Meaningful, perhaps too meaningful: a friend of mine landed today at Ben Gurion Airport on Yom HaShoah, the day of the Hurban, and took a photograph there – arrival and remembrance signs crossing in a single moment. It should be simple, almost self-evident: eighty, eighty-one years have passed since the destruction of European Jewry. The rituals are known, the sirens, the silences, the recitations. And yet, this year, nothing feels self-evident.

Memory does not disappear. That much we know. It does not fade like a photograph left in the sun. But it does change direction. It shifts, it takes on other meanings, other tones, sometimes even other burdens. What was once held as sacred clarity may become a question. What was once unquestionable may begin to tremble.

And something else is striking this year. One listens, one attends, one observes the commemorations – and one notices what is absent. Yiddish, the language in which so many of the murdered lived, loved, argued, prayed, despaired, laughed – this language is hardly heard. It is as if it has been gently set aside, or perhaps silently bypassed. And yet Yiddish lives. It survives, it re-emerges, it re-deploys itself in poems, in whispers, in fragments, in unexpected places. It is not only a relic of destruction; it is a living bearer of memory; it paves the future. To remember the Hurban without hearing, even faintly, the echo of Yiddish is to risk flattening the texture of what was lost – and what, against all expectation, still persists.

For many years, my remembrance had a clear center. It had names, even when the names were lost. It had a number – not an abstract number, but one that I carry in my own flesh: nearly four hundred members of my family deported, gassed, murdered, erased in different ways, across different places. A world extinguished not in metaphor but in fact. I belong to what one might call the last link of that chain. I am, in a very concrete sense, alone in my generation.

My parents knew this. They did not speak of it in grand declarations, but they acted upon it with a certain quiet determination. They insisted that I learn German, that I learn Ukrainian -not as foreign languages, but as necessary instruments. They believed, perhaps with a hope that exceeded their own lifetime, that I would belong to a generation tasked with reconciliation, with rebuilding understanding where everything had been broken. They were not naïve. They knew that such a task could not be completed in one generation. Perhaps not even in two or three. But they placed me within that trajectory. I saw the first Germans coming to visit Israel… then thousands of Ukrainians.

In that sense, memory was never only backward-looking. It was always already oriented toward the future, toward a work not yet accomplished.

There is also another layer, one that........

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