About the hope I lost, the promised land that no longer exists, and politicians who don’t care about people or the future

As a child, I believed that safety was hidden in books and texts. I ran to books that offered me a feeling of home and at the same time the opportunity to discover new worlds. I have always been driven by the desire for stories. To tell me “what it was like when you were little,” I forced my grandmothers so fiercely that one of them kicked me out of the kitchen and into my grandfather’s garden.

Later I believed what the American writer Eleanor Catton writes: “Literature requires curiosity, empathy, wonder, imagination, trust, dampening cynicism, eradicating prejudice, and in return it offers us curiosity, empathy, wonder, imagination, trust, dampening cynicism and eradicating prejudice .” I decided that the only way I can change things around me is through books, so I studied literature and am dedicated on many levels to making the literary industry work, for example, for female authors or translators better than before.

In often hopeless situations, frustrating and futile efforts to draw attention to the fact that literature is a tool of understanding across societies and generations, I consoled myself by the fact that it is a poorly paid, arduous job, but it has meaning. But in the last weeks and months I am more and more convinced that I have reached the end of the road. That understanding through texts and books is not possible, that it is a chimera and I am chasing a mirage for a third of my life. Still, I want to try again to break through the walls and try to understand each other. I do not expect understanding or eradication of prejudices or suppression of cynicism. I just know I can’t help it.

Piece by piece

For most of society, the Shoah chapter in the textbook is roughly somewhere between the Golden Bull of Sicily, the Hussite Wars, and the Velvet Revolution. Not for me and thousands of other people. It is not a destructive presence, in fact very internal mechanisms play a role, which you usually don’t even think about. Whether it’s knowing that you must always have a valid passport; the presence of security and control at Jewish kindergartens, schools and synagogues; or just “simple” appeals at Saturday lunch that your ancestors in the concentration camp had nothing to eat, so now you eat what’s on your plate. Last but not least, it is also