Wanderings [antikvár]

l>/jIntroductionI am an American, a Jew. Early in this century my father came to America from Poland. He had served in a Polish unit of the Austrian army during the First World War and had returned home to a strange reward: a pogrom.He crossed the Atlantic but underwent no sea change. He never grasped the essential difference between the Christian in America and the Christian in Europe. K Though beardless, and garbed as a twentieth-century fu man, he was a very pious Jew. He saw himself mirrored in the eye of most American gentiles as a Jewish Caliban.iHe spoke often about the strange destiny of our people, . a destiay chosen for us by the transcendent One God who had created man in His own image, thereby making each and every one of us unique and of infinite worth. For some mysterious reason, God's world was imperfect. i Man's task was to help God perfect it.My father often spoke in military terms: the Jews were the vanguard of mankind, the reconnaissance troops, and therefore prone to taking the highest casualties. But we would succeed one day in establishing the Kingdom of God on earth. Of that he had no doubt. Unlike the English historian G. M. Trevelyan, who regarded history as having no beginning and no end, my father saw history as the path that led from the creation of the world by God al- f most six thousand years ago to the future coming of the Messiah and the redemption, first of Jewry and then of all , , mankind. It was the sacred duty of the Jew to lead man i along that path; it was the demonic intent of imrighteous gentiles to try to kill us along the way.In the schools that served me as daytime homes during11