Using her body as both her sounding board and her canvas, Vainshtein has totally subverted both the imagery and the process: her tattoos are chosen and worn with pride, not shame, and they delineate aspects of her heritage in a graphic, unmistakable way-she is the granddaughter of survivors. Mifflin lists these tattoos in some detail: a smoke-belching crematorium, naked bodies hanging from gallows, an old woman chained to a coffin of nails, an escaped inmate dying on a electrified fence, a can of Zyklon B, (used in gas chambers), a skeleton in an open casket reading Kaddish, a star of David, and, in Hebrew, the words, Earth hide not my blood (from the book of Job) and Never Forget. Now, more than twenty years later, she is covered. She was raised in California, and in the early 1990s, when she was eighteen, began having explicit Holocaust imagery tattooed on her skin. Vainshtein, who these days goes by the name of Spike, was born in the Soviet Union and came to the United States when she was four. And one of the featured subjects, Marina Vainshtein, will no doubt cause to you reexamine any ideas you might have had on the topic of Jews and tattoos. Even after the survivors were liberated, the incised blue numbers remained, silent yet eloquent witnesses to the systematic process of dehumanization of which they were only a part.įast forward to Margot Mifflin’s recently reissued Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoos, a brilliant and compulsively readable volume that offers an alternative range of meanings: tattoo as a symbol of empowerment, of catharsis, or as a way of establishing new boundaries for the female body.
Jews have had a heinous association with tattoos: millions were marked, against their will, as they filed through the gates of concentration camps that dotted Europe like the spores of a horrific and malignant disease.
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