7/30/2025

“People Love Dead Jews” by Dara Horn
 

Continued thoughts as I read this book-
 

I was reading the chapter about a small town in north China called Harbin, which was created by Russian Jews in the early 1900s. 
 
The chapter, titled “Frozen Jews” is about how this town was created, thrived, and was destroyed by multiple groups of opposing peoples- 
 
all in the span of about 30 years. It was going the usual amount of depressing to read this chapter, until about 5/6 of the way in I read a very 
 
deeply troubling story, about a successful Businessman who incorrectly assumed that his family would be treated with some amount of basic courtesy. 
 
He brought his family back to Harbin in 1932 (They were already living in France by then) and although they were just visiting, the reality of the hostile 
 
antisemetic environment took it’s toll. Joseph Kaspe’s son was kindnapped, then held ransom, then found dead in the tundra three months later. “When Kaspe saw 
 
his son’s maimed and gangrenous corpse, he went insane. Friends shipped him off to Paris, where he died in 1938. His wife was deported and died in Auschwitz five 
 
years later. His younger son escaped to Mexico, where he died in 1996, refusing to ever discuss Harbin.”
 

After about 23 pages of Dara Horn very carefully avoiding giving any opinions of her own on the town of Harbin, dutifully sidestepping 
 
any real critique or critical analysis, she lets you have all of the information she’s gathered, like a slap in the face. Then she doesn’t have to criticise 
 
or analyse anything, the damage has already been dealt, there is no more that need be said about what happened. I am awed by this effective piece of 
 
storytelling, but even more so I’m struck by how little power anyone in this example story had.
 

In “An Antizionist Path to Embodied Jewish Healing”, WES (Wendy Elisheva Somerson) writes about how powerless our ancestors were in times of distress. 
 
“Because so many of our ancestors were unable to protect themselves or their loved ones from harm during the Nazi Holocaust and other periods of violent
 
antisemetic persecution, many of us have internalized not only the terror of those times, but also rage about what happened.”
 

Considering my own family’s history of mental illness, it starts to make even more sense why this particular story stands out to me. “When Kaspe 
 
saw his son’s maimed and gangrenous corpse, he went insane. (…) he died in 1938.” If I were him, I can’t say I’d have done much (if anything) differently. 
 
If I had invited my (hypothetical) children to my hometown, only for one of them to be kidnapped and murdered, I would have also “went insane”. In addition, 
 
I’m shocked by how little time he spent on earth after that. 6 years of living with his ghosts, and he died. He didn’t even live long enough to be shipped to 
 
the death camps with his wife. I can’t say I’d have lasted any longer. It just strikes me how tragic and helpless the story is. No one gets out unscathed,
 
and the only one who lives does NOT tell the tale.

And coming back to the quote by WES, I don’t think I feel anger or rage about this story, not yet. I feel disturbed and confused. I feel defeat. 
 
I feel the weight of so many lives not only lost, but also tortured before their inevitable loss. That’s how this story feels, inevitable. How could I 
 
have assumed that things would work out differently (better) in the 1930s? Despite the fact that it occurs in China, there is no escaping the antisemetism of 
 
the time. Not even fleeing to Mexico can erase the horrors of Harbin.