Turning 60 on October 7, I’ve Learned to Embrace Darkness and Light

I was born on October 7, 1965, sixty years ago today, and fifty-eight years before the events that would forever alter my life, and the lives of many other Jews. It’s strange how the meaning of a date can change overnight. My oldest daughter was born on September 11, 1991, ten years before 9/11 came to symbolize something terrible and new. So today, on my birthday, I simultaneously celebrate and mourn, which is probably the most Jewish thing I can do.

But before I write more about my sixtieth birthday, I want to talk about my Uncle Karcsi. He was actually my great-uncle, brother of my grandfather, Joseph Lovy. Karcsi is short for Károly, the Hungarian version of Charles. Karcsi survived slave labor and Mauthausen concentration camp. I wrote a detailed account of his survival here.

I’m thinking about Karcsi and my grandfather now because they are what anchor me to the dual aspects of my Jewish identity that I grew up with. Karcsi’s Judaism was molded into cynicism through the Holocaust. My grandfather, along with my grandmother and four-year-old father, escaped Hungary for the United States in 1939, and so were not shaped by the camps. I grew up listening to stories from both of them—Karcsi primarily when I was of college age and able to absorb what exactly he went through.

Karcsi lost his belief in God somewhere in Mauthausen, and so he replaced faith with irony and skepticism. After the war, he returned to Hungary, changed his name from Lovy to the not-so-Jewish-sounding Lukacs, and became a journalist. When the Soviets invaded in 1956, he fled again—this time to the United States—changing his name once more, to Lucas. I remember attending a Passover seder with the Lucas family. The rituals were there, more or less, but hollowed out. God was taken out of the equation.

In contrast, my grandpa’s form of Judaism was filled with joy and compassion for his fellow man. His faith was expressed in how he lived: in his devotion to family, in his optimism, in the simple blessings he never took for granted. He saw Judaism as a source of meaning and community, a way of being connected across time. To me, my Grandpa Joe is the template for the joy of Judaism.

And this brings me back to my birthday. I’m a second- or third-generation survivor, depending on how you want to count it, and so I carry the living testimony of the Holocaust with me as I forge my own path forward. I hold inside me the joy and the tragedy. So, it is not such a new thing for me to feel these conflicting emotions on October 7, a day of both celebration and sorrow.

One thing Karcsi and my grandpa agreed on was that it could happen again. Teenage me would roll his eyes at their warnings. I should have known better. I spent part of my early childhood in the American South and experienced antisemitism firsthand. And in college, I was exposed to the anti-Zionist brand of antisemitism that today’s students know too well.

Later, when I was managing editor at JTA, I was swept up in Oslo peace fever. I was convinced I would be covering the historic end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I actually wrote stories about how young people would connect to Judaism now that antisemitism was a thing of the past. I covered one of the first Birthright trips and, even as a journalist, embraced the optimistic form of Judaism I inherited from my grandfather.

Then the spirit of Uncle Karcsi appeared. I led coverage of the 2000 Camp David peace talks between Clinton, Arafat, and Barak. The collapse of those negotiations disabused me of any lingering belief in the two-state solution. When the second intifada began, I was so disgusted, I quit my job at JTA and stopped writing about Jewish issues and the Middle East for sixteen years.

The current rise in antisemitism, which began in 2016, brought me back.

Age, I’m learning, leaves room for uncertainty. I no longer feel the need to choose between hope and despondency, because I’ve known both. I can mourn the dead today, on October 7, and still celebrate my own life. I can call up the spirits of my uncle and my grandfather—each carrying his own version of what it means to be a Jew in this world—and move forward not with blind optimism or hardened pessimism, but with something better.

Wisdom.

At the age of sixty, I’m ready for whatever comes next.