Zionism began with a meditation on the fear of ghosts. In 1882, the Russian Jewish physician Leon Pinsker wrote perhaps the first Zionist tract, titled “Auto-Emancipation.” In it, he rejected the historical charges and traditional bases of antisemitism—“[the Jews] are said to have crucified Jesus, to have drunk the blood of Christians, to have poisoned wells, to have taken usury, to have exploited peasants”—and argued the root cause of “Judeophobia” was much more primal. The world had witnessed the destruction of the Jewish nation two thousand years earlier when Jerusalem fell and the temple at the heart of Judaism ceased to exist—and yet Jews remained. “The world saw in this people the uncanny form of one of the dead walking among the living,” Pinsker wrote:
 
"The Ghostlike apparition of a living corpse, of a people without unity or organization, without land or other bonds of unity, no longer alive, and yet walking among the living—this spectral form without precedence in history, unlike anything that preceded or followed it, could but strangely affect the imagination of the nations. And if the fear of ghosts is something inborn, and has a certain justification in the psychic life of mankind, why be surprised at the effect produced by this dead but still living nation."
 
Pinsker concluded: “A fear of the Jewish ghost has passed down the generations and the centuries.” And for centuries, attempts to rid mankind of its fear had been fruitless. His solution was to clothe the ghost in flesh, give it a body; the spectral nation needed a material host.

Leon Pinsker is rarely talked of as a father of Zionism; instead that honorific goes to Theodor Herzl. And when Pinsker is discussed, the focus is usually his proposed solution—a Jewish state—rather than his diagnosis of the problem. Perhaps this is because we have no good way to talk of ghosts, which evoke either horror or sentimentality, on occasion eroticism. Ghost stories are almost always told from the perspective of the person visited by the apparition, and this person discerns the specter’s temperament and intent. But there is something that rings false about such conceptions. They reify and personify the ghost, when the ghost is marked most by what it is missing.

We have no language to speak of profound absence, however, of things inchoate. This too is the problem in talking or writing about families, which in many ways are also ghost stories, marked as much by their negative spaces as they are by their tangible ones. The past can be a specter hanging over one’s family. It is in mine—a discomfiting thing many relatives have explained away with neat narratives and silences that defy depth. In questioning these easy answers, I uncovered far more complicated questions, and I learned that if everything came together well, it was the mark of a lie. Silence and lies: these became motivations for me writing this novel, which is in many ways the story of my family, perhaps all families as they construct their collective identities and mythologies. In mine, however, the silences were compounded with the traumas—the Holocaust on one side, and struggle and superstition on the other (the Jinn is always waiting to be summoned). Uncovering the stories, then, was an iterative act of returning over and over to the still-living elders in my family—those who still had access to the ghosts—and piecing facts together from the fragments offered. But it felt important, because Judaism is the metaphor of a family becoming a nation, and one can only understand Israel by seeing how its national mythology—replete with silences and lies—was constructed through the stories of early individual families that moved and migrated, resurrected an ancient language used only for ritual and prayer, and created a new self/identity to give flesh to Pinsker’s spectral form.

How does one tell a different kind of ghost story? One in which the subject is not the subject, and what is hidden feels more real than what is visible? Who is qualified to serve as the narrator of such a story? For when it comes to ghosts and families, one cannot stare directly or speak explicitly. There are rules—because superstition governs the supernatural—and these rules are the ones often passed on as commands, the ones most strictly enforced. They require that we remain silent, for an invoked ghost is always more terrifying and mischievous than an invited one.

Picture the Passover Seder. The family sits at the table ordered around the metaphors of the Seder plate: saltwater for the tears of slaves, horseradish for the bitterness of bondage, a paste of dried fruit and nuts for the mortar used in their forced labor, and so on. The table is crowded with food and people, rife with ritual and conversation; and yet there is one conspicuously empty chair, with a plate setting before it, and a full cup of wine. This is the seat for the prophet Elijah, should his ghost choose to join. The door to the room is open to allow Elijah in to dine with the family. In his absence, everyone can feel his enduring presence (just as in a piece of music, the notes are oriented around the rests; the silence defines them). Whether he ever shows up is irrelevant.