Tattoos
March 27, 2025 at 03:30PM
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Aaron Rabinowitz | Longreads | March 27, 2025 | 8 minutes (2,262 words)
My mother has a tattoo, but it’s not what you think. She was born a little too early to be a hippie, was too preoccupied with raising Vietnam-era kids on a desert air force base to get into all the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. And her ink is not one of those half-moons on the ankle or a lower-back tramp stamp. She had cancer years ago. The doctors marked her skin for radiation therapy with an indelible freckle.
When she was in the clear, my father joked that she couldn’t be buried in the Jewish cemetery where they’d pre-purchased adjoining plots. The Jewish prohibition against tattooing goes back to biblical times, specifically when Moses and his people were totally lost in the wilderness and God said, You shall not . . . incise any marks on yourselves. I am the Lord. And the Hebrews said, If you get us out of the desert, we’ll call you whatever you want. That’s the end of the story. It’s in Leviticus. Look it up.
But if you’d prefer that I do that myself, the term commonly translated as tattoo, קַעֲקַע (ka’aka), is a hapax legomenon. It is a widowed word, a hermit, a singularity. קַעֲקַע occurs only once in the Torah, making it difficult to verify its exact meaning. That gives me hope for my mother and for those whose bodies were involuntarily engraved. God may be granting them some wiggle room.
When my father-in-law was growing up in Baltimore and misbehaved in Hebrew school with his friends, their teachers would calmly unbutton their cuffs and roll up their sleeves, revealing their tattoos from Auschwitz. I’ve seen worse, the tattoos said. Or perhaps, This could happen to you. An effective disciplinary strategy. Back then, the Holocaust wasn’t some biblical tale. Survivors were walking around in blue jeans and buying TV dinners and working at department stores. They were the bank teller you visited in the morning and the neighbor who made sure that at night all his entrances were triple-locked. Young people starting families and middle-aged folks grieving lost ones.
When I was 10, my mother told me that her father, my Zaydie, a second-generation Pittsburgher, frequently came home from the steel mills where he was one of the only Jewish employees and said things like, It could happen here. I had read enough autobiographies, seen enough archival footage, visited enough memorials and museums to understand what It meant.
I was raised on stories from my Hebrew school teachers about those who escaped prewar Europe and those who didn’t. It did not seem remarkable that all my classmates and I were Americans because our grand or great-grandparents made the right call. It did not seem abnormal that some of our great- or great-great-uncles had thought that they could ride out the bad times, had thought that things could always be worse, had waited too long. We were Americans because our direct relatives were so traumatized by pogroms or quotas or Nuremberg Race Laws that they were forced to flee, often with the help of a good forger.
Like my father’s father. When he was growing up in Ukraine, which he always called Russia, every once and a while men on horseback would ride into his village and rape and murder the Jewish residents. I didn’t know any of that. I only knew that by 1921, his parents had cobbled together enough money to pay smugglers to sneak them across the half-frozen Dnieper River and through multiple European countries and onto a ship embarking from France. My grandfather’s parents found someone to ink them bogus Romanian passports, but US quotas were full, so they chose Canada. Two years later, they made their way to Pittsburgh. My grandfather was able to ditch his old country accent, but he could not erase his history. Some of it was in the narrative of his nightmares, which plagued him his whole life. Some of it was visible on his skin, where he was wounded from a Cossack bullet during one of the raids.
My classmates and I believed we were just as savvy. If we’d been forced to wear bells as our ancestors in Egypt had a thousand years ago, we would’ve ceded the Nile Delta to the crocodiles. If we’d been in France for the Dreyfus Affair, we would’ve known to abandon those Parisian pâtisseries. If the benches in our local park were stenciled with Nur fur Arier!, we would’ve booked a one-way train ticket out of Vienna. We were convinced we could have figured out when to leave, that we could read The Signs.
When I was forming my identity, nothing really foreboding happened to Jews in America, as far as I knew. I felt as if I lived beyond the confines of history, far removed from the GoodForTheJews-BadForTheJews pendulum that my Zaydie intensely monitored. I’d hear the odd story about people throwing bagels or pennies at members of my congregation, but we didn’t yet need a police presence during the High Holy Days. Every so often, though, that feeling of inevitable social progress was pierced.
I had read enough autobiographies, seen enough archival footage, visited enough memorials and museums to understand what It meant.
If America and Israel were at war, a friend asked me which side I would choose. We weren’t talking about the Middle East or politics or combat. The question felt like an ambush. I knew a bit about McCarthy’s interrogations from my mother. I had inside information on Nixon’s abuse of power from my father. For centuries, wherever Jews have lived, we have been asked, Which side would you choose? It’s called dual loyalty. And if someone has that question on the tip of their tongue, the answer is already assumed.
I am making a bigger deal out of this than is necessary. This person didn’t know the historical weight of his hypothetical. But it makes me wonder. If a friend is making an assumption, then a stranger is making the same assumption. That’s been happening a lot, especially of late. Which side would you choose? Neither.
The Jews in Hollywood have a tradition of trying to blend in. Over the decades, many have wallpapered their identity with goyish names. Growing up, I only remember identifying two Jewish characters gracing the small screen: the eponymous Rhoda (too freewheeling and ethnic for prime time because after a handful of episodes she married a non-Jew) and the eponymous Barney Miller (who I assumed was Jewish because he had the same name as my Zaydie). Eventually Jerry Seinfeld and Richard Lewis and Gary Shandling appeared, but usually television let me down with portrayals of vaguely Jewish characters, like Ross and Monica on Friends, whose heritage only came into play when they (sacrilegiously) lit their hanukkiah—a nine-branched menorah used to celebrate Hanukkah—during a blackout.
The Holocaust seemed like a long time ago when I was a child, and now, indeed, it was a long time ago. It’s been many decades since the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich. That’s long enough for flabby-faced men in the American government to make Sieg Heil salutes that others excuse as awkward gestures. That’s long enough for some members of the up-and-coming generation to emboss their arms with the concentration camp numbers of their grand or great-grandparents.
The English word tattoo can also mean a knocking or strong pulsation. Once, in university, I was with a group, waiting to get into a hockey game. Someone else joined us. A friend of a friend of a friend. He guffawed when someone called me by my last name. I stepped backward because I could feel the strong pulsation, the intense decibel level of his absolute delight. He tattooed me with his laughter. That’s really your name? he asked. Yeah, why? I asked. It’s the punch line of a joke, he said. I wasn’t sure how to respond, how to pierce the silence, so I said, I’d like to hear the joke. He laughed again and said, No you wouldn’t. He went through the gate and repeated the punch line.
In Western Canada, a boy sitting beside my daughter in her socials classroom exclaimed, All Jews should go kill themselves. Another time a classmate found a handwritten note that read, Hitler did nothing wrong. Another time two boys were passing a scrap of paper and it dropped on the floor, revealing a swastika circumscribed with a Star of David. The boys laughed and, as the teacher removed one of them from the class, other students laughed. It wasn’t the note that stayed with my daughter. It was the laughter.
Each time there is an incident in this vein, my wife and I contact the principal. We don’t believe it will change anything and we assume it will be swept under the rug—and we continue to be correct—but the other option is to look the other way.
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The university where my father works was recently inundated by hundreds of Wanted posters targeting mostly Jewish faculty. Their faces, names, and lists of their alleged crimes were glued across campus walls. Students were arrested and it’s an ongoing case. My father is concerned, but he is also in the sixth decade of his career, has seen the arc of his life, and is known and respected around town. He can say things like how he is disappointed that he didn’t get his own poster. He wanted to frame it for his office. I can laugh too, but my laughter is quieter. I am not as known and respected.
Around the same time, my son came home and said that his school had hired an organization to run a violence prevention workshop for boys. The facilitator asked the students for names of men they admired and one of his peers said, Hitler. The leader asked, Are you sure? and the kid said, Yes, so the man added Hitler’s name to the board—though he wrote Adolf, as if on a first-name basis. It stayed there for the duration of the three-hour lesson. At the behest of my wife and me, the principal contacted the organization, who contacted the workshop leader and reported back with vague assurances that the situation was handled.
Dry-erase ink is not similar to tattoo ink, but it is almost identical to ink from a permanent marker. And if you leave it on a surface for long enough, especially a porous surface, it will remain. The brain is a porous surface. Memory is a porous surface.
As it stands, the group of boys in that room could have left with the confirmation that Adolf Hitler is a man to be admired. We asked the principal to follow up with the students in that group. To communicate to them that Hitler sucks. The principal is welcome to use his own words to make that case.
I forgot to mention something about the friend of a friend of a friend. The punch-line guy. After university, he got a government job.
The high school offers an elective on genocide studies, which my daughter takes. There was a special, in-person lecture delivered by Mariette, a woman who lived through the Holocaust. She was fortunate not to have a tattoo, was hunted but never captured. She told story after story that my daughter could only recount to me in whispers, like being 5 years old and hiding in a bale of hay that was being stabbed at with pitchforks. Like the man who had aided her and was later tortured by Nazis, fingernails removed. And as Mariette spoke, two teens in the audience were leaning into one another, intertwining arms, making out.
Look, one 15-year-old boy blurting out his prejudice isn’t a state-sponsored book burning. Students conflating civilian Jews in Upstate New York with a military six thousand miles away isn’t a poster in Nazi-occupied Poland proclaiming Jews are lice: they cause typhus. Granting Hitler equal billing with Gandhi in a violence prevention workshop isn’t Kristallnacht. Kids snogging while a Jewish woman describes her harrowing World War II childhood isn’t Holocaust Denial.
Memory is a porous surface.
I am not lost in the wilderness, in the desert, like the Hebrews of old. I can still make out landmarks, make my way around town. At the same time, we are living through a precarious time for irony and a worldwide recalibration of what is considered normal and I am no longer confident in my ability to read The Signs. Jews like Barney Miller—my Zaydie, not the character—tend to catastrophize, overanalyze, make too much out of the misbehavior of others. But I cannot see beyond this moment. I cannot be certain if history will chronicle me as one of those great-great uncles who waited too long to forge their way out.
My mother’s tattoo isn’t much of anything, by the way. You’d never notice it if you weren’t a lifesaving radiation oncologist with the proper coordinates. And those gravediggers are on the lookout for collarbone butterflies and roses around wrists, so she’ll have no trouble making her way into her designated plot. My mother’s tattoo is a reminder of what she has survived. My mother’s tattoo is a tiny blue dot. My mother’s tattoo is our planet seen from a great distance. My mother’s tattoo is all that we have.
Aaron Rabinowitz’s debut poetry collection, Suggestions, is forthcoming from Gaspereau Press. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, Grain, The Normal School, The Masters Review, and elsewhere. In the real world he can be found building wobbly benches out of pallet wood and in the pretend world he can be found here. Aaron also will water your plants when you are out of town.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/03/27/tattoos-signs-history-antisemitism/
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