My wife and I drove to Philadelphia yesterday afternoon from New York. We were a half hour along when I said, Damn. I had forgotten a biography of Noam Chomsky I'd meant to grab and bring along. Oh, well the O'Neils will have one, my wife joked, a reference to her cousins.
I told my wife why I wanted the book. The day before I'd had lunch with a scholar who told me what a large impression Chomsky had made on him. My friend said that his memory was that Chomsky had not begun writing about Israel/Palestine till his parents died. Chomsky's father was a noted Hebraicist in Philadelphia, Chomsky himself had been a Zionist when young, and it would have hurt his parents too much for him to speak out against Israel's conduct. I was stunned by my friend's comment.
I said to my wife, "That means that one of the most important thinkers in the west didn't express his true thoughts on an important subject out of fear of hurting people."
"We all censor ourselves all the time."
"Yes but this isn't censoring himself about whether he found his father in bed with the neighbor, it's about a monumental abuse of human rights in our name as Jews."
My wife said, "It would have deeply hurt his parents and Chomsky knew that. It's like the famous thing Einstein said, 'Remember humanity and forget about everything else.'"
I'd never heard that. I said, "It's still amazing to me that Chomsky would have put aside such an important idea for the sake of his parents. My father wouldn't have done that."
"No your father wouldn't," my wife agreed. "Do you think your father was raised like Chomsky?"
After that the conversation became more personal, about my father's relationship with his mother and father and the ways I'm like my father. When I was young, a friend said that some family relationships are based on "negative intimacy," and I believe now he was pushing me toward the awareness that my father and I share a certain harshness. A lot of things went through my head, about my harshness on Israel, my parents' feelings about Israel, and my relationship to my father. Got to find that Chomsky biography.
