Abeng

Christopher Columbus arrived at Jamaica in 1494. Scholars to this day are unsure of his origins, and some believe he was of Jewish descent and undertook his journeys in order to find a safe haven for his people. 

One day in March, Clare skips school in order to watch the film adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank (1947). She identifies with Anne because of the Jewish girl’s similarly distant relationship with her mother. Clare wants to understand why Anne died and asks her teachers for an explanation, but they “hemmed and hawed” (70) talking about various important events related to WWII. Ultimately, they conclude that “Jews were expected to suffer. To endure” (70). It was good Christian people who finally realized what was going on in Germany and stopped the Holocaust. It remains unclear, however, how “no one noticed […] that people were disappearing and returning as smoke” (71). Unlike the instantaneous death that occurred after the atomic bombs hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Holocaust took years, but the teachers insist that no one in the world knew what was happening in Germany or they would have stopped it. One teacher even goes so far as to