In his generous blurb for my book, Palestine Posts: An Eyewitness Account of the Birth of Israel (Toby, 2019), Yossi Klein Halevi wrote that for Jews, “history is always personal.” It is the summation of countless personal memories constructed from individual stories passed down through generations. Objectively, history is “his story” – an account of events that occurred to someone else. But for Jews, it is “my story” – these events did not happen to others. They happened to me, even if not literally.
This unique attitude toward history derives from the Bible. The word zachor (remember) is repeated 197 times. Jews are commanded to remember. But remembrance goes beyond the cerebral. It is often experiential. Jews are instructed to feel as though they themselves were standing at Mount Sinai, personally receiving the Torah, and to experience the actual liberation and exodus from Egyptian bondage. The Haggadah, which is read during the highly ritualized Passover Seder evening, is a kind of libretto, or script, that brings together disparate Jewish sources to reexperience that process of liberation and to inculcate membership in the Jewish people. A centerpiece of the seder is the 4 sons, really a seminar on how to tell the story to different types of children. It highlights the issue of whether a child is “in or out.” The seder is also intergenerational. Observance of the seder features family traditions and stories handed down from parents who received them from their parents, who received them from their parents. Some of the stories my father used to tell undoubtedly came from his father, grandfathers, and even great-great-grandfathers.
Similarly, the holiday of Sukkot (Tabernacles) is observed by building and living in flimsy booths for one week to experience what it must have been like for the Jews wandering through the desert for 40 years — vulnerable to the elements, dependent upon God’s providence.
This approach transforms history from merely academic to a living tradition passed down through generations – a “chain of memory” that connects individuals directly to their ancestors. In this way, Jewish identity is built by internalizing collective memory. Tragedy and joy are personalized, and collective tragedies are made personal, and vice versa.
My book, Palestine Posts, is an historical account of the birth of Israel as told through the letters my father wrote from Israel during the War of Independence. At that time, he was the foreign news and war correspondent for the Palestine Post and a soldier in the Haganah. His letters describe what would later be called historical events – as experienced and perceived by an individual in real time. If newspaper accounts are the “first rough drafts of history,” his letters are even more primary sources.
I knew much about the history of the 1948 War of Independence, but his letters allowed me to experience it as though I had been there. Similarly, 2nd gen holocaust survivors often internalize their parents’ experience and feel as though they themselves went through it.
At the end of my book I wrote:
Reading and rereading my father’s letters has dramatically changed my relationship to Jerusalem. I always felt awed and privileged to live in this city but the fact that my father lived here and fought here during the war makes this privilege all the more precious. As I walk around the city, I often find myself ignoring buildings built after 1948, imagining the city as it was then. I picture my father crossing the security zones with his press pass in order to sketch British military installations and am drawn to British-built buildings like the King David Hotel and the YMCA. I have eaten at the original Café Atara and visited many other places my father mentions. I scan the façades of buildings for the bullet holes left by the war, respectfully preserved, and am moved and strangely reassured. I feel my father’s presence as I walk around Jerusalem.
The late Rabbi David Hartman, founder of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, once wrote, “Judaism imposes a vital task on the parent, to tell the children their people’s story. What the child does with this past, no parent can decree. Parents provide their children with luggage. Whether the child will open up the suitcases and use their contents is beyond the reach of parents…”
In our forthcoming novel, Resonance (Sub-plot, September 2026), Michael Tobin and I created a character, Sophie, who opens a literal suitcase and discovers a journal written by Anna, a young Jewish sculptor who has fled Warsaw for Paris in 1920 to hone her craft. There, she becomes part of the community of famous artists and writers who created modernism and then must confront the growing menace of Nazi Germany. Although not Jewish, Sophie is transformed by the journal and feels compelled to retrace Anna’s journey. Anna embodies the Jewish hero – a fighter, a creator, a warrior, a nurturer, but one who just wants to focus on her art, her family, and her people. Reading her journal imbues Sophie with many of these qualities and emboldens her to find her place. Resonance is fiction, but it could just as easily be a memory.
Daniel S. Chertoff worked in various aspects of the investment industry but retired early to pursue doctoral studies in English literature. He has published academic articles and serves as an associate editor for an academic journal. Daniel’s first book, Palestine Posts: An Eyewitness Account of the Birth of Israel (Toby Press, 2019), grew out of a series of extraordinary letters written by his father during Israel’s War of Independence. Together with Michael S. Tobin, Daniel is the author of Resonance: A Novel (Amplify, September, 2026). Perhaps most importantly, in the summer of 1972, Daniel was a “tumbleweed” at Shakespeare and Company in Paris — where Resonance begins.