Rediscovering Etty Hillesum

Sometime during or after my sophomore year of college (1985-86), almost certainly after my existential crisis decimated any sense of certainty I’d had about religion or anything else, I found the book on the left: An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum. Etty was a 27 year-old Jewish woman who lived in Amsterdam, and who started keeping a diary in 1941. Along with her observations about the war and the danger she and her fellow Jews were in, she wrote vividly about her intellectual, spiritual, and erotic life, which were all intensely intertwined. She strove to have what she called “a thinking heart.” I was utterly captivated the book, and it has stayed with me all the years since.

A few weeks ago I discovered – quite by accident – that the volume I owned was only a small portion of Etty’s diary. The book on the right is her Complete and Unabridged diary, along with the letters she wrote from Westerbork, a work camp where she was imprisoned before she was taken to Auschwitz. The unabridged volume is out of print, and I paid quite a bit for it, but it feels like one of the best expenditures I’ve made in a very long time. I feel like I am entering a “new octave” in my own life, integrating (finally) a lot of old lessons and releasing old aspects of my identity which went with them. Finding Etty anew at this time, and with so much more material, feels highly synchronous.

I haven’t had time to compare the texts yet, but the differences between the covers speaks volumes. The softly muted, pastel portrait on the left, with its demurely downcast eyes, hardly seems to have anything to do with the frank, bold, intense expression of the photograph on the right. It’s easy to suspect that there will be a great deal in this version which the previous editors found unsettling or uncomfortable, or which they feared their readers would not find appealing. I am looking forward to meeting Etty all over again, and I tremendously grateful for the thirty years of life and experience I’ve had since then. Years which were denied to her by anti-Semitic hatred and violence which still scar our world today. Her words are a gift. Her memory is a blessing.

On Christmas Without Dad, Gifts, Blogging, Being Known, and Unexpected Insight

Christmas this year was painful. It was the second one since my dad's death, and I think his absence hurt more because the first year I was still somewhat in shock. I always felt more akin to my dad than anyone else in my family (except my daughter), so his absence is not only its own grief, it makes being around my mother and sister less fun.

Writing about dissatisfaction with gifts is always perilous because of the risk of being perceived as petty and ungrateful. But I'm going to do it anyway. Because I need to unpack (no pun intended) some emotions and realizations. ( Read more... )