Baby's First Totalitarian Experience

My parents sent me to Jewish day camp when I was very young. It was supposed to be fun. I knew that. And I wanted it to be fun. I was not a complicated kid. I liked having fun.

So I could never quite put my finger on it why it wasn’t.

The bus rides were where it all started. A big yellow school bus would drive us kids to the countryside outside of Milwaukee, and return us to our homes at the end of the day. The camp was right outside the city, but it seemed far, and the rides seemed eternal.

They didn’t start off bad. In fact, I found it exciting to watch how the city slowly changed to suburbs, and the suburbs to wide-open country highway. The Wisconsin summers were hot and lush, with green growing wildly everywhere. You could smell the chlorophyll and pollen and mud in the air. The birds and cicadas were deafening. It was like entering the jungle. I couldn’t wait to get off the bus and run into those open fields, that amazing nature!

But then the singing would begin. A camp counselor would stand up in the front of the bus, face the children, and start it off, clapping his hands and urging us to clap in unison. The clapping made the songs sound regimented and militaristic, getting louder and louder till it became something ugly.

It sounds embarrassingly melodramatic to say that it sounded like gunshots, but that’s exactly what it reminded me of.

At that age, I loved the music of Sesame Street and the LPs that my parents put on in the house: Dylan and Cat Stevens and Joni Mitchell and Randy Newman. But the “music” on the bus struck me as strangely unmusical. It was certainly annoying, but that wasn’t all. There was something dark and unnatural about it.

It wasn’t that the songs were bad. They weren’t. The melodies were okay. The problem was that they were always the

SAME. FIVE. SONGS.

There was a forced quality to these sing-alongs. I never felt like participating in these scream-a-thons. They seemed grotesque to me. But the counselor was there, pushing everyone to sing. And everyone was watching you, so you felt as if you were disobeying if you didn’t sing too.

Don’t get me wrong; I liked music. But knowing that we were being forced to sing ruined everything.

And the lyrics to the songs. Always about Israel, or else in Hebrew, which I didn’t understand or know how to speak. What did these words mean? Why was I singing them? No one ever told me, and somehow I knew better than to ask.

The lyrics of the English songs said that Israel was something sacred, almost like God. That was why we were always singing about how much we loved it. How we’d fight and die for it, like our ancestors had.

I didn’t know why we felt this way, but I knew one thing: we should feel this way. And proclaim that we felt it. LOUDLY, to make sure that everybody could hear.

I didn’t get it. I loved my mom and dad. But love Israel? How could I love something I didn’t know or understand?

Even at that early age, I knew that something about the whole thing stank. I could feel the dis-ease in my body. The dread would creep into my chest and something inside me would shut down. For some reason — and I never could have found the words to describe it at that age — I felt violated.

Man, I felt trapped on that fucking bus. I tried to escape the gaping mouths and glassy stares of the obedient, screaming children by looking out the window.

Outside, I could see the open countryside pass by. Blinding sun and red farmhouses and fluffy white clouds. Fields of cows and corn and dusty yellow driveways leading to mysterious lives I’d never know.

Thank God for that window! It was my only escape. Looking outside, I could drown out the noise around me and enter the alternate reality of my imagination. This simple exercise would become a precious tool I’d use for the rest of my life.

I remember all this. I was five years old.