Silence Speaks Louder Than Words
[Autoethnography] Written for AMST 435/ANTH 366: Inequality in America
Elia Zilberman—subsequently Eli Silberman, via Ellis Island—was a nervous man, who never spoke about his life before America. He never told my grandfather, Irwin, about growing up in Dvinsk, Latvia. He never told him about suffering the atrocities of the Lyubashevka Ghetto in the Odessa Oblast, or of the Lviv Ghetto, or even of being miraculously evacuated from Nazi control during the liberation of Moldova. (All of this information is based purely on educated speculation, utilizing the United States Holocaust Memorial Museums’ Holocaust Survivors and Victims Database as possible reference; Grandpop Irwin knows none of it.) So as my grandfather grew older and lost the ability to distinguish between daydream and reality, he began to voice his last worries in a desperate attempt to have them solved by the daughter who now takes care of him. He told me (or her, or himself) some arbitrary midmorning, while we sat eating bagels with lox—a messy tear rolling down wrinkles from his pale blue eyes, pupils much too small, as if constantly in a state of clairvoyance—that if he had one wish, it would be to “hear [his] father’s story.” My aunt Amy, his daughter, looked silently at him for a moment. He was looking past the ceiling, hoping, tragic. After a moment of shared sorrow, she consoled him, promising that “Eli would visit in his dreams [that] night.” Grandpop finally closed his eyes, weeping, still mourning that unknown, sacred intergenerational narrative. Eli had died some years prior in 1975, struck by a car in Arizona; even after so much hardship, he was not allowed to die peacefully.
I always wondered—perhaps naively—why my great-grandfather Elia never told my Grandpop about his trauma; why Grandpop was constantly ridiculed for his quiet disposition by his wife, Sydelle (Bubby), [REDACTED], why I find it simultaneously necessary and extremely difficult to associate with Judaism, religiously and ethnically, to the point where I wear a necklace around my neck, but identify as atheist. I found part of an answer in a surprising text: Christine J. Walley’s Exit 0: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago, which contextualizes silence both as a means of escaping one’s own trauma and as a means of rebellion against its effects on one’s children, neither of which are effective. Walley’s ethnography follows a community of steel-workers—her own family included—in the wake of the deindustrialization of Southeast Chicago's steel mills. Walley depicts the good, bad, and ugly of various generations of her family, as far back as her immigrant Swedish ancestor through to herself (and eventually her hopes for her adopted son). She attests to the challenges of raising a family, considering the inevitable failures her own father, Charles, faced in his time and his influence on her. She notes how her “father’s bitterness at how his life had turned out, his lack of confidence that a place still existed for him in the world, emerged in small expressions of anger that surfaced on a regular basis” (Walley, 74).
Yet Charles Walley maintained a certain pride, too, in having worked in the steel mills, in a collective upward mobility, the ultimate failure of which conflicted with his internalized dominant narrative, or as Christine Walley puts it, “assumption taken as gospel” “that the future would necessarily be one of progress and increasingly common prosperity” (Walley, 158). Walley even notes that, just as a “web of ties” binds her to “Southeast Chicago, … to the relatives in Sweden from which [her] great-grandfather emigrated, … to the farms and coal mines in southern Illinois where [her] Little Grandpa was raised, and to the factories of Bohemia in Central Europe from which [her] father’s mother’s family hailed,” so too her “son will be similarly bound by a web of connections that lead outward across time and place” (Walley, 162-3). By concretizing intergenerational and inherited trauma through narrative, Walley allowed me to process my own confusion with all parts of family and community, and to understand that, while I am in control of myself, my own tendencies are not merely quirks of my personality, or the nurturing of my household, but are necessarily and intrinsically tied to the silence of Elia Zilberman and every other member of my family. Indeed, as Walley claims, Irwin’s college degree and subsequent economic success—which fit the dominant narrative—is intertwined with the story of Elia’s migration and tragic end, which does not. In my specific case, Dr. Rachel Yehuda’s fantastic paper “Holocaust Exposure Induced Intergenerational Effects on FKBP5 Methylation” seems to support this claim that the “severe psychophysiological effects” of the Holocaust have “intergenerational effects” as demonstrated in the epigenetic traces in FKBP5 Methylation (Yehuda, Conclusions).
But how do these vague “effects” manifest physically and behaviorally? In my family, my mother and aunt often scrunch their upper lip to their noses during stressful situations, while my and my Grandpop’s shoulders rise unconsciously. Each member of my family has different bodily responses, as we all undergo different variations of formally diagnosed and undiagnosed anxiety and depression. But only after reading the bodily approach toward trauma theory and social justice contained in Resmaa Menakem’s revolutionary New York Times Bestseller My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies did I begin to connect these characteristics with their origins through Menakem’s exercises in recognition and relaxation. Menakem slowly eases the reader into his conception of a network of generational and violent propulsion originating in the executions of the Middle Ages that he calls “white-body supremacy” (an alternative to white supremacy, which ignores the physicality of the inequality) while positing a solution in the “clean pain” of personal and communal growth (as opposed to the “dirty pain” of ignoring responsibility) (Menakem, 19-20). He cites “humming, rocking, rhythmic clapping, drumming, singing, grounding touch, wailing circles, and call and response” as common body-based responses which settle Black communities, and theorizes that other communities most likely utilize other methods (Menakem, 15).
That Menakem’s “white-body supremacy” originates from white-on-white violence in the Middle Ages is crucial to an analysis of post-Holocaust body analysis, which mirrors the racialized body analysis of his original premise in My Grandmother’s Hands. I theorize that Elia Zilberman carried his own “dirty pain” with which I both deeply empathize due to the atrocities he must have faced, and which I can simultaneously rationalize as impossible to “dispose of,” leaving inevitable psychological marks of damage on his descendants. I do not blame Elia Zilberman for his taciturnity; rather, with the help of Menakem, I am able to acknowledge that I have inherited a part of his story in the very fibers of my being. When I play Bach’s famous Chaconne on my pant leg in an anxious moment, or isolate myself claiming “introversion” as its own root cause, somehow still yearning for connection through music composition, I feel Elia’s hardships run through me. My very obsession with classical music itself, Dr. Sander L. Gilman claims in his groundbreaking article “Are Jews Musical? Historical Notes on the Question of Jewish Musical Modernism and Nationalism,” may stem from a post-Holocaust “generation of Western Jews that defined their place suspended between Western Bildung and Jewish identity in terms of the trope of music” (Gilman, 256). And so, perhaps selfishly, I like to think my unchosen bodily practice, a mere one response to my own trauma and that of my ancestors, is a beautiful voice of connection and healing in trying times that can be teased away from its supremacist roots.
This, of course, brings me to the practice of the modern-day. What kinds of actions can we take to address or counter our inherited trauma and the society we are bequeathed? [REDACTED]. Perhaps this signifies some kind of new rejection of Irwin’s conservative tendencies, doubtless sprung from his own careful, self-made narrative—yet my mother has found herself able to disagree with Irwin without entirely dismantling the institution of her family. For that, I wholeheartedly admire her. So for my next book recommendation to her, I plan to gift her a copy of Imani Perry’s More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States. Addressing the ever-daunting question above, Perry (a graduate of my high school!) uncompromisingly grounds her autoethnography in a commitment to common good that transcends both narrative and bodily inheritance. She counters two common misconceptions of the racialized process in America: that it is an unconscious engine running in the background of everyday life, or alternatively, that each member of a racist society must be considered a moral hypocrite. Perry refuses to split the difference, rather taking a radical “post-intentional” approach in which “small, deliberate, courageous, and dedicated movement can lead to big change.” She encourages active engagement in matters of justice despite the fact that “in a society and world with past and present experiences of ethnic conflict and oppression, we cannot think of something like racial justice as having an end point after which we can stop thinking about it.” She further insists that the ideal of American equal opportunity can only come about if all members of a just society cultivate “a commitment that is consistently engaged and regularly retooled to meet the needs of the moment” (Perry, 184).
Elia Zilberman, never having read Perry’s work, made a “courageous movement” towards equality, one I would never have seen without Menakem, Walley, and Perry’s joined hands. Most likely his silence was only semi-conscious, somewhere apart from the “unconscious engine” and “moral hypocrite” extremities, in that Eli knew he could never fully prevent the pain of the Holocaust from reaching his children, his children’s children, and theirs. But he made some part of a choice, which did not wholly break Irwin’s heart, nor fully allow for an ideal father-son relationship. In doing so, Eli submitted himself to the tragedy of his son, and the anger of his granddaughter, and the inherited grief of his great-grandchild. I choose to believe that Elia Zilberman elected action in an impossible situation, in the same way that all people of this flawed planet must, according to Perry, despite the inherited narrative and bodily dysfunction highlighted by Walley and Menakem respectively. This is not to vouch for centrism in any sense; in its stead this essay advocates for Elia’s chosen methodology, which strives to do the least harm possible moving forward in time. Every person—I, cannot succumb to nor ignore the past. I am a human being altered by history and the history of my ancestors, a dialectical and dialectic being, and must make choices to outdo harm wherever I encounter it. Perhaps Elia deserves more credit than I have given him. And perhaps, in that moment of Irwin’s grief, if I were to go back, I would write a new narrative of love and connection, instead of sitting on that stool, silent, grieving too. If I could now, perhaps, I would embrace Irwin, fostering the family he never had, making the “courageous choice.”
Works Cited
“Database of Holocaust Survivor and Victim Names.” USHMM.org, 2018, www.ushmm.org/remember/resources-holocaust-survivors-victims/database-of-holocaust-survivor-and-victim-names.
Gilman, S. L. “Are Jews Musical? Historical Notes on the Question of Jewish Musical Modernism and Nationalism.” Modern Judaism, vol. 28, no. 3, 15 Sept. 2008, pp. 239–256, https://doi.org/10.1093/mj/kjn009. Accessed 24 Apr. 2022.
Menakem, Resmaa. My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Las Vegas, Central Recovery Press, 2017.
Perry, Imani. More Beautiful and More Terrible. NYU Press, 28 Feb. 2011.
Walley, Christine J. Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago. Chicago ; London, The University Of Chicago Press, 2013.
Yehuda, Rachel, et al. “Holocaust Exposure Induced Intergenerational Effects on FKBP5 Methylation.” Biological Psychiatry, vol. 80, no. 5, 12 Aug. 2015, pp. 372–380, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006322315006526, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2015.08.005.