JUNE 2 • 2022 | 49
America, families then told their children
the soothing falsehood that their names
were inadvertently changed at Ellis Island.
Horn records, though, that Ellis Island had
a staff of multilingual experts who checked
travelers’ names against the names on ships’
manifests. Names did not get changed at
Ellis Island. The soothing story preserves
America’s good name as a haven for Jewish
immigrants and covers the shame of those
who feel embarrassed at having abandoned
their family names.
Horn calls things by their
proper names, but she, perhaps
uncharacteristically, sympathizes
with those who distorted the story
of how they got their American-
sounding last names. She notes
that Jewish communities around
the world preserve wishful legends
about how their friendly non-Jew-
ish neighbors welcomed the Jews
who first came to this place.
Sites around the world that
once had Jewish communities
now make expensive efforts to
reconstruct their now-empty syn-
agogues and study-halls, and even
to build new museums of local
Jewish culture. Leaders hope to
attract tourists — primarily Jewish
tourists — to view these memori-
als with nostalgia and affection.
Horn herself travels to these
venues, but they leave her feel-
ing queasy. The memorials to a
once-thriving Jewish community
do not feature exhibits about what
happened to make the Jews disap-
pear. Somehow, these venues have
warm nostalgia for the Jews who
used to live here, but only after
those Jews have been murdered or
at least driven away.
One example of a memorial to a depart-
ed Jewish community: In 1896, when the
Czarist regime built the Trans-Siberian
Railway, the planners needed a hub in
Manchuria, a frozen land adjoining Siberia.
Industrialists could build a town where
none existed, but which wealthy industri-
alists would want to live there? The czar’s
minister of finance had a brilliant idea:
Jews who needed to flee the Russian’s own
pogroms and antisemitic laws. Wealthy Jews
did build the hub, the city of Harbin, and
poor Jews joined them, especially after the
Russian Revolution; so, Harbin became a
home to thousands of Jews, until it wasn’t.
Japan conquered Manchuria in 1931,
and, with help from anti-Communist
White Russians, claimed Jewish-owned
businesses. The Soviets took over in 1945
and sent Jewish leaders to the gulag. When
the Chinese conquered Manchuria in 1949,
they allowed the remaining Jews to leave for
Israel, if they would abandon all their prop-
erty. Now Harbin, with its one returned Jew,
works at building an affectionate memorial
to its long-departed Jewish community.
Visiting Harbin leaves Horn uncomfortable.
Horn asks, how did the diary of Anne
Frank become the best-known account of
the genocidal war against the Jews? How
did one sentence become the most-often
quoted, the “lesson” of Anne Frank’s work?
Anne Frank wrote, “I still believe, in spite
of everything, that people are truly good at
heart.
” Horn notes that these words “flatter
us. They make us feel forgiven.
”
Horn writes, “Frank wrote about peo-
ple being ‘truly good at heart’ before
meeting people who weren’t. Three
weeks after writing these words, she met
people who weren’t.”
Holocaust museums around the world
also make Horn feel uncomfortable, though
she passionately believes we do need to
learn and remember the facts. Whenever
she detects a lesson to be learned,
though, Horn gets that queasy feel-
ing. If we learn the details of how
Jews were killed, without devoting
much attention to how Jews lived
and live, we can come to know
those Jews as “people whose sole
attribute was that they had been
murdered and whose murders
served a clear purpose, which was
to teach us something” (xiv).
Other essays in People Love
Dead Jews focus on Varian Fry,
the American diplomat who
heroically saved dozens of the
greatest musicians, writers and
thinkers of Europe. An American
heiress named Mary Jane Gold
(not Jewish) provided funding the
American government would not
for the effort to save people whose
“art had put them in danger.
”
Fry’s life went downhill after the
war and, as Horn demonstrates,
the artists he had saved did little
to help him. Horn notes that “it
is easy to forget there are other
values a culture might maintain,
other people whom one could
consider the guardians of civili-
zation instead of artists and intel-
lectuals — and that a large proportion of
the people who were actually murdered
in the Holocaust adhered to one of these
alternatives.”
She continues: “No rescue committee
was convened on behalf of the many people
who devoted their lives and careers … to
the actual study of righteousness” (164-65).
Read Dara Horn’s essay collection People
Love Dead Jews. The book can help us learn
to call things by their proper names.