Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

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Think of the long trip home.

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

Where should we be today?

. . .

Continent, city, country, society:

the choice is never wide and never free.

And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,

wherever that may be?

—Elizabeth Bishop, “Questions of Travel”

Dispatches from Everywhere

When I was about seven, my father told me about the Holocaust. We were in the yellow Buick on New York State route 9A, and I had been asking him whether Pleasantville was actually pleasant. I cannot remember why the Nazis came up a mile or two later, but I do remember that he thought I already knew about the Final Solution, and so didn’t have any rehearsed way to present the camps. He said that this had happened to people because they were Jewish. I knew that we were Jewish, and I gathered that if we’d been there at the time, it would have happened to us, too. I insisted that my father explain it at least four times, because I kept thinking I must be missing some piece of the story that would make it make sense. He finally told me, with an emphasis that nearly ended the conversation, that it was “pure evil.” But I had one more question: “Why didn’t those Jews just leave when things got bad?”

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