Destroyed by the Japanese, it is now being rebuilt by the Chinese as a tourist attraction.
Then, speaking of frozen, Horn details the fascinating story of Russian Jews who built a thriving community in a frigid part of China.
She begins with, as she puts it, “Everyone’s second favorite dead Jew,” Anne Frank, revered for a diary that keeps her frozen in time with no consideration of the future she lost. There is an immediacy to her writing that makes it seem as though everything she addresses is happening at once, even though the incidents described may be separated by centuries. Her thesis is contained succinctly in the book’s shocking title each chapter brings those words hauntingly and disturbingly to, well, all-too vivid life. As Horn explores the (not so) shocking attacks on the American Jewish community in recent years, she reveals the subtler dehumanization built into the public piety that surrounds the Jewish past-making the radical argument that the benign reverence we give to past horrors is itself a profound affront to human dignity.Horn, an award-winning author whose novels, including Eternal Life (2018), often intertwine Jewish issues, history, and the mercurial nature of time, brings all these themes to this provocative book of essays. Horn draws upon her travels, her research, and also her own family life-trying to explain Shakespeare’s Shylock to a curious ten-year-old, her anger when swastikas are drawn on desks in her children’s school, the profound perspective offered by traditional religious practice and study-to assert the vitality, complexity, and depth of Jewish life against an antisemitism that, far from being disarmed by the mantra of "Never forget," is on the rise. Throughout, she challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, and so little respect for Jewish lives unfolding in the present.
In these essays, Horn reflects on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the mythology that Jewish family names were changed at Ellis Island, the blockbuster traveling exhibition Auschwitz, the marketing of the Jewish history of Harbin, China, and the little-known life of the "righteous Gentile" Varian Fry. Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture-and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks-Horn was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones. Renowned and beloved as a prizewinning novelist, Dara Horn has also been publishing penetrating essays since she was a teenager. A startling and profound exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to comfort the living.
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