Free Report from the Interior by Paul Auster Page A

knife in order to seal the covenant between your newborn self and the God of your ancestors. For all their indifference to the particulars of their faith, your parents nevertheless considered themselves Jews, called themselves Jews, were comfortable with that fact and never sought to hide it, unlike countless other Jews over the centuries who did everything in their power to disappear into the Christian world that surrounded them, changing their names, converting to Catholicism or one of the Protestant sects, turning away from themselves and quietly obliterating their pasts. No, your parents stood firm and never questioned who they were, but in the early years of your childhood they had nothing to offer you on the subject of your religion or background. They were simply Americans who happened to be Jews, thoroughly assimilated after the struggles of their own immigrant parents, and therefore in your mind the notion of Judaism was above all associated with foreignness, as embodied in your grandmother, for example, your father’s mother, an alien presence who still spoke and read mostly in Yiddish, whose English was nearly incomprehensible to you because of her heavy accent, and then there was the man who turned up occasionally at your mother’s parents’ apartment in New York, a relative of some kind by the name of Joseph Stavsky, an elegant figure who dressed in finely tailored three-piece suits and smoked with a long black cigarette holder, a sophisticated cosmopolitan whose Polish-accented English was perfectly understandable to you, and when you were old enough to understand such things (at seven? at eight? at nine?), your mother told you that cousin Joseph had come to America after the war with help from her parents, that back in Poland he had been married and the father of twin girls, but his wife and daughters had all been murdered in Auschwitz, and he alone had survived, once a prosperous lawyer in Warsaw, now scraping by as a button salesman in New York. The war had been over for some years by then, but the war was still present, still hovering around you and everyone you knew, manifested not only in the war games you played with your friends but in the words spoken in the households of your family, and if your first encounters with the Nazis took place as an imaginary GI in various backyards of your small New Jersey town, it wasn’t long before you understood what the Nazis had done to the Jews, to Joseph Stavsky’s wife and daughters, for instance, to members of your own family for the sole reason that they were Jews, and now that you had fully grasped the fact that you yourself were a Jew, the Nazis were no longer just the enemy of the American army, they were the incarnation of a monstrous evil, an anti-human force of global destruction, and even though the Nazis had been defeated, wiped off the face of the earth, they lived on in your imagination, lurking inside you as an all-powerful legion of death, demonic and insidious, forever on the attack, and from that moment on, that is, from the moment you understood that you were not only an American but a Jew, your dreams were populated by gangs of Nazi infantrymen, night after night you found yourself running from them, desperately running for your life, chased through open fields and dim, maze-like forests by packs of armed Nazis, faceless German soldiers who were bent on shooting you, on tearing off your arms and legs, on burning you at the stake and turning you into a pile of ashes.
    By the time you were seven or eight, you were beginning to catch on. Jews were invisible, they had no part to play in American life, and they never appeared as heroes in books or films or television shows. Gentleman’s Agreement notwithstanding, which won the Academy Award for best picture the year you were born, there were no cowboys called Bernstein or Schwartz, no private eyes called Greenberg or Cohen, and no presidential candidates whose parents had emigrated from the