The Light Shines Through

Posted in Dershowitz, Palestine on October 27th, 2007

Yara G. Chiara is a 17 year old Jewish girl living in Brazil. Her moving, thoughtful, intelligent letters in response to Alan Dershowitz and Charles Edgbaston’s continued propaganda war against Norman G. Finkelstein, demolishes them both. But read for yourself … . Below is the letter to Dershowitz. Go here for the correspondence from and to Edgbaston.

Why my hope in humanity never wavers: A most remarkable seventeen year old writes Professor Dershowitz

From: Yara G. Chiara
To: dersh[at]law.harvard.edu
Sent: Monday, October 15, 2007 9:58 PM
Subject: Dear Professor Dershowitz

Dear Professor Dershowitz,

How are you? I hope you’re doing fine. :))) Let me first introduce myself: I’m a 17 years old Jewish girl and have been living in Brazil for about 10 years now. I was born to a Jewish immigrant family and from early on I had to learn to survive in a strange, sometimes scaring environment which included not only the country where I was brought to, but even my own family: at first, I couldn’t really relate to anyone in my family because they were all people who came from all sorts of different backgrounds. Having to speak German, Yiddish, Hebrew, Italian and French - and then Portuguese - from very early on was a heavy price I had to pay at that time as a result of a real, not staged, problem to craft my identity and avoid the sense of alienation, distance, strangeness and otherness which had already taken hold of me. I simply didn’t know what the hell I was, and I had to struggle from early on with very serious brain-related diseases which harm until this very day my cognitive skills most of the time despite all the dreadful surgeries and treatments I’ve been through. My family parted ways - I won’t go into the details - and I ended up living alone in a tiny apartment with my 3 years old little daughter. She’s actually daughter of my mother’s sister and her parents both died and I’ve been taking care of her since she arrived here. She takes me for her mother and calls me “mom”, not because she came out of me, but because I got inside her and she got inside me. She’s actually a pearl, not a daughter: too smart, too cute, too sweet. We live in a very poor condition, as you could expect: I work as a janitor at the local university (a job I still am able to do) and engage in various humanitarian activities when I’m not studying to make it to the University and graduate in Physics. That’s my dream.

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