After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

by Ben Rhodes

Like Sandor’s, my Jewish roots are in the Eastern European countries where pogroms drove people deep into the Jewish quarters of the grand cities. A good chunk of my family came to America early, decades before German nationalism lit the fires that fueled the Holocaust, while some stayed behind, destined to be surrounded by walls. Growing up in New York City, I did not feel my Jewishness as a religious identity; history was something we had escaped from. Our rabbis were writers—Roth, Bellow, Singer—who told stories from the residue of nation-states, the assertion of the individual. Our temples were the apartment buildings, courtyards, and fire escapes of Manhattan, where every life contained multitudes. As unbridled capitalism washed across New York at the same time that it remade Budapest, I had felt Sandor’s sense of loss as I watched characterless glass towers erase those old apartment buildings and with them the stories they held.