why are we telling these stories?

what did we come here to find?

what did we come here to ask?

removed from us in space and in time, this place
belongs to a memory potentially
our own,
to a probable autobiography.
our parents or grandparents might have been here
it was mainly chance that decided whether they would stay
or would not stay in Poland, whether they would stop
on the way, in Germany
or Austria or England or France.

to each of us, this shared fate has appeared
in a different light:

what I, Georges Perec, have come here to examine
is dispersion, wandering, diaspora.
To me Ellis Island is the ultimate place of exile, that is,
the place where place is absent, the non-place,
the nowhere.
it is in light of this that these pictures concern
and fascinate and involve me,
as if the search for my own identity
depended on my incorporating this dumping-ground
where frazzled bureaucrats baptized
Americans in droves.
what I find present here
are in no way landmarks or roots or
relics
but their opposite: something shapeless, on the outer edge of
what is sayable,
something that might be called closure, or cleavage,
or severance,
and that in my mind is linked
in a most intimate and confused way
with the very fact of being a Jew

I don’t know exactly what it is
to be a Jew,
or what effect being a Jew has on me

there’s something obvious about it, I suppose,
but it’s a worthless obviousness
that doesn’t connect me with anything,
it isn’t a sign of belonging,
it doesn’t have to do with belief, or religion, or a code
of behavior, a way of life, or a language;
it seems more like a silence, a deficiency, a question,
a questioning, a dubiousness, an uneasiness:

an uneasy certainty,
and looming behind that, another certainty,
abstract, oppressive, and intolerable:
that of having been labeled a Jew,
Jew therefore victim,
and so beholden for being alive to exile and luck

like near and distant cousins of mine
I might have been born
in Haifa, Baltimore, or Vancouver
I might have been Argentinean, Australian, English or
Swedish,
but in the almost unlimited range of
possibilities,
one thing was specifically denied me:
I could not be born in the country of my ancestors,
in Lubartow or Warsaw,
or grow up there, in the continuity of tradition,
language, and community.

In some way I’m estranged
from myself;
in some way I’m “different,” not different from others
but from “my own people”:
I don’t speak the language my parents spoke,
I share none of the memories they may have had,
something that was theirs and made them what they were
— their story, their culture, their hope —
was not handed down to me.

I don’t have the feeling that I’ve forgotten
but that I was never allowed to learn;
this is how my approach differs
from Robert Bober’s:

to him, being Jewish means continuing to reaffirm one’s place
in a tradition, a language, a culture, and
a community that neither centuries of diaspora
nor the systematic genocide of the “final solution”
succeeded in definitively crushing;