Such questions come to the fore in the second volume of "Diaspora," titled "Voices," which contains 60 images from the first volume surrounded by talmudic-style commentary from several dozen distinguished thinkers, including Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, George Steiner, Carlos Fuentes and Jacques Derrida. A 1983 photograph of Ethiopian Jews regally clad in white robes, seated before the Simens Mountains, calls forth a bracing variety of responses. Brenner's text relays the disillusionment of one subject, Etenesh Bruck, now settled in Israel: "We are first seen as black and then as Jews." Contributor Zvi Bekerman conveys Bruck's humiliation at being asked to undergo conversion upon arrival. Julius Lester ponders the resistance to Judaism's putative African origins, remarking, "At the very least, we can say that Moses and the Jews in Egypt were not Ashkenazim." Most provocative, perhaps, is the poem Sami Shalom Chetrit addresses to the "black desert daughters," challenging them to "say something ... of European wisdom," "of her sublime culture" — to "say something," at last, "of Auschwitz."
Provocation abounds in "Diaspora": in "Jews with Hogs," depicting Miami bikers and their Harleys in front of a synagogue; in "Passion Play in Tykocin," showing Catholic Poles costumed for the purimspiel that their village's exterminated Jews cannot enact. Still, the Ethiopian image and its commentary evoke aspects of Brenner's work that may ruffle feathers in the North American Jewish community: first, his conviction that recent Jewish history "has been written from a very ethnocentric point of view: white, Western, Ashkenazi." He leaned forward, eyes ablaze. "I wanted to show all the many fragments that make up the fabric of klal Yisrael. I believe that there is no minor or major diaspora." And then there is his treatment of the Shoah: ever-present, to be sure, but less front-and-center than some might expect. Brenner noted wearily "the way Jews — mainly in America, but also in Europe — have dealt with the victimhood story, the way we have been abused by it."
| Go back for the rest of Marion Lignana Rosenberg's Forward article "Putting the Pieces of the Puzzle Together" on Frédéric Brenner's "Diaspora: Homelands in Exile"
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