Letter to a Jewish Trump-Supporting Friend

I don't feel like having lunch today. And I don't believe I'll see, it'll be ok. 

The Electoral College has just proven to women that a man who has a dozen women willing to come forward with charges of sexually predatory behavior can still be elected president.   What use is coming forward?   Do you feel disempowered?  I do.

We have also proven that failure to pay income taxes or one's contractors is no impediment to high office.  I'm a contractor.  So my "smartest" clients are my biggest risks?

That complete disinterest in the legislative process does not disqualify.  

That complete lack of compassion for those less fortunate, due to circumstance or disability, doesn't matter. 

That inability to focus or concentrate doesn't matter; you can prepare for the highest office in the country by "watching the shows."  On Fox. 

We have trusted a man who cannot be trusted with his own Twitter account -- his advisors finally shut it down in the last days -- with the ability to launch nuclear weapons.

David Duke is ecstatic; have you read his reactions?  The other Trump supporter among my Facebook friends is inviting Whoopi Goldberg to shove off for Canada.   Black woman, Jewish name.  He has no use for either; he's all resentment.  He thinks the "other" is eating his lunch.  He scares me.

People have voted with their lower intestines, not their brains. 

We have also proven the danger of only reading and watching what you want to see and hear.  Had I forced myself to watch Fox more, I guess I would have been less surprised and perhaps less complacent.  Had you read the New Yorker, you would have heard different voices, perhaps come to different conclusions.  

This election is an embarrassment to the world.    And part of a global, nationalistic trend that has come to terrible grief in the past.

I cannot reconcile your vote with your intelligence; I chalk it up to your authoritarian streak.  Your idealization of the past.  It's consistent with your admiration of the most hidebound, insular, conservative type of Jew: Hasidim.  They have one morality for their own kind -- or those they think they might persuade to do more morally arbitrary mitzvahs --  and little to none for anyone else. 

Yes I too miss some things about the past-- like Walter Kronkite -- but none of them turn me towards Trump.  My sister lives up in Suffern, near the Hasidim who have cynically joined school boards, starved the local schools their kids don't attend, cheated welfare, busted neighborhoods, and earned the fear and contempt of everyone around them.  Don't get her started on Hasidim.

Like our friend Bill and other liberals, I was educated to think critically and to evaluate things by humanistic bottom lines, for everyone alike.  

My whole graduating class is grieving with me. 

I'm sorry, this is a very black day.  I cannot be less angry about this than your sister is. 

Ellen

The Moment Bernie Lost My Vote

First I have to admit that Bernie never had my vote sewn up.   I'm not his demographic in the first place; being a registered Democrat and a female boomer, I'm more likely to be for Hillary anyway.

I am certainly sick of Citizens United, and the outsized role of money in politics, and the favoritism the U.S. shows sinking corporations over sinking schools and infrastructure.  And I favor lots of other things Bernie espouses, with the glaring exception of his stand on gun control.

Tipping point: Wrong holiday, right metaphor,
right letter.

But then there's the electability thing.   A friend down in Atlanta, outside my blue Northeastern bubble, tells me there's no way America is ready for President Bernie. I surely don't want to risk a Trump or a Cruz or a Kasich presidency, and I frankly can't believe that Hillary hatred is so strong that Bernie would make a better bet against the Donald.

And there's the nuance thing.  A story in the Times reports that according to studies of their delivered speeches, Hillary's show much more actual cogitation and careful weighing of complexities, as opposed to the more single-minded notes struck repeatedly by Bernie.

I think it was David Brooks who wrote, also in the Times,about the importance of being able to hold competing truths in your head at one time, and to navigate to the best trade-offs between them. That's where things actually happen. Thanks, Bernie, for pulling Hillary to the left.  But I really like thinkers; the nuanced ambivalences of Obama in his Dreams for My Father book made me extra happy to vote for him.

The specific instant that I decided against Bernie was the one that demonstrated that single, simplified story line... the moment he quoted that  grossly exaggerated death toll of Gazans during the last Israeli response to Hamas shelling and bombing.

You want to call that response disproportionate, that's your right and your call.

But like we say, you're not entitled to your own facts.   And the fact that you would just repeat whatever was handed to you, by propagandists, shows a disinterest in the fine points.  And in accuracy.  .

Being anti-Netanyahu would not have cost you my vote.  Being against Israeli policies, ditto.  You got props for standing up to AIPAC and if you demonstrated that being critical of Israel is now a politically survivable thing to do, that would also have been all right with me.  I even believe you when you say that long-term, you have Israel's best interests at heart. Most left-of-center Jews do.

But you can't just repeat what's shoved at you. That tipped me over into the camp I was leaning toward, anyway.  So bye-bye, Bernie.

Roots Tour Part XIII: Postscript

It is now more than six months since our trip to my grandmother's home town and environs in Poland, time to write some sort of summation, and more than time to start working on the new leads it gave me.

I went there to prove that the towns my grandmother spoke of -- Tarnow, Rzeszow, Przeworsk, Jaroslaw and Przemysl -- were places that exist in real life, that you could visit. I went to get some sense of what Esther's native country looked like, even close to a century later. To stand where she and her sisters and brothers must have stood. To travel the east-west road that links these towns together. And, I guess, to affirm our place in eastern European history, in the minds of people who live there now and in the minds of people here, too.  To connect destroyed past to present.  Not an original goal, to be sure. 

In what way did my walking these old streets, visiting these restorations and ruins respond to such thorough destruction?  Because that thoroughness is one inescapable takeaway of such a trip.  It takes research and some imagination to find the skinned and gouged-out traces of Jews in these towns.

My only answer is that in the end, we are all reduced to pieces of history.  And all you can do for these relatives, in consolation or reparation, is recover and preserve their lost histories, to endure alongside your own.  Rescuing relatives from historical oblivion is what Daniel Mendelsohn had in mind in his riveting account, The Lost: The Search for Six out of Six Million.  I didn't have the time or resources to scour the world like he did, filling in my murdered relatives' histories and settling vague theories in first-person testimony.  In addition to visiting their towns and interviewing still-living neighbors, Mendelsohn also got to the right survivors in places like Australia, just in the nick of time in 2006, months before their deaths.

What  I did see in person were records, in their originals, that testified to my grandmother's and her family's presence. Six months later, I sent a Christmas card to Malgorzata Woloszyn, the museum historian who brought out and showed me the census books. I remember her and that moment fondly.  I wish she'd email me back.  But I do have a favor to ask of her; simply to rephotograph one of the pages I shot; the most important page came out blurry.   Probably because I promised not to use a flash.  Or because I was excited. Or both.

I also brought the "Anne Frank of Przeworsk" Polish diary that I bought in the museum, by Basia Rosenberg, to a Polish friend here in NJ and she's been working on translating it.  I may offer that to the museum; neither Elzbieta nor I want anything for it but to spread this history to wider audiences and set more visitors on my path.

Once I got home, things I found by googling added to what I'd learned and seen.  I found an  amazing postscript to the little "Jewish Cemetery" monument,  its inscription crumbling in a corner of the Przeworsk bus station that covers my ancestor's bones, in a recently published book, "Jewish Spaces in Contemporary Poland," by Erica T. Lehrer and Michael Meng.  Google took me right to most of the relevant pages; I bought the ebook for the rest.

Seems that  in the early eighties, Przeworsk's municipal council decided to build a badly needed bus station on the site of the former Jewish cemetery. A road widening between Rzeszow and Przemysl had already disturbed much of the site. There were no surviving headstones and presumably no visitors.  But the decision to build on the site had one dissenter on the council:  One Jan Sasak.  Outvoted,  he suggested that the town at least erect a monument to mark the spot's former existence.  Again, outvoted. 

But, as history would have it, this Jan Sasak was himself a stonecutter.  So he made the little monument himself, and had it erected in the middle of the station.  Without his knowledge or consent, it was later moved to the back, in a corner on a small bricked rectangle.  Google Streetview still shows it, but only if you know where to look.  And that is why this little monument looks like an unofficial afterthought.  It's certainly unofficial; one man's professional act of righteous, compassionate obstinacy. Does anyone know this man?  Does he still live? Can't find him on Facebook.  I'd certainly like to thank him for this act of historical rescue.

I keep in Facebook touch with Jakub Lysiak, our guide to Przeworsk, Jaroslaw and Przemysl.  He has sent me the info should I want to get more research done on my behalf in the Przemysl archives.  I should follow up on that.  Last I heard he was applying for training as a guide at the Polin Museum in Warsaw.  I'm also Facebook friends with Helise Lieberman, director of the Taube Center for the Renewal of Jewish Life in Poland.  Both their paths cross with Agnieska (Agi) Legutko, a Yiddishist  from Krakow who I met when I booked her for an adult ed presentation at my synagogue in NJ years ago. Today she heads up the Yiddish department at Columbia in NYC.

Then there's the surviving distant relatives newly turned up by Anna Przybyszewska of Warsaw's Jewish Historical Institute; third cousins, perhaps, whose existence is documented by pages of testimony they gave to Yad VaShem in the fifties.  The survivor's name: Chaim / Henryk Schopf, of Tarnow.  Married to a Helena Eisen, with two kids, a Jan and a Ludwig.  His testimony says they made it from the nearby Krakow ghetto to Budapest in 1943, and presumably all made it to Israel.  I have other third cousins in Israel who exchange messages with me all the time; how could they not know of these others in such a small country?  There's a mystery to which I could apply more time and money. 

I would like nothing more than to swim around in these records and mysteries as a full-time occupation.  I have a lot of the language skills and more than passing familiarity with the more popular tools of online genealogical research.  What I have done is given introductory workshops in Ancestry.com to my synagogue, and, with my Lifelong Learning cochair, gotten a wall-sized map of eastern and central Europe printed on sturdy vinyl and hung in the social hall. The idea is to encourage others to research and mark their ancestral towns within its borders.  (We've added inserts of Israel, Iraq, Spain and Sudan for our few Sephardi members.  And Italy for inter-marrieds.) We've just gotten started.

Then there's Poland, a place the grandmother I knew certainly didn't care about, and who could blame her.  I follow its politics a little now.  The news is not good; fear of Muslim refugee hordes, among other factors, has turned voters sharply to the right, and what has made the news but a photo of the archetypical Polish antiSemite of my grandmother's nightmares, holding a bottle, in a group burning an effigy of a Hasid holding the European Union flag. What is that about?  Is that a safer stand-in for a  Muslim effigy, which would also be repulsive but at least more relevant?  Is it cowardice, a drunken  fringe element, or just the most virulent outbreak of an incurable xenophobia, expressed against the most traditional, vulnerable  Other? 

You beautiful young people I saw sipping wine and beer on the Rynek of Rzeszow, the college town, speaking other languages:  You folks who gave me the Jewish History tour map of Tarnow: Jakub: Did you go to the polls?  Did you sit this one out? Or were you simply outnumbered. And by whom.

The "renascent" Jewish community of Poland is miniscule; somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000.  I can't see that number ever approaching even five percent of its pre-war population, which would get to 150,000.  But we could become more frequent and interested visitors. Even if somewhat transient,  the community could grow. Jewish Studies is apparently popular at Warsaw University, among Catholic-born Poles. Here's hoping that with the churn of Polish generations, we will see even wider acknowledgement and acceptance of our historical relationship.