Well, here's a thing that just happened - a small and undramatic thing - that has brought home to me just how much life has changed for me in recent years.
I stepped out into the hall just now to get yesterday's post. I live in a house divided into flats; we leave each other's post by the appropriate door or on the stairs when we pick up our own, and somebody had kindly left mine for me.
It included a compact, solid-looking item that at first glance I took to be a catalogue or some such. In fact, it was a complimentary copy of a magazine for which I recently wrote an article. It's wrapped in clear plastic, so the magazine title is plainly visible.
The magazine is Jewish Quarterly.
Before I even knew what I was thinking, or that I was thinking it, or why I was thinking it, I thought, "Shit, now all the neighbours know I'm Jewish."
Then a millisecond later I caught myself thinking it and felt stupid and ashamed. It's not as if it's a secret, or as if I don't often talk about it publicly (although I wish I didn't have to, given the reasons why I do.) Nor as if I have any reason to think ill of my neighbours.
But my instinct was, "Uh-oh."
Because you never know when it's going to mean trouble.
You never know if the day is going to come when somebody points you out or turns you in.
And it is a grim moment when you realise you are now living with that mindset.
Because you never know when it's going to mean trouble.
You never know if the day is going to come when somebody points you out or turns you in.
And it is a grim moment when you realise you are now living with that mindset.
Such a thought would never have begun to cross my mind not so long ago.
But it's hidden deep in there, in so many of us, from generations of experience and knowledge and understanding of how things happen for us, everywhere. How there is no such thing as permanent safety.
But it's hidden deep in there, in so many of us, from generations of experience and knowledge and understanding of how things happen for us, everywhere. How there is no such thing as permanent safety.
Nowadays with every person I encounter, every person whose views I don't know, at the back of my mind is the question, "Are you one of them? The ones who when the time comes will let or help it all happen?"
It is a horrible way to live. To be as suspicious of the world at large as some people in it are of Jews, and all because of those people. Because of people who never should have been allowed in from society's fringes.
And it manifests itself in petty things like this. To get a reflexive shudder of fear from receiving a magazine that tells people who and what you are. That's my life now.
