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Language of Hate and Intimidation
How do you make one group of people hate another group of people they have never met?
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In the dimness of the kitchen, the air thick with the aroma of cooking, my grandmother prepared the Shabbat meal. I stood there in the narrow hallway, inside the frame of the door and watched; her body planted firmly in the chair, deft fingers kneading the dough with long slow movements turning the sticky mound, pounding and rolling it. She continued to move the rolling pin until the dough thinned and soon gaping holes stared back at her. But she didn’t see them. These widening spaces lead her behind her eyes. Eyes that had seen a life perish before it even began. By men too hateful, heartless to her soul, they took her children away, her family, their fingers red with blood.
She frequently paused from kneading, a strange distant look entered her eyes, and I felt the rush of all the years of grief and the ocean of pain pouring forth. At that moment, the continuing and unwelcome sense of gloom, blotted out the line between real and imagined worlds and infected me.
