From Still Pictures (Janet Malcolm, 2023) pp10-12
When we arrived in America, and were taken under the wing of my aunt and uncle, who had left Prague six months earlier, we changed our name from Wiener to Winn, as they had changed theirs from Eisner to Edwards, out of fear of an anti-Semitism that was not limited to Nazi Germany. As an extra precaution, my aunt and uncle had joined the Episcopal Church. My parents balked at taking such a step. But they sent Marie and me to a Lutheran Sunday school in our neighborhood and never did anything or said anything to acquaint us with our Jewishness. Finally, one day, after one of us proudly brought home an anti-Semitic slur learned from a classmate, they decided it was time to tell us we were Jewish. It was a bit late. We had internalized the anti-Semitism in the culture and were shocked and mortified to learn that we were not on the “good” side of the equation. Many years later I came to acknowledge and treasure my Jewishness. But during childhood and adolescence I hated and resented and hid it. The recoil from Jewish identity was not unique to me, of course, as the term “self-hating Jew” attests. But each case of this anxiety disorder is different. Some of the severity of mine could be attributed to my parents’ own confusion about how to represent themselves in their adopted country. In Prague, they knew who they were; they belonged to a community of secular, nationalistic, Czech-speaking Jews who lived confidently among the Czech goyim and were thoroughly identifred with Czech culture—as opposed to the German-speaking Jews whose most famous member was Franz Kafka. That is, they thought they knew who they were. After the Nazis marched into Prague in March 1939, it no longer mattered what kind of Jew you were, whether you spoke German or Czech, lit Hanukkah candles, or (as we did) ate carp soup on Christmas Eve. All Jews were vermin to be exterminated. Some of the Czech Gentiles proved to be less philoSemitic than they had appeared. Anti-Semitism was a fixture of the Czech state, as it was of every other European state. For example, my father could not study literature at Charles University, because the faculty of literature did not welcome Jews. He studied medicine instead. The fearfulness that fueled the change of name from Wiener to Winn was not enurely unwarranted: there was anti-Semitism in 1939 America too, and my parents could not know for sure that they had found a refuge here. By the time they understood that they had, their children’s imaginative life had been deeply affected by their dread.
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