I exist thanks to the decision of my parents, born in Poland, to rebel against the rabbis and immigrate to Israel

I was born in Warsaw during the war. And I was -- survived partly because I was hidden in a place in a Catholic orphanage. And my parents arranged for that. My father was killed in the uprising. He was one of the people involved in the uprising -- in organizing it.

But it turns out many who march for a free Palestine believe, as Hamas believes, that Israel shouldn't exist at all. They see Israelis as "colonisers and settlers". But do you know why they had to settle there? Because they had nowhere to go after the Holocaust achieved what centuries of persecution had failed to do and wiped out most of Europe's Jews. Many, like my Polish family, couldn't go back to their home country because there were still — even after the fall of Nazism — Jew-hatred and pogroms there. So they went to Israel. This is the context: the Jews are there because they needed somewhere safe to live, and now their grandchildren are being killed for it.

Both my parents are immigrants. They came from nothing, had to work so hard, and so the idea for them, I suppose, of taking a risk, that wasn’t a luxury they had. I always knew that was the luxury and privilege that I had, that they had given me.

My parents saved me from nonexistence.

I learned a great deal about immigration as a child because my father came from Poland at the age of 17, without a nickel in his pocket, without knowing one word of English. He came to the United States to escape the crushing poverty that existed in his community, and to escape widespread anti-Semitism. And, it was a good thing that he came to this country because virtually his entire family was wiped out by Hitler and Nazi barbarism... The underlying principles of our government will not be racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, and religious bigotry. I did not come from a family that taught me to build a corporate empire through housing discrimination. I protested housing discrimination, was arrested for protesting school segregation, and one of the proudest days of my life was attending the March on Washington for jobs and freedom led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Our parents’ generation and our generation grew up under different circumstances. Our parents were born during difficult times and forced into exile at a very young age. They had to fight for their country and identity.

I was born in Munich, Germany, in 1933. I spent the first six years of my life comfortably, as an adored child in a closely-knit middle-class family. Even when my family was rounded up for deportation to Poland it didn’t occur to me that anything could happen to us. All I remember is scrambling up and down three tiers of narrow beds attached to the walls of a very large room, and then taking a long train trip. After some days of back and forth on the train, we were returned to Munich. All the grown-ups were happy and relieved, but I began to realize that there were bad things that my parents couldn’t completely control, something to do with being Jewish. I learned that everything would be fine if we could only get to “America”.

There was a thousand-year-old tradition in Poland that I feel far closer to than the religious traditions based on Torah and Talmud and halakha. Now much of that tradition is religious. But it represents my history, my Polish Jewish ancestors. Poland is the center of my Jewish cultural roots, and the destruction of that center in Eastern Europe has created the deprivation of my life. My mission is to try to figure out how to continue here. So in that sense I don't accept the Zionist premises of Diaspora and homeland-that dichotomy. I feel Jews can be Jews anywhere. They might have to work on it in different ways depending on the contexts, hostilities, support, and so on. But they have to figure it out. So, yes-neither Israel nor the Bible is the core of my Jewish Identity. (GP: Can you say what it is? Is it memory?) IK: For me it is language and culture. What the Jewish Labor Bund called national cultural autonomy…Language by itself really doesn't mean anything to me. It's because a language is the medium of a whole culture, of a literature, of a politics (socialism) that language-Yiddish-takes on meaning. Now the question for me is what happens to that combination of language and culture here in the United States. I'm someone who is currently active in translating. I don't want that Yiddish heritage lost to the Jews here who can't read Yiddish. So simultaneously when I translate I'm also proselytizing for people to study Yiddish so that they can read the original. What I don't know is whether we can in fact have a secular culture-meaning one not based on religious practice and ritual or on religious texts-here in the United States as they did in Europe. They had the Yiddish language to define it, we do not. Of course, I'm hoping we can and will.

Uprooted is very much about my mother’s side of the family, who were Polish Catholics. They were deeply patriotic and deeply rooted in their country...Spinning Silver is about my father’s family, and they were Lithuanian Jews who had to escape persecution—not just from the Nazis, but from their own neighbors.

Er ist aber in Kopenhagen geboren, von israelitischen Eltern, die der dortigen portugisischen Judengemeinde.

However, he was born in Copenhagen, of Jewish parents, of the Portuguese Jewish community there.

When I was about five years of age my parents brought me to this country and we settled in New York. So my earliest recollections are of living in a crowded street among the East Side Jews, for we also are Jews.

I was born to poor because of honest parents.