The Japanese have a trenchant phrase for “close-relative abhorrence.” It is kinshin-zo-o. The very existence of this expression recognizes the fact that we often hate our own people – and by “people” I am extrapolating from relatives to members of our ethnic group or nationality – at least as much as we do “others” … if not, in some ways, more.

My dad used to say to me, “We Jews are the biggest gonifs (Yid. – thieves) and momzers (Yid. – bastards) in the world.”

“Dad,” I remember saying to him when I was old enough to talk back (about 37), “how can you say that? We’re no worse or better than anyone else.”

“What would you know, eh?” (This was one of his favorite retorts.) “I know. I’ve been in the middle of it since I was born.”

“But you don’t really know much about people who are not Jewish. You’ve never been much among them. If you associate pretty much exclusively with other Jews, of course you’re going to see a lot of awful people as well.”

My dad, who had left school after the sixth grade and spent his life in fairly close-knit Jewish communities, saw what he considered the worst of humankind in his own kind. Were he a non-Jew saying derogatory things about Jews, he would instantly be called an “anti-Semite” and be denounced by Jewish organizations whose policy on anything that smacks of criticism of Jews or Israel is “monitor-and-pounce.”

Actually, all ethnic groups and nationalities denigrate their own, if primarily in private. I have heard stinging attacks on Norwegians, Irish, Germans and Chinese from my Norwegian, Irish, German and Chinese friends. They can get away with it, keinahora (Yid. – “May the Evil Eye stay away from them.”).

As for the Japanese, I could write pages listing comments I have heard here that well classify as expressions of kinshin-zo-o. One that springs to mind came from that astute observer of the most extreme aspects of Japanese behavior, film director Nagisa Oshima, with whom I worked as assistant on Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.

I once asked him about the character of the father in his 1969 film Shonen (Boy). The father is a brute who throws his son in the path of cars in order to collect money from their drivers. Some people really did practice this as a calling; and there is a word for that calling in Japanese: atariya, or, roughly, “accident extorter.”

“In some ways he’s a typical Japanese father,” said Oshima. “When I showed this film abroad, people were naturally appalled by his behavior. They said the Japanese were awful. But it is my role to turn my eye on to my own people, come what may. If you love your own people, you must show them in this kind of light.”

I was reminded of the theme of ethnic self-hatred by a book. The Dogs and the Wolves was the last book Irene Nemirovsky published in her lifetime. This novel about Jewish émigrés in Paris came out in 1940. Two years later Nemirovsky, a Jewish émigré from Kiev, was arrested in France, sent to Auschwitz and murdered. Not long after, her husband shared the same fate.

It wasn’t until the late 1990s that her two daughters, who had remained in hiding during the war, read their mother’s unpublished manuscript of what was to become her novel Suite Francaise, that the process leading to the rediscovery of one of the greatest prose writers of 20th-century France was set in motion. That novel, published in 2004, more than 60 years after Nemirovsky’s death, caused a sensation, leading to its publication in English and other languages. Translations of her earlier works of fiction followed.

I have written in The Japan Times about this fascinating and brilliant author. Readers interested in her please see: http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20070916rp.html or http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20081207rp.html.

The Dogs and the Wolves (Chatto & Windus, 2009) presents a warts-and-all portrait of two branches of a Jewish banking family in Ukraine and France. Nemirovsky’s father and husband were wealthy bankers, so she is writing about a world that she knows intimately.

“Everyone thought money a good thing,” she writes of her characters, “but to a Jew, it was a necessity, like air or water. How could they live without money?”

Nemirovsky converted to Catholicism in 1939, thinking that this might save her and her family from the black tide of fascism sweeping across Europe. She also published short works of prose in periodicals known for including anti-Semitic writing. This – and the fact that some of her Jewish characters are less than attractive – has opened her up, long after her death, to the charge of being what is called a “self-hating Jew.”

Myriam Anissimov, who describes herself as a “Yiddish writer of the French language,” said of Nemirovsky, in the introduction to the French edition of Suite Francaise, “What self-hatred she reveals in her writing!” (References to her alleged Jewish self-hatred were, by the way, omitted in the English-language Chatto & Windus edition.)

Now, the characterization of some members of any nationality or ethnic group as self-hating or self-loathing is nothing new. But what is relatively new for the Jews is the accusation of self-hatred or, worse, anti-Semitism brandished as a tactic to justify a geopolitical position, particularly one held by some people in Israel.

In Nemirovsky’s case, the label has been slapped on for her candid portrayals of Jews. It is patently absurd to characterize her with such a preposterous and essentially meaningless epithet. Jewish authors from Isaac Babel and Bruno Szulc to Franz Kafka and Isaac Singer, to name only four, shine an intense light on their characters, exposing every wrinkle, foible and flaw. Whether writing in Russian, Polish, German or Yiddish, they are linked by a gift of forthright self-deprecation; they share a most robust and profound ability to search the souls of Jewish people of every age, citizenship, depth of religiosity and variety of aspiration.

Come to the United States in the 20th century and see the way Jewish comedians like Fanny Brice, Gertrude Berg, the Marx Bros., Myron Cohen, Jerry Lewis, Jackie Mason, Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen, among many, continued this tradition of baring the complex of ethnic emotions for all to see, understand, laugh at and empathize with. If there is any one trait that unites Jews of all nationalities, it is the practice of the not-so-delicate art of self-examination in art and entertainment. For the writer, this is the primary vehicle of honest characterization. It has nothing whatsoever to do with self-hatred. To search for such a thing in order to justify some self-styled ethnic or political stance is to seek self-justification and self-aggrandizement at the expense of others.

Back in the early ’80s, when I was working at the Playbox Theatre in Melbourne, I held a public reading of a play of mine set in a Jewish nursing home. The Australian Jewish News did an interview with me about the play and the house was full. In fact, loath as I am to admit it, it’s just about the only time I filled the house for one of my plays, but let’s not go there.

Sitting in the wings while the play reading was proceeding, I noticed an old couple in the front row. They noticed me, too. In fact, during the entire reading, they had an icy stare fixed on me rather than on the actors. I knew what they were thinking; and sure enough, after the reading, they were the first to raise their hands to ask those famous Jewish rhetorical questions:

“How could a Jewish boy write such awful negative stuff about his own people? What kind of parents could you have had to make you expose all this dirty laundry? Don’t we have enough enemies as it is, already?”

Actually, judging by the stares piercing me like so many fondue skewers, most of the people in the audience were thinking the very same thing.

I recall answering by bringing up Tennessee Williams, whose mother probably never understood why her son depicted people from the South as a pack of violent alcoholics, manipulative tyrants and rapists.

“If I wrote a play about how nice, kind and normal we Jews are,” I said to what was a hall full of people shaking their heads in collective pity, “who would come to see it?”

Are we to close our eyes to our own shortcomings, our own rich ethnic traits and mannerisms, for fear of being branded “self-haters” by people with a self-serving agenda or a geopolitical ax to grind? If we do, then we forfeit the right to call ourselves objective and free of prejudice ourselves. We cease to be individuals and become spokespeople for some pseudo-ethnic cause, blinded by self-righteousness and a trumped-up notion of exclusivity. At that point, all art becomes propaganda; all opinion, bias.

The creative ideal, from belles-lettres through to brash and iconoclastic comedy, is predicated on the discovery and revelation, with uninhibited candor, of the self.

As for the works of Nemirovsky, one can hardly find more insightful, moving and honest depictions of the plight of refugees in anyone’s literature than those of the vulnerable and terrified people fleeing Paris in Suite Francaise and those of the people lost in emigration in The Dogs and the Wolves. Her Jewish characters in the latter book have monstrous faults, like all human beings, but they also possess a universal longing for happiness and peace of mind.

“Surely everyone carries such mad dreams deep within themselves,” she writes there. “Or perhaps only the Jews are like that? We are such a hungry race, starving for so long that reality is not enough to satisfy us. We must have the impossible.”

That Nemirovsky’s literature was rediscovered so many decades after her tragic death is a triumph. It is the most powerful feat of survival and ultimate self-affirmation an artist of any nationality can dream of.

In the current geopolitical climate, the hair-trigger of accusation against alleged self-haters is encountered in many countries. Right-wing Americans reach for their revolvers whenever anyone appears to be “anti-American.” In some countries, such as China and Russia, elites invariably strive to bolster their entrenched power by labeling any opposition as “anti-Russian” or “un-Chinese.”

But this does not obscure the fact that we are, and should always be, our own harshest critics. Give that trait up, and you forfeit your people’s literature.

My parents lived their lives in a Jewish milieu and wouldn’t have had it any other way. There are plenty of gonifs and momzers everywhere. They just never had the dubious pleasure of meeting them.

As far as Japanese kinshin-zo-o is concerned, one TV producer said to me just before I went on his talk show in the 1980s, “Please say bad things (warukuchi) about the Japanese.”

“But I love Japan!”

“I know. But no one wants to hear that sort of thing on TV.”

You could have knocked me over with a neutrino. In what other country is there such gleeful masochism? Are there countries other than Japan where people actually enjoy hearing scathing remarks about themselves from non-natives? If there are, I haven’t been to them.

Kinshin-zo-o is alive and kicking in Japan. ❶