The practice of “black weddings” (or “shvartze khasene” in Yiddish) held in Jewish cemeteries emerged in the 19th century across Eastern Europe in response to the Cholera epidemics that decimated entire populations in regular waves.  These rituals were believed to ward off such epidemics. Plague Weddings often involved the forced union of orphans or beggars.  As Laura Spinney describes in her book Pale Riders about the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, “Bride and groom must be chosen from among the most unfortunate in society…a black wedding was conducted in the belief that the knot tied amidst the graves of the parish dead, the contagion would at last stop.”   Spinney’s book even documents such plague wedding at Mount Hebron cemetery in New York in 1918, where despite all the modern sanitary practices and public health policies that were already in place then, two strangers were wed as a divine plea for protection.

Can the incomprehensible cruelty of a virus be compared with the evil of the Nazi’s genocide? How can we compare the indiscriminate nature of a virulent biological phenomenon to the deliberate, fully intentional inhumanity of the Third Reich? Zoya answers. “It’s true of course. But fear is fear.”  She continues, “While we are complaining about being locked in our houses, I think about Anne and her family hiding for years in that tiny place. In her diary, she describes how she was looking out the window carefully, afraid to be seen from outside.”

When I first saw Zoya’s drawing of the confined girl peering out the window, reflecting on the deep pooling of black ink engulfed me in dark thoughts. I too had been guilty of deploying “Anne Frank” guilt when talking to my own teenage daughter just last week—she could not help but explode at me with a torrent of adolescent emotion. Misia was tormented by missing her friends. She bemoaned the deprivation of so many rites of passage at the end of her eighth-grade year that were surely canceled.  Zoya’s drawing became a catalyst for my own mother/daughter shame spiral—was I becoming my own guilt-inducing mother? Oh, the clichéd Freudian horror of this quarantine! I re-read Anne Frank last winter. How could I not at least give credence to my own daughter’s growing pains heightened by sudden deprivations (at least, without again misusing the memory of Anne Frank)?

In a provocative essay published in the New Yorker in 1997, writer Cynthia Ozick asks, “Who Owns Anne Frank?” Pushing back against the marketing of her diary as an uplifting work—“a  poignant delight in the infinite human spirit” —Ozick dissects how Frank’s story “has been bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, traduced, reduced; it has been infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized; falsified, kitschified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied.” Ozick concludes her detailed chronicle of the “shameless appropriations” of Frank by pondering a more salvational outcome for Frank. Would it not have been better for the diary to be destroyed?

Guilty as charged, yet we the appropriationists, beg to disagree.

A radiant blonde boy stands in the foreground. He is wearing a Vyshyvanka—a typical embroidered Ukrainian folk shirt. He stands in front of a roaring hearth with long handled peel in hand; the composition implies that he is baking bread or cooking for the elderly Jewish couple who are sitting passively nearby. “Shabbos Goy”: a quick Google search offers a pantheon of famous gentile helpers from Elvis Presley who assisted his downstairs neighbors in Memphis to a young Barack Obama who shared an office in Chicago with a fellow senator who was Orthodox. I think of my grandfather, Charley Fitzpatrick, whose tales of his heyday in the Bronx during the Depression came to life in my mind as a gritty Jewish-Catholic remake of the Little Rascals. “On Saturday, I would go to Temple on the Grand Concourse with my buddy Saul. And come Sunday, he’d come to Our Lady of the Assumption for Mass. What was the difference?!” But there is a dissonance between these cheerful American anecdotes and Zoya’s disquieting scene. I inquire whether this drawing is a veiled self-portrait. Her answers come in a rapid of bubbles:

 “It’s like the other side of anti-Semitism — the way Jews see a “goy.”

“It’s a little beat offensive to be a goy.”

“Personally, I’ve been both—a Jew in Ukraine and a goy in Israel.”

“I must say being a Jew was easier.”

“Nobody ever asked me how come I’m a Jew and live in Ukraine…I have a floating identity.”

Passive sacrifice.

I bite my tongue while talking with my mother over the phone. She has this need to conclude our nightly check-ins with some variant of “We are all going to be better people after this is over…”  Why? Why us particularly? I cry out in my head. What are we even doing right now besides sitting at home passively? Her compulsion to moralize this moment drives me nuts—just more Catholic PTSD. Why do we need to project some kind of moral meaning onto this pandemic? I understand the compulsion of positive thinking, but can we really make meaning out of the havoc wreaked upon the human populous by this undiscriminating pathogen? The end of "normal" life has everyone reflective, but is there another reflection that can emerge that is not a simplified redemption or celebration of personal sacrifice?  

Spring is a season of sacrificial celebrations—the virus’ canny timing is hard to ignore. With their ritualized acts of memory, Passover and Easter loom with crushing symbolic weight. Yet most Seders will be smaller this year. Hard to imagine a multigenerational table like the one Zoya conjures in her Seder drawing. A majority of churches will be shuttered for Good Friday enactments of the Stations of the Cross. Our sacrificial goats and lambs are also subject to forced isolation.  To this day, I am haunted by the image of Jan van Eyck’s anthropomorphized lamb who stands on an altar in the central panel of the Ghent altarpiece. His sacrificial blood streams mystically like an endless font, flowing for centuries, from his chest into a golden chalice. I made countless pilgrimages to see this Agnus Dei as a young art history student in Belgium—his melancholy rules my visual and moral unconscious.

Zoya sends me a group of drawings captioned with lyrics of Chad Gadya that are sung from the Haggadah at the conclusion of the Passover feast.