I believe that years after the war, when all the secrets of the [death]
camps will be revealed, miserable mothers will still be dreaming that
the children snatched out of their arms are somewhere in the depths
of Russia; that expeditions will be organized to search for the
thousands of the camps [where] the exterminated Jews [might be still
living]. In a period so distant from romanticism, a new legend will be
formed about the millions of Jews who were slaughtered, a legend
similar to that of the ten tribes.^79
The loss of the tribes, this “huge tear that does not heal,” has spoken to and
mobilized thousands of people across different times, places, and contexts,
animating them to create different worlds—temporal, human, and physical. It
is loss, then, that has, more than any other of its features, made the story of the
ten tribes a truly global story and its history truly a world history. But ever
nested within this profound loss and absence has been its mobilizing corollary:
the idea of restitution, redemption, and wholeness. I allow myself to end, then,
with the most hopeful vision that the possibility of finding the lost tribes ever
produced: Ben-Israel’s promise of the restoration of peace to the world “and
concord, which is the only Mother of all good things.”
lu
(lu)
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