On the strangeness of pledging allegiance to the flag

00:00

{"text":[[{"start":6.8,"text":"It strikes me as strange now — that for so many years of childhood our school day began with the Pledge of Allegiance. As strange as 10pm public service announcements on TV asking parents if they knew where their children were, or being told to crouch under our desks in the case of a nuclear bomb, or, for that matter, the whole cold war. The transformation of life into history has a way of revealing the peculiarity of things we blindly accepted while living through them. Yet, even as early as kindergarten, the daily pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States of America (and “the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible”) was a bone in my throat. "}],[{"start":48.349999999999994,"text":"The requirement to chant in unison with hand over heart to demonstrate allegiance to a flag felt creepy to me, no matter what it represented. To get around it I’d stand in silence, arms dangling at my side. “A nation under God”, any God, made me queasy, the result of my own agnosticism combined with a Jewish upbringing that instilled an awareness of God as a subject on which people violently disagreed. Yet my resistance came mostly from the gut, and I doubt that at five, or eight, or 11, I would have been able to explain how, for someone born into a family whose relationship to place was essentially a relationship to inconstancy, the demand for patriotism, and even nationalism itself, could cause ambivalence. The very notion that a sense of belonging manifested itself in space rather than time (ie history) was foreign to me. "}],[{"start":97.44999999999999,"text":"As was, frankly, the presumption that one should expect to belong anywhere at all."}],[{"start":103.64999999999999,"text":"From where would I have gathered trust in a political conception of place being safe and reliable, being indivisible or offering permanence in time? My paternal grandfather was born in a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that soon after became Czechoslovakia then Hungary, and when he left to study in Palestine, which later became Israel, his mother, who remained behind in their village, was rounded up with the rest of the Jews and sent to be killed in Auschwitz. He saw her one last time in 1939, on his way back through Europe before taking a boat to America. My grandmother on the other side was born in Nuremberg in Germany, where she lived until she was deported at the age of 19, having never been granted German citizenship. Her parents came from a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that became Poland, and is now Ukraine, to which they were sent back by the Nazis to be murdered by the Einsatzgruppen. She survived by getting a visa to chaperone 86 children by boat on the last kindertransport that left Poland in September of 1939; war broke out during their journey to England. "}],[{"start":176.1,"text":"None of my four grandparents, all of whom were central European Jews, had the choice to remain in the countries where they were born; each of them ultimately emigrated no less than three times in their lives. That I never heard any of them mourn the places they left behind is not because they didn’t, but because, in the Jewish consciousness they inherited, place wasn’t primarily located in the local plane of reality, but in the abstract realm of collective memory. "}],[{"start":203,"text":"The psychology of the ready suitcase or the anxious accumulation of passports is often associated with the trauma of the Holocaust. But of course America, founded as a haven for those persecuted elsewhere, is proof that the catastrophe of being forced to flee one’s country of birth doesn’t prevent devotion to an adopted nation. On the contrary, the fervency of American patriotism is the legacy of gratitude for the opportunity to survive and flourish in a new land. "}],[{"start":231.55,"text":"What is often missed in the analysis of the crisis of 20th-century Jewish experience, sometimes even by Jews themselves, is that while an attachment to mobility that dates back at least 2,500 years corresponds with a history of expulsion and exile, the de-prioritisation of place in the Jewish psyche was never merely a response to displacement, but rather the result of an inverse prioritisation of text and its transcendent portability above all else. Jewish consciousness begins with the biblical narrative of expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and carries on through many historical expulsions, from the sixth-century BC Babylonian exile, onward. That the incoherence of a lost home could be replaced by the coherence of what George Steiner called “an unhoused at-homeness in the text” (in other words, “wherever in the world a Jew reads and meditates Torah is the true Israel”) was a spiritual and philosophical decision that led not to the survival of Judaism, but the creation of Judaism as we know it. "}],[{"start":293,"text":"This was the existential framework I was born into. While it didn’t preclude assimilation and civil contribution (without which no diaspora can survive), it did make patriotism more difficult to metabolise. And yet, if the memory of the ritualised Pledge of Allegiance felt baffling, that was also because America, a nation founded on plurality and the protection of personal freedoms, didn’t generally require public displays of patriotism of its citizens, whose right to voice criticism of the country was enshrined in the First Amendment."}],[{"start":328.1,"text":"Growing up in New York, with a British mother, a father who spent his childhood abroad, and four foreign grandparents, I always felt that much about my home life and the culture of my family was unusual. But I was taught that in America such differences were not, in theory, a political liability; that I lived in a country whose essential promise was — in the final words of the Pledge — “liberty and justice for all”. So not entirely fitting in, and not always feeling very American, didn’t cause me anxiety. "}],[{"start":359.05,"text":"That my alienation lived together with many forms of belonging has been one of America’s many gifts to me. As I started to become a writer, I came to value what was unique to my family and the perspective it gave me; that my innate sense of how to build a novel depended on weaving together disparate narratives, voices and places to form a whole; that, for me, the effortful creation of “home” occurred primarily in the realm of language and text. Both are the result of being born to immigrants and refugees who were themselves shaped by a far longer history of diaspora. I took for granted that I could be, that I am, nevertheless considered an American writer — a category defined, like the country itself, by its outspoken plurality."}],[{"start":403.55,"text":"Now, as my government institutionalises and legalises a hideous programme of arrest, imprisonment, deportation and even the killing of refugees, immigrants and its own citizens, the time for easy assumptions about what, and who, is considered American has passed. As the global refugee population reaches a record of around 40 million, and the borders of most countries grow increasingly less porous, it is becoming less and less possible for migrants to be devoted to anything beyond the immediate necessities of survival. "}],[{"start":434.1,"text":"In the increasingly catastrophic conditions of war, political violence and climate change, attachment to a spiritual and existential position such as the one that shaped Jewish life and imagination continuously over 2,500 years of diaspora now seems, despite its obvious hardships, also to have been a corresponding privilege of a world that could still accommodate migration. For hundreds of thousands of years, that is how human beings evolved and flourished, and when the modern idea of nations emerged, America was founded to embrace that essential need to leave behind a place one can no longer survive."}],[{"start":469.85,"text":"In 1939, a few months before war broke out in Europe, my grandparents took a boat from Cherbourg and arrived at Ellis Island with 10 silver dollars. They had to change their name from Krausz to Krauss, learn English and find a way to live. But they did. They became Americans like so many before them. If, as a child, I took that possibility for granted, time, and the transformation of experience into history, has also chastened me. However too late, it is to the memory of that country where I was raised, which still offered the chance to escape to a new world, to which I now wish to pledge my allegiance."}],[{"start":507.70000000000005,"text":"Nicole Krauss is the author of five books of fiction. Her new novel, “Vita”, will be published in 2027"}],[{"start":515.25,"text":"We would love to make FT readers a part of our series about America at 250. What does America mean to you? In the comments below, please share a memory or experience that you feel encapsulates it. We will publish a selection of your responses on FT.com next week"}],[{"start":531.8,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram"}],[{"start":546.4499999999999,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1783151759_7675.mp3"}

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{"text":[[{"start":6.8,"text":"It strikes me as strange now — that for so many years of childhood our school day began with the Pledge of Allegiance. As strange as 10pm public service announcements on TV asking parents if they knew where their children were, or being told to crouch under our desks in the case of a nuclear bomb, or, for that matter, the whole cold war. The transformation of life into history has a way of revealing the peculiarity of things we blindly accepted while living through them. Yet, even as early as kindergarten, the daily pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States of America (and “the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible”) was a bone in my throat. "}],[{"start":48.349999999999994,"text":"The requirement to chant in unison with hand over heart to demonstrate allegiance to a flag felt creepy to me, no matter what it represented. To get around it I’d stand in silence, arms dangling at my side. “A nation under God”, any God, made me queasy, the result of my own agnosticism combined with a Jewish upbringing that instilled an awareness of God as a subject on which people violently disagreed. Yet my resistance came mostly from the gut, and I doubt that at five, or eight, or 11, I would have been able to explain how, for someone born into a family whose relationship to place was essentially a relationship to inconstancy, the demand for patriotism, and even nationalism itself, could cause ambivalence. The very notion that a sense of belonging manifested itself in space rather than time (ie history) was foreign to me. "}],[{"start":97.44999999999999,"text":"As was, frankly, the presumption that one should expect to belong anywhere at all."}],[{"start":103.64999999999999,"text":"From where would I have gathered trust in a political conception of place being safe and reliable, being indivisible or offering permanence in time? My paternal grandfather was born in a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that soon after became Czechoslovakia then Hungary, and when he left to study in Palestine, which later became Israel, his mother, who remained behind in their village, was rounded up with the rest of the Jews and sent to be killed in Auschwitz. He saw her one last time in 1939, on his way back through Europe before taking a boat to America. My grandmother on the other side was born in Nuremberg in Germany, where she lived until she was deported at the age of 19, having never been granted German citizenship. Her parents came from a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that became Poland, and is now Ukraine, to which they were sent back by the Nazis to be murdered by the Einsatzgruppen. She survived by getting a visa to chaperone 86 children by boat on the last kindertransport that left Poland in September of 1939; war broke out during their journey to England. "}],[{"start":176.1,"text":"None of my four grandparents, all of whom were central European Jews, had the choice to remain in the countries where they were born; each of them ultimately emigrated no less than three times in their lives. That I never heard any of them mourn the places they left behind is not because they didn’t, but because, in the Jewish consciousness they inherited, place wasn’t primarily located in the local plane of reality, but in the abstract realm of collective memory. "}],[{"start":203,"text":"The psychology of the ready suitcase or the anxious accumulation of passports is often associated with the trauma of the Holocaust. But of course America, founded as a haven for those persecuted elsewhere, is proof that the catastrophe of being forced to flee one’s country of birth doesn’t prevent devotion to an adopted nation. On the contrary, the fervency of American patriotism is the legacy of gratitude for the opportunity to survive and flourish in a new land. "}],[{"start":231.55,"text":"What is often missed in the analysis of the crisis of 20th-century Jewish experience, sometimes even by Jews themselves, is that while an attachment to mobility that dates back at least 2,500 years corresponds with a history of expulsion and exile, the de-prioritisation of place in the Jewish psyche was never merely a response to displacement, but rather the result of an inverse prioritisation of text and its transcendent portability above all else. Jewish consciousness begins with the biblical narrative of expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and carries on through many historical expulsions, from the sixth-century BC Babylonian exile, onward. That the incoherence of a lost home could be replaced by the coherence of what George Steiner called “an unhoused at-homeness in the text” (in other words, “wherever in the world a Jew reads and meditates Torah is the true Israel”) was a spiritual and philosophical decision that led not to the survival of Judaism, but the creation of Judaism as we know it. "}],[{"start":293,"text":"This was the existential framework I was born into. While it didn’t preclude assimilation and civil contribution (without which no diaspora can survive), it did make patriotism more difficult to metabolise. And yet, if the memory of the ritualised Pledge of Allegiance felt baffling, that was also because America, a nation founded on plurality and the protection of personal freedoms, didn’t generally require public displays of patriotism of its citizens, whose right to voice criticism of the country was enshrined in the First Amendment."}],[{"start":328.1,"text":"Growing up in New York, with a British mother, a father who spent his childhood abroad, and four foreign grandparents, I always felt that much about my home life and the culture of my family was unusual. But I was taught that in America such differences were not, in theory, a political liability; that I lived in a country whose essential promise was — in the final words of the Pledge — “liberty and justice for all”. So not entirely fitting in, and not always feeling very American, didn’t cause me anxiety. "}],[{"start":359.05,"text":"That my alienation lived together with many forms of belonging has been one of America’s many gifts to me. As I started to become a writer, I came to value what was unique to my family and the perspective it gave me; that my innate sense of how to build a novel depended on weaving together disparate narratives, voices and places to form a whole; that, for me, the effortful creation of “home” occurred primarily in the realm of language and text. Both are the result of being born to immigrants and refugees who were themselves shaped by a far longer history of diaspora. I took for granted that I could be, that I am, nevertheless considered an American writer — a category defined, like the country itself, by its outspoken plurality."}],[{"start":403.55,"text":"Now, as my government institutionalises and legalises a hideous programme of arrest, imprisonment, deportation and even the killing of refugees, immigrants and its own citizens, the time for easy assumptions about what, and who, is considered American has passed. As the global refugee population reaches a record of around 40 million, and the borders of most countries grow increasingly less porous, it is becoming less and less possible for migrants to be devoted to anything beyond the immediate necessities of survival. "}],[{"start":434.1,"text":"In the increasingly catastrophic conditions of war, political violence and climate change, attachment to a spiritual and existential position such as the one that shaped Jewish life and imagination continuously over 2,500 years of diaspora now seems, despite its obvious hardships, also to have been a corresponding privilege of a world that could still accommodate migration. For hundreds of thousands of years, that is how human beings evolved and flourished, and when the modern idea of nations emerged, America was founded to embrace that essential need to leave behind a place one can no longer survive."}],[{"start":469.85,"text":"In 1939, a few months before war broke out in Europe, my grandparents took a boat from Cherbourg and arrived at Ellis Island with 10 silver dollars. They had to change their name from Krausz to Krauss, learn English and find a way to live. But they did. They became Americans like so many before them. If, as a child, I took that possibility for granted, time, and the transformation of experience into history, has also chastened me. However too late, it is to the memory of that country where I was raised, which still offered the chance to escape to a new world, to which I now wish to pledge my allegiance."}],[{"start":507.70000000000005,"text":"Nicole Krauss is the author of five books of fiction. Her new novel, “Vita”, will be published in 2027"}],[{"start":515.25,"text":"We would love to make FT readers a part of our series about America at 250. What does America mean to you? In the comments below, please share a memory or experience that you feel encapsulates it. We will publish a selection of your responses on FT.com next week"}],[{"start":531.8,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram"}],[{"start":546.4499999999999,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1783151759_7675.mp3"}

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