 | Naomi Mandel
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Terrorist alerts ‘mundane’ for English professorNaomi Mandel, assistant professor of English, never walks by an unattended knapsack without wondering whether it might contain a bomb. She’d never consider living in the heartland of America. “I would feel trapped. I need to be near a port in case I had to escape,” confesses the educator who trained as a concert pianist but studies and teaches the literature of atrocities and trauma, particularly the Holocaust, slavery, and Hiroshima.
Although terrorist threats since Sept. 11, 2001 have most Americans jittery, those threats seem mundane to Mandel. “I’m accustomed to living in high alert,” says the woman who grew up in Israel where terrorism can often be an everyday event. “I feel at home.” Only those with enough money, time, and opportunity can sustain an illusion that terrorism doesn’t affect them, she says.
Mandel helped found the Journal for Mundane Behavior, a two-year-old on-line journal (www.mundanebehavior.org) that ferrets out insights into what it is to be human by examining and commenting on common experiences that we generally ignore. As the name implies, the journal is not only a peer-review academic publication, it was created to appeal also to the non-academic crowd.
Although past issues have spotlighted bull sessions, the hidden meanings behind facial hair, and wall calendars, a piece on atrocities and the everyday was authored by Mandel, the guest editor of the Journal’s commemorative issue of the terror attacks of September 11.
Mandel’s impassioned essay was not a step away from the jocular, but rather a bridge that we can walk over gingerly to see that suffering continues on a day-to-day basis. She acknowledges that it is difficult to talk about such subjects. There almost seems to be a taboo. “Sometimes there is so much suffering that it seems to exceed language,” she says, conceding that for her, even language can serve as an intellectual shield. She realized while talking on the phone to her mother in Israel recently that they had never discussed their shared experiences of SCUD missiles shrieking through the skies and landing nearby during the Gulf War.
Atrocities hit close to home. Mandel’s parents, both college professors and Jewish, left the U.S. to take jobs in Israel when she was 7. Her mother’s entire extended family and most of her father’s perished in concentration camps. “We lost an entire generation,” Mandel says. “Yet we don’t talk about it.”
Mandel finds it odd that Americans have a museum in Washington, D.C. dedicated to the Holocaust, which took place in Europe, yet no museum in the nation’s capital that commemorates slavery in the U.S. She plans to visit the Holocaust Museum. Is there, she wonders, anything in the museum that addresses America’s role in the Holocaust, such as the immigration policies during World War II that denied many European Jews, including her family, the chance to escape from Hitler’s clutches?
Living with atrocity on such close terms, says Mandel, does not make her feel like a victim. Rather, it makes her feel responsible to other suffering.
It is this community of suffering that keeps both sides coming back, however hesitantly, to the peace table, according to Mandel. “This is a community in which the most mundane elements of everyday life—running out for milk, getting on a bus, getting to work or to school, meeting a friend—have become the site for our bloodiest battles, our most heartbreaking losses, our most unforgivable crimes.”
By Jan Wenzel
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