Stoke Newington April 6, 2020
Some people say that after this pandemic is over, nothing will be the same again. Others claim that everything will return to normal, there will be nothing new under the sun.
Much smarter women already said dozens of years ago that the personal is political. As this week was the week in which I was supposed to ask the Ma Nishtana in the Seder, I thought I would write down some of the things that have actually changed over the past month.
I have stopped hugging friends I on the street; I no longer kiss them goodbye; I have essentially handed my divorce to this physical ritual. This absence gives me unrelenting pain, but I hope this pain never ends. I am resigned to not doing a Seder with my family and friends around the table this year, and the idea of holding a Seder-by-Zoom sends chills down my spine.
I no longer write on a daily basis, and the truth is that I have not written in weeks. I used to have pangs of conscience for such periods, but I no longer do. If there is one thing that this pandemic has managed to cure it's my tendency to engage in self-flagellation.
But this, so it seems, won't last long; my Polishness has stayed. If people dare to keep away from me on the street before I keep away from them, I immediately feel insulted and begin badmouthing them behind their backs.
I still have fights with Ravid over food. We used to fight over the food at restaurants, but now we fight over the stockpiling of food at home. He is generous, spontaneous and even excessively willing to spend money.
I am frugal, supposedly for practical reasons, but actually this is because of my anxieties. He always adds 500 grams of butter and poppy seeds to the deliveries, because the lockdown allows him to hone his cooking skills, and I insist on having rice and lentils and accuse him of having Marie Antoinette-style inclinations that will lead to our demise. He laughs, I get angry and eventually apologize, especially when I realize that as usual, he ordered the delivery while I was watching television.
The Zoom and Whatsapp meetings allow my conversations about politics to continue and even intensify, only now they always begin with the coronavirus: coronavirus and democracy; coronavirus and capitalism; coronavirus and the need for transformative social change.
More than ever before, after each such conversation, I feel like a selfish hypocrite. The British press is full of articles on how people are lining up to help with the fight against the virus. Some 500,000 people signed up to volunteer with the NHS. More than 100,000 offered their help to the police. And what about me? Apart from baking a few cakes for people in self-isolation, what have I done for society? Nothing.
Banish all the poets, Plato reportedly ordered. This was part of his plan to create Utopia. And now I have this feeling that poetry and prose are nothing more than an illusion and a pretext, a twisted theater of morality and hollow rhetoric that lacks action, and that I play no role, not even a minor role, in finding a solution. In fact, I may be part of the problem.
Yonatan Sagiv was born in Herzliya. He completed his PhD in New York and currently lives and teaches in London. He has written three detective novels.
