament.

There is one major obstacle to my contacting one or both of these authors for referrals to therapists who might help me get back the full power of memory that I had before the traumatizing events of October 7th and 8th, 2023.

In the cases I’ve read about so far, the traumatizing deed is not being done now. The raped woman who confides her story to her consciousness-raising group isn’t being raped now – not at the same time that she tells the women’s group what happened to her! The traumatized veteran isn’t back at the front at the same time that he tells the therapist what shocked him in previous combat.

But anti-semitism isn’t over! On the contrary. It’s world-wide and it’s growing. So it’s not clear that the therapy that repaired the traumas in these reports could help in my case.

Speaking of anti-semitism, here’s an interesting factual detail: Peter Levine reports that the grandchildren of Holocaust victims carry bio-chemical traces of death-camp trauma that they did not personally experience. Such traces can be detected even in the wombs of grandchildren of survivors! So that trauma is being passed on even to the third generation!

In this context, I wonder whether the sudden reappearance of anti-semitism after October 7- 8 might not itself be a resurfacing of the contempt for Jews that had been commonplace for almost two thousand years. Social anti-semitism was repressed during World War II‘s war against Nazism. Meanwhile the discovery of the Holocaust – it became Exhibit A among the Nazi atrocities – prolonged the suppression of such thoughts. But just as the memories of suffering can be passed down the generations and detected in certain bio-chemical markers, so possibly the even older memories of Christian contempt for and cruelty toward Jews might erupt like a collective “return of the repressed.”

It would be hard to prove such an hypothesis, since by now the grass is green over the present generation’s anti-semitic great-great grandfathers. No doubt there are other influences also in play. But this sudden eruption of hate seems to be a surd in culture for which a fuller explanation might include such factors, conscious and unconscious.

On the brighter side, there is one improvement over the placid surface of earlier years. The Jews whom I see interviewed today, or making speeches of their own, are no longer as deferential and tip-toe-y as they used to be. They’re candid and contemptuous of their anti-semitic contemporaries.

Is it the very existence of Israel – a nation under arms – that gives this confidence? Theodore Herzl, who convened the first Zionist conference where he introduced the idea of a Jewish state, pictured manufacturing and agricultural produce that would enrich the world. There is all that – and Israeli Nobel prize winners have also enriched the world along the lines of Herzl’s vision.

But mainly, today there is a Jewish state. Only one – and it’s a small one – which you can see almost in its entirety from the air. But its citizens, surrounded by hostile forces, are armed. 

And they know

how to fight.

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