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“Do you know how my father would try out a new pen?” the Jewish Communist in Warsaw asked her American visitor in the early 1970’s. “My father was a pious man, so he would dip the nib in ink, write ‘Amalek’ in Hebrew on a sheet of paper, then cross it out with a single black stroke.”

This was how traditional Jews settled historical scores with their enemies—biblical Amalek being the tribe that attacked the weak rear guard of the Israelites on their flight from Egypt. But the daughter’s point was that “history” teaches only what we are already inclined to learn from it, and that Jews had not yet drawn the right conclusions from theirs. Her father’s symbolic strike at injustice had not prepared his generation for a century of real Amaleks. For her own part, she thought, she had perhaps done even worse in responding to the challenge of World War II and the Holocaust by staying on in Poland to help build a Workers’ International.

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