FOR AMERICAN JEWS, one legacy of the Holocaust is a sense of nostalgia, tinged sometimes with a feeling of guilt, toward the life of our ancestors in Eastern Europe. The nostalgia is natural enough—it is the idealization of an unknown past that is common among American immigrant groups, as Irish or Italian as it is Jewish. What makes the Jewish American experience different is the fact that our “old country” did not continue to evolve and develop after we left it, because it was violently destroyed. We treat our past reverentially, sentimentally, with kid gloves, because we are afraid that if we handle it too roughly it will be shattered beyond repair.
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