The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor
What Jewish Children Learned From Charlottesville
This dirty Jew remembers every penny thrown at him.
The
ones thrown from above, as we waited to be picked up from the public
pool in my hometown on Long Island, our yarmulkes pinned to wet hair. By
then, I was big enough to feel shame for the younger kids, who knew no
better than to scurry around, as our local anti-Semites laughed.
I
remember walking home from synagogue at my father’s side, in our suits
and ties, and seeing a neighbor boy crawling on his hands and knees,
surrounded by bullies, this time picking up pennies by force. I remember
my father rushing in and righting the boy, and sending those kids
scattering.
I
remember when, at that same corner, on a different day, those budding
neo-Nazis surrounded my sister, and I raced home for help. I remember my
parents running back, and my father and mother (all five feet of her)
confronting the parents of one of the boys, who then gave him a winking,
Trumpian chiding for behavior they didn’t care to condemn. Even if it’s
“kids with horns,” they told their son, he should leave other children
alone.
I’ll
never forget the shame of it. Nor any of the other affronts, from the
swastika shaving-creamed on our front door on Halloween to the kid on
his bike yelling, “Hitler should have finished you all.” I remember
every fistfight, every broken window, every catcall and curse. I
remember them because each made me — a fifth-generation American — feel
unsafe and unwelcome in my own home, just as was intended.
I
could, likewise, catalog every tough-Jew story of victory in the face
of hatred. My favorite still: that of my bull-necked great-grandfather
who worked for the railroads, who in response to the guy on the next
barstool saying that there were “too many Jews” in the place, knocked
the bum out with a single punch, without getting up from his perch.
Continue reading the main story
But my great-grandfather is history. My childhood is history.
I
live in Brooklyn now, where my father grew up. It was here, after
watching people cheer Barack Obama’s victory in the streets, after gay
marriage became legal nationwide and after other evolutionary steps,
that I was finally able to embrace the past as the past and look at our
collective present in a new light.
Secular
now, I watch the younger religious Jews in awe. They don’t slip their
yarmulkes into their pockets out of fear. It hit me at, of all places, a
Nets game. I was amazed by all the yarmulkes in the crowd, and the boys
beneath them eating hot dogs from — who would have believed it — kosher
concession stands.
In
a New York sports tradition, one of them was mouthing off at anyone and
everyone who was rooting for the visiting team. I watched him razzing
people, opening his mouth without thinking he’d be beaten to a pulp for
drawing attention to himself. But no one said a single
non-basketball-related, Jew-hating word.
I
can’t tell you how much pride I took in that moment, the same syrupy
pride I take when sitting on a subway car where no two faces, no two
histories, seem alike, and feeling nothing but minding-our-own-business
good will I felt the same watching all our children in the park, knowing
that they must recognize difference but see nothing in it to fear. How
great it must be, I thought, to grow up in that America, a place still
flawed but striving to do better.
I understood that, in my 40s, I was already part of history. That certain things I knew didn’t need to be known anymore.
And
yet, in seven months of this presidency, in one single day in
Charlottesville, Va., all of that is lost. A generation, and so much
more, stolen away. There is the trauma of those assaulted by Nazis on
American soil and the tragedy that is Heather Heyer’s murder
that belongs to her and her family alone. And then there is what all
the rest of us share — the pain and violence and the lessons we draw
from them. Because the children who witness a day like that, and a
president like this, will not forget the fear and disrespect tailored to
the black child, the Muslim child, the Jewish child.
They
will not forget the assault rifles that this government puts in these
violent men’s hands, nor the chants that black lives don’t matter and
that the Jews will not replace them — just as I will never not hear what
that kid on the bike screamed or stop seeing my father helping a boy,
crawling for pennies, off his knees.
While
harking back to my pious, head-covered days, I am reminded of a notion
that our rabbis taught us: The theft of time is a crime like any other.
Back then it was about interrupting class — one minute wasted was a
minute of learning lost. But multiply that minute by everyone in the
room, and it became 15, 20 minutes, half an hour’s worth of knowledge
that none of us could ever get back.
Saturday
in Charlottesville was just one day, but think of that one day
multiplied by all of us, across this great country. Think of the size of
that setback, the assault on empathy, the divisiveness and tiki-torched
terror multiplied by every single citizen of this nation. It may as
well be millions of years of dignity, of civility, of progress lost.
Just from that one day.
Nathan Englander (@NathanEnglander) is the author of the forthcoming novel “Dinner at the Center of the Earth.”
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