“
My grandfather Alexander and my grandmother Shlomit, with my father and his elder brother David, on the other hand, did not go to Palestine even though they were also ardent Zionists: the conditions of life there seemed too Asiatic to them, so they went to Vilna, the capital of Lithuania, and
arrived there only in 1933, by which time, as it turned out, anti-Semitism in Vilna had grown to the point of violence against Jewish students. My Uncle David especially was a confirmed European, at a time when, it seems, no one else in Europe was, apart from the members of my family and other
Jews like them. Everyone else turns out to have been Pan-Slavic, PanGermanic, or simply Latvian, Bulgarian, Irish, or Slovak patriots. The only Europeans in the whole of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s were the Jews.
My father always used to say: In Czechoslovakia there are three nations, the
Czechs, the Slovaks, and the Czecho-Slovaks, i.e., the Jews; in Yugoslavia
there are Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Montenegrines, but, even there, there
lives a group of unmistakable Yugoslavs; and even in Stalin’s empire there
are Russians, there are Ukrainians, and there are Uzbeks and Chukchis and
Tatars, and among them are our brethren, the only real members of a Soviet
nation.
”
”