COMMUNITY VIEWS
Know For Whom The Bell Tolls

SIDNEY BOLKOSKY

Special to The Jewish News

e defined modesty and
humility: If one wanted to
write a definition of those
words, Andrew Weiss
would be all that was necessary.
His wife Shari, vivacious, buoyant,
talkative and animated, always beauti-
ful, seemed the polar opposite of him.
Yet, together they must have had a
wonderful life, despite the losses —
from the Holocaust to a daughter. In
the face of desolating disasters, they
carved out a life, like so many of their
friends, persisted in taking joy where
they could and in bringing it to oth-
ers. Andrew died recently. I never got
his story.
His friends packed the Hebrew
Memorial Chapel for his funeral:
other Holocaust survivors, their chil-
dren, members of B'nai Moshe who
loved his quiet grace, his sweetness, his
absolute refusal to take credit for his
accomplishments, his reluctance to be
called to the bimah, his steadfastness
and his quiet charm. And each of us
thought "another one gone." A few
even voiced the feeling.
That dwindling group, survivors,
who by definition are not supposed to
/- die, are dying and that small commu-
nity senses their passing as a diminish-
ment of more than just numbers. And
I never got his story.

- Sidney Bolkosky is professor of history
at UM-Dearborn.

EDITORS
NOTEBOOK
The Problem
With Yabbuts

ELIZABETH APPLEBAUM
Associate Editor

When I was in the
ninth grade, I had a
teacher whose first
announcement the
first day of class was
that he would not tol-
erate "yabbuts."
He explained that a
"yabbut" is one of those students who
invariably has an excuse that begins,
"Yeah, but ..." whenever a teacher

me how people like Andrew, who
Since 1981, when I began to inter-
experienced the Holocaust, could be
view survivors for the Holocaust
such mentshen. Not all survivors
Memorial Center and continued for
whom I have interviewed fit that
the Voice/Vision Holocaust Oral
description, but he and many of his
History project at UM-Dearborn, I
fellows at B'nai Moshe with whom I
have thought of these lost lives also as
have spoken surely do. All of us are
lost testimonies — why hadn't I asked
truly diminished by this loss because a
him? How had I overlooked him?
way of life and of perceiving the world
Would he have talked?
slips a little bit further away. Perhaps
At a parry at another survivor's
part of their characters have been
home several years ago, he told my
frozen from the time in their lives
wife Lori more than he had ever told
before the Holocaust ended. Each sur-
me. Shari had given brilliant inter-
vivor may retain a bit of the 15-year-
view, powerfully moving, generative,
old, still be 18 or 20 in their own
in which she seemed back there — in
the boxcar, gasping for air, on
the platform at Auschwitz,
panic-stricken as she gazed
incredulously at the barbed wire
everywhere. Excerpts of her
interview, used in a Holocaust
curriculum videotape, have
transfixed high school students
all over the country. "I was 15,"
she says, describing her first
encounter with Auschwitz; and
15-year-olds learning about that
epoch identify with her, appreci-
ate a little bit what it meant to
be a Jewish child in the
Holocaust. But Andrew — I
never got his story.
At his funeral, I remembered
the generator of Holocaust sur-
vivor oral histories in detroit,
Dr. John Mames, and I thought
to myself, "I'm sorry, John, I
never asked him." I never got
John's story either.
It will forever be a mystery to Items at the Holocaust Memorial Center.

minds and attitudes. That part of
them preserves the world from which
they originated, now sliding into the
past as they die. Pieces of Jewish life in
Romania or Hungary or Poland or
Czechoslovakia died with them and
no one has the - wherewithal to recover
them.
Andrew may be a synecdoche, an
emblem for that life and all that it
embodied; and to remember him
means to recall that ensemble of quali-
ties, attitudes, Jewish mentshlichkeit
that grows more rare with each pass-
ing day.

she said. (Boy, can you imagine if
Tony Blair stopped in at the White
House to tell Bill Clinton how he has
to get this Paula Jones thing in order?
Well, wait a minute. Maybe that's not
such a bad idea ...)
I was a little surprised, though, in
view of the few-days-old terrorist
attack in Jerusalem to find that
Albright would choose this moment
to stake her claim as a yabbut. But
there it was.
Netanyahu probably said some-
thing along the lines of, "How can we
talk peace when these terrorists are
killing innocent civilians?" And
Albright responded, "Yeah, but...
I forget her exact words, something
along the lines of, "Israel hasn't done
enough to create a climate of peace."
I'm sure the settlers were brought up,
and the fact that Israel doesn't want to
hand over Jerusalem to the
Palestinians, maybe that tunnel thing
again.

Isn't it amazing how every single
problem in the Middle East boils
down to something Israel has done, or
has not done?
Stalled Middle East peace talks?
Israel's fault. Terrorist attacks against
Israeli citizens? Israel's fault.
Stagnating growth in Palestinian
neighborhoods? You guessed it.
And how about that amen choir of
Jews (sorry, I couldn't help myself) in
the United States. -Why is it that Jews
here just can't wait to join in a diatribe
against Israel? Of course, they're too
careful to wage an out-and-out attack,
because that's called anti-Semitism.
But they seem to have no problem
condemning Israel when they can do
it as yabbuts.
"Did you hear there was another
attack against Israelis?"
"Yeah, but what do you expect
when Israel ..."

says, "That report was due yesterday"
or "I expected you to have your paper
completed last Tuesday."
Over the years, I have seen an
unprecedented growth of yabbuts in
the world, and it's getting on my
nerves.
Sometimes, yabbuts take the form
of victim.
Judge: "So, you went into the store
and you stole a dress ..."
Accused: "Yeah, but my mom was
mean to me when I was a kid and I
never had nice clothes ..."
Other times, yabbuts become the
accuser. A case in point is Madeleine
Albright.
Albright, of course, just returned
from the Middle East. As I pretty
much expected, she went to dispense
yet more invaluable American wisdom
about how Israel should conduct its
affairs, then came back frustrated
when Prime Minister Benyamin
Netanyahu wouldn't do exactly what

YABBUTS page 35

9/19
1997

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