Night by Elie Wiesel, and To The Land Of The Cattails by Aharon Applefeld, an editorial by Jonathan Tabakin

I've just recently reread Elie Wiesel's Night and Aharon Apllefeld's To The Land Of The Cattails, prompted, I'm sad to say, by the unrelenting sense of dread and impending doom that I, like many others, I'm sure, feel these days.

Both books are wonderful in different and similar ways, and I whole heartedly recommend both to those readers who want to look a little bit through a Holocaust survivor's eyes and both remember and re-remember the horror and inhumanity that seems increasingly these days in danger of being forgotten. Both are slim volumes that pull no punches.  Night follows a son and father as they catapult suddenly, before they know it almost, from happy family to ghetto to concentration camp.  To The Land Of The Cattails moves far more slowly as it charts a mother and son on their inexorable, hypnotic in its pace, journey toward their own quicksand. Reading both, we readers, knowing of course what will happen, want to cry out,  "Listen!  Look out!  Pay attention!"

Trump is not Hitler, to be sure, though he does scare me, and that some of his supporters are indeed nazis scares me even more.  But what terrifies me and makes me lie awake sometimes at night is the quiet lining up of trusted friends and neighbors, ready, almost eager, it seems, to point a finger and simply turn away.  This Jew, born in 1950, overreacts no doubt, but I still remember as a young boy not understanding any of it, anymore than I understand now.  That the fingers point now at others only makes it worse.  Have I not in my life stood up enough?

Probably not.  Already, writing this, I have hesitated to be specific and have even excised a paragraph or two for fear of hurting or shaming a loved one or friend.  The code words and phrases and the glibly alluded to conspiracies charge, and some groups are more or less targeted, but the machinations and economics of dismissal and hate are still much the same.

At a time when roughly one-quarter of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-nine believe that the Holocaust is some sort of fabrication, these two small volumes call out to us to listen to the brooding silence building around us and cry out.

At a time when police execute no-knock warrants not knowing who is within, when we argue whether shooting someone in the back seven times is a "good shoot" or not, when kneeling... At a time when citizens in the streets, in places of worship, in supermarkets are literally getting out their guns, hear and speak up we must!  These two books remind us what might happen if we do not.

—Jonathan Tabakin