Fires In The Mirror

The interview takes place Thanksgiving Eve, 1991, over the phone. Pogrebin talks about the scapegoating of Jewish and black communities, and the racism in America, like people who voted for David Duke. She talks about Jews paying special attention, such as when Jeffries talked about the collusion between the Mafia and Jews in Hollywood: “Only Jews listen, / only Jews take Blacks seriously, / only Jews view Blacks as full human beings” (50). Pogrebin says that in order to get media attention, “you have to attack a Jew. / Otherwise you’re ignored” (51).

The interview takes place at a restaurant in New York on a morning in April 1992. Mohammed travels with another well-dressed Muslim man. Mohammed speaks to the white devilry that robbed blacks of their humanity via slavery. He speaks to the suffering of blacks, including the rape of women, which “no crime in the history of humanity / has before or since / equaled that crime. / The Holocaust did not equal it” (54).

Mohammed admits that the Holocaust was terrible but it does not compare to slavery, which stole the lives of hundreds of millions and lasted much longer than a decade. Mohammed says that a person in an under-developed nation is better off than the black community in America because they have a “contextual understanding of what identity is” (55), which the black community does not have. He says that being cut off from their past and knowledge was a worse crime than being raped, murdered, tortured, sold like cattle, and renamed after their victimizers. He talks about how blacks are the chosen people of Allah, and how Jews are “masquerading in our garment” (58). He says that only seven verses in scripture talk about Jews as being chosen via the covenant with Abraham. 

The interview takes place on a spring morning over the phone, while Pogrebin sits in her Manhattan office. Pogrebin worries “that / we’re trotting out our Holocaust stories / too regularly and that we’re going to inure each other to the truth of / them” (59), but reads from her book anyway about her uncle Isaac. Isaac passed for Aryan and was commanded to survive and tell the story, but the Germans were suspicious, so they put him in charge of herding everyone from his community into the gas chambers, including his wife and two children. When he gets to America, he has “prematurely white hair and a dead gaze within the sky blue / eye that’d helped save his life” (62). He tells the stories over and over, talking for months on end and aging until he finished telling everything he knew and died. 

On a November 1991 morning, Sherman sits in his apartment, enjoying talking. Sherman speaks to how the Hasidim are a minority in Crown Heights, comprising only ten percent of the population, and how blacks, especially black, Caribbean Americans, represent the dominant culture. He says that trouble has been brewing for almost two decades, much of which revolves around bias: “There is a sort of soup / of bias— / prejudice, racism, and discrimination […] negative attitudes / that can lead to negative behaviors” (64-65). He says that the words get tangled up which can lead to a range of language associated with bias, like how Eskimos have seventy words for snow. The “very, very bad language” (66) associated with discrimination and bias in America is reflective of society’s inability to honestly deal with these subjects.