Conversation with a Tattoo Artist

After wondering whether I’m too old to acquire my first tattoo, I visited a shop called Permanent Ink and asked the resident tattoo artist if he could inscribe the Yiddish word “doykayt” on my upper arm.

דאָיִקײַט

He told me his shop had a lot of requests for that word lately, and although he doesn’t speak Yiddish himself, he knew enough to translate it as “hereness.” One of his customers defined doykayt as a state of mindfulness that Eastern Europeans and democratic socialists in the Jewish Labor Bund achieved in the 1930s after they decided to reject Zionism and stay “here” in Poland, or wherever they were after migration, and to struggle there – or should I say here – for justice and equal rights. Resisting oppression where they were, instead of seeking refuge in a land already partially occupied by another people, they anticipated practices still observed today by some secular Jewish activists.

“Yes, that’s why I want the tattoo,” I admitted, but he could tell I was hesitating. I hadn’t bared my arm.

I assured the artist that I wasn’t worried about his ability to inscribe a word in Yiddish script, or about the sharpness of his needles. I could see from photographs around the room that he’d had many satisfied inscription bearers, who left the shop with colorful slogans and eye-catching portraits engraved on their bodies.

No, I told him, I was worried that the tattoo on my arm might be mistaken by Immigration and Customs officials for a Venezulean gang member’s emblem, because the agents probably couldn’t read Yiddish, and without further inquiry and no due process they would chain my legs and deport me to a crowded cell in El Salvador, even though I had an American passport in my jacket pocket, which I did the day I visited Permanent Ink.

The resident tattoo artist whose friends called him Rembrandt sensed my reluctance to risk wearing his artwork, beautiful though it would be once colored in red and black inks, with a small picture of the Jewish Labor Bund’s 1917 election poster accompanying the word for “hereness.” (The original poster also questioned the concept of geographic nationalism by saying in Yiddish: “Our country is wherever we live.” That too might have incensed the ICE agents. If someone translated it for them, they might conclude I wasn’t from these parts; but I was.

Putting away his needles, Rembrandt admitted that a few former customers had asked him about the price of inscription removal, because they too worried ICE might mistake their artwork for evidence of criminal association. But Rembrandt always said that the name of the shop was Permanent Ink, and he wasn’t willing to cancel any culture.

He advised me to forget about getting a tattoo and instead buy an antiwar tee-shirt he had in stock. The bright red shirt’s lettering announced: “Not in My Name!” It was produced for an antiwar rally, to call for a ceasefire and an end to arms exports; but I wore my shirt to an anti-deportation rally. The weather was freezing that day. I had to wear a jacket over the shirt, and the jacket didn’t say anything; but everyone knew why we were there.

We were there for a Liberation Seder in Manhattan’s Foley Square. Hundreds of participants stood outdoors in a park across the street from the city’s ICE headquarters. Police squads watched from a distance, and listened with the rest of us to speakers who described the kidnapping and deportation of immigrants in America. Seeking asylum from persecution and poverty, the refugees and student activists ICE arrested around the country weren’t slaves escaping Pharaoh; but then the United States wasn’t the Promised Land, at least not this year. Liberty and justice were not available for all under the current Administration’s autocracy. As the Seder of resistance to would-be pharaohs continued, some songs were sung. One rabbi held up a cup of water, not wine, praised its life-giving properties, and regretted its scarcity in Gaza. Other speakers mentioned Moses, Martin Luther King and court cases in progress. When asked by a Seder organizer, I helped raise a large banner announcing that “Opposing Fascism is a Jewish Tradition.” It was much easier to read than a Yiddish tattoo.

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Joel Schechter is the author of Radical Yiddish, Messiahs of 1933, and Satire.