FRANCINE KLAGSBRUN

FRANCINE KLAGSBRUN A piece of our conscience has died. Lucy Dawidowicz would hate to be memorialized in MOMENT. Commentary was her home. Freidl?" The voice on the other end of the phone was weak,...

...She defended the behavior of American Jews during World War II in the face of onslaughts of criticism that they did not speak out forcefully enough against the Holocaust...
...She said things she believed were right no matter how unpopular or politically "incorrect...
...And it did come, because she had angered groups she criticized...
...Her positions were never motivated by self-promotion or personal ambition...
...Having seen her just a few hours earlier, I knew she was close to death, so weak it seemed a miracle she could hold the phone, let alone issue the communique I was about to receive...
...There she received streams of visitors to whom, without a drop of self-pity, she said her final goodbyes laced with words of love...
...She wanted to add a speaker whom she had inadvertenUy omitted from the ceremonies...
...Because she eschewed sentiment of any kind, I have tried to write about her as unsentimentally as I could...
...She argued that in its bent toward voting Democratic, the Jewish community was voting out of its class and against its best interests...
...What, then, are we to make of this person...
...The voice on the other end of the phone was weak, struggling for breath...
...What—with her Holocaust work firmly in place—have we as a community now lost in the passing of the fiery, strong-willed Lucy Dawidowicz...
...All we've learned of the Holocaust since barely balances the scales with the enormity of that teaching...
...She continually maintained that Jewish leaders, like American leaders, were convinced that the best way to stop the murder of the Jews was to defeat Hitler as quickly as possible and therefore to concentrate on the war effort...
...it won't make the proceedings too long...
...This phone call, however, shocked me...
...Yet this was also a woman who could be fierce with those who opposed her...
...I write about her now as part of that search for understanding, not so much on a personal level but in terms of contemporary Jewish life...
...In an age of hype, hers was the sound of intellect and uncompromising honesty...
...The term "war against the Jews" is taken for granted today, used most recently, I've noticed, to characterize Stalin's treatment of Soviet Jews...
...Disagree with her as we might—and I did on a thousand things—she made us take stock...
...Lucy (everybody called her by her first name) demanded the highest standards of herself, as she did of her friends and of the community...
...She would hate it, I know, that I am writing about her in this magazine...
...But when Lucy Dawidowicz first titled her book The War Against the Jews, she was teaching us and the world something we did not know: the cen-ti lity of the destruction of the Jews to Hitler's plans for world conquest...
...In the more than 10 years in which we'd become close friends, I had received dozens of phone calls from her that always began with, "Freidl...
...She issued instrucdons about her books and papers and will, about continuing her work in raising funds to translate Yiddish literature and about the funeral...
...She left the hospital within hours of receiving the diagnosis, to die at home...
...She was called a racist because of that (she was decidedly not racist), but held her ground and was later joined by a chorus of other Jewish leaders...
...In fact, she had been making funeral plans from the moment she'd entered the hospital just a few weeks earlier with what would soon be diagnosed as a rare, incurable cancer...
...She wished, she told me, to make some last minute change in her funeral arrangements...
...I think we've lost a piece of our conscience...
...For when again will I ever meet a curmudgeon who calls me Freidl and worries in her last breaths about hurting someone's feelings at her funeral...
...The myriad of friends she left behind talk about her constandy, still trying to understand this woman who could, through sheer orneriness, arouse fury, yet who tapped the deepest wellsprings of devotion, love and protectiveness in each of us who knew her well...
...She knew the illness would kill her, and she was determined to take charge of her life and death as much as humanly possible—and then some...
...For the "lefties," as she labeled all who might call themselves liberals, she had nothing but derision...
...I'll take care of it, Lucy," I said, picking up on her unemotional, businesslike tone...
...Yiddish was her language, and applying it to me was her personal statement of affection...
...This was a woman whose contribution to our knowledge of the Holocaust cannot be measured...
...She loved Israel, never wavering for one moment in her support, and she loved America and its Jews...
...She had long ago rejected the anglicized Francine along with the Hebrew Aliza, by which I'm known to many friends, as not quite right for her...
...Commentary was her home, and the politics of neoconservatism her gospel...
...Her book Voices of Wisdom—Jewish Ideals and Ethics for Everyday Living (David Godine, 1990) was recently published in softcover...
...I never accepted that argument, but in not accepting it I had to sort out my thoughts and examine the motives behind my voting patterns...
...Only one person in the world had ever called me by that Yiddish name—not my parents or grandparents but Lucy Dawidowicz...
...She could be judgmental and cuttingly critical, and she did not stop short of making enemies...
...And when again will we hear such a forthright voice provoking us to think hard about what we believe and what we say, even if only to disagree with her...
...Some years ago, before there had been a whisper of such talk in the Jewish community, she criticized Bishop Tutu of South Africa for his pro-Palestinian stance...
...IS' Journalist Francine Klagsbrun writes and lectures on such Jewish issues as family, social change, ethics and feminism...
...I always believed her right in that argument and was glad she did not tire of making it...
...Then she died, as she had lived, alert and in control until almost her last breath...
...But, oh, how I miss her...
...The best thing about dying," she said in those last days, "is that I won't have to answer the pile of hate mail that will come in response to my latest article...
...She was dismissive of my middle-of-the-road positions and disdainful of my feminist allegiances...
...I don't want him to feel hurt or left out," she said between breaths, as if she were talking about a party invitation, adding, "Give him five minutes...

Vol. 16 • April 1991 • No. 2


 
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