An early memory is of my mother handing me over to a scary bearded man dressed in black and wearing a skullcap. The man carried me down the stairs away from the rooming house my family lived in and took me across the street to a dark basement. There, he lifted me up so I could turn on the basement’s lights. It was Saturday morning and the man, a Jew, was readying a makeshift synagogue for services.
I was about four years old when I became the synagogue’s shabbos goy, a gentile servant permitted to light the fires in Jewish households on Sabbath mornings. The scary guy was Mr. Gurevitch, an old man who lived in a single room next to the two rooms occupied by my father, mother, and three children. My mother was 21 years old; my dad was a cab driver with aspirations to become an over the road truck driver.
Every day at 10 o’clock, my mother sent me down to a little store on the corner of Logan and Broadway Avenue in North Minneapolis with two dimes and a permission note to buy a pack of Pall Malls. Mr. Taub, who owned the store, got the cigarettes while Mrs. Taub waited patiently as I chose my errand-reward, a piece of penny candy.
It’s hard to imagine modern day parents sending their 4-year old out into the city to buy smokes, but it was common enough in those more careless and innocent days. Most of the people living along still slummy Broadway Avenue, like Mr. Gurevitch and the Taubs, were DPs, or “Displaced Persons,” which is what we called refugees back then. They were holocaust survivors, concentration camp survivors, displaced because of their failure to survive some Nationalist thug’s idea of “extreme vetting.”
So, I’m thinking about Mr. Gurevitch and the Taubs just now, more than 60 years later, and wondering how the land of the free and the home of the brave has become a nation of wall builders seriously considering the election of a home-grown and incoherent Nationalist thug as its leader. It’s baffling and heartbreaking and makes me want to holler.