Jews

In eveningtime the old man would shuffle up the street to his modest rowhouse where he would be reunited with his wife and two sons and two daughters. He always seemed tired. His clothes hung sadly limp upon his weary frame and I know that when I saw him I looked compassionately upon him. I was a small boy who had gathered up an un-redeemable debt to his girls.

On summer evenings he and his wife would sit on the porch and talk in the Yiddish which was for them a more comfortable tongue. They were immigrants. Across the street on those hot nights other couples sat and talked, in Italian on one porch, in Welsh on another. Poor us. We only knew English...and maybe we didn't communicate as well.

A common bond between Snoyer and Fiori and Evans, all laborers earning little in wage, was that they would raise children who would become schoolteachers. Maybe that was just coincidence.

Their wives shared a common pitch of voice when they called their sons off the street for supper, for chores, for bedtime, away from mischief.

The Snoyer girls, not quite teachers yet, drew little children into their yard and taught them to read. Read a page and the reward was a shiny penny. And I was rich at five.

Neighborhoods, in my memory, seemed to be physically alike. But then most everyone I knew lived in rowhouse blocks like mine. Rows of chimneys belched smoke from coal fed furnaces in winter: skylights made of frosted glass over bathrooms protected users from only the eyes of birds overhead...such modesty.

Our neighborhood was sprinkled with mom-and-pop stores. There was little need to shop beyond a short walk for day to day needs. (The roster is so fresh in my memory and seemingly better than of things of more recent times.) McCall had an Ice Cream Parlor and Soda Fountain. Mariello sold groceries and Italian foods — and tomato pie. Glickman, across the street from Mariello, was a butcher. Diodoro, who because of his shop name children were privileged to call Frank, cut hair off the heads of men and boys. Some lady operated a beauty parlor (for women) in the back of "Frank's." Old Guido was a cobbler and he hammered nails into new heels and soles in his little tin shack in back of his house. Bryant, an emigree from Tennessee,and that almost sounds dirty, operated the "American Store." He was rumored to be a Klansman. But he was too busy with booze to be an organization man for the invisible empire and his wife, a more pleasant person tended the produce and veggies and the butcher's block as well. Horwitz ran the other chain grocery, a "Unity-Frankford" market. Shaeffer's drug store was fronted by a window in which stood great glass jars filled with colored water that lent mystery to the title "Apothecary." Horn sold notions, candy and soda and Isadore Ostrum, who outlived them all and died in 1989, had a drug store with a big soda fountain. Johnston (a translated Scot), Wilkins and Wrigley had gas stations and Miller, a greenhouse. The roll goes on. And no one was for want for business...or for customers.

In those days, before World War II, and during it, I cannot remember anti-Jewish feelings in our neighborhood, not within my own house nor in the utterings of my companions and my peers. Of course, it existed and obviously, it was wide spread, but we were spared those follies of the wider world. We were insulated by our common singular struggle that unconsciously demanded an inter-dependency, especially among the women whose infectious social gatherings were primarily with each other at the grocery, and in yards on wash-day, and at Frank's Beauty Salon. They chatted, one with another, whenever they were in sight of each other and they flitted about like bees that buzz flower to flower. We were seldom privy to their chatterings, and I suppose we never had inclinations to care about their interests.

If women (in that time and in that place) were bonded together by instinct, girls were not — they were fickle, choosy. But boys were a common mob allied by their geography and without prejudice. If parents were inhibited by religious animadversions, particular to protestant and catholic antagonisms, it was their ridiculous battle and that saved the pack. Our own religions were rationed. God discriminated only at the time of services and once the doors of church and synagogue opened, the boys — more than anyone — fled to the unsophisticated company of their gang.

There's no immunity, though, and the infection of other people's views affect or infect us all seemingly with a perverse romanticism, if not by disproportionate exaggeration of incidents wherein race or ethnic or class difference becomes an "excuse" to stir up absurd passions and foggy invention to smear a general group of society.

In 1945 the truth of man's worst deeds was revealed to the world...and the world could still find excuse to dismiss them either as exaggerated or fabricated or justified. And forty-five years later the holocaust has apologists no less in number than in the days of Hitler's savages.

My own introduction to these deeds, the systematic destruction of Jews — old Jews, babies, children my own age, parents — all of them — was through news-reels and the horror was underlined by the magic of and the indictment by the camera. A face of a child whose eyes search into the camera's lens...and the face, the eyes and indeed the whole being is between the time of portrait and the time of viewing turned to ash and smoke up a chimney. By accident, the eyes are not mine. By accident, they are not my father's, nor my sister's. By accident, they're not yours.

From the outrage called "Kristallknacht," in 1938, until the liberation of Europe from the "Darkness," Jewry in greater Germany and the occupied lands was almost wiped out. Yet it seems as if the world, except for its Jews, was and is largely indifferent to the bald fact that this atrocity had ever happened. When the "Morganthau" plan advancing draconian retribution upon the Germans was proposed, it was denounced as cruel. And yet little cry was heard, ah!, really none from the conscience of western man against the issue that prompted Mr. Morganthau to vent his reaction against those who, if given opportunity, would reduce him and you and maybe me to the ash and smoke that has drifted 'round the world ever since the war and everyman still breathes in the vapored remains of millions of angels.

The antipathy of Christians to Jews is ancient but so contradictory to their own origins. How puzzling; the Master was a Jew as were his first companions and community. Is it because in the quest of conversions outside the Jewish world the influence deferred to the whims of zealots and wax-moths?

Germany was rehabilitated after the war. That's fine because there's no German problem. It's much wider; it's Austrian and Polish and French and British...and American. But all we know is the "Jewish problem." That's German and Austrian and Polish and French and British...and American. The problem, though, is not the Jews. If all the Jews of the world would disappear, the object of hatred would find another quarter, even though those who invented the "Jewish problem" and those who hate would be cheated of several millennium of concerted malice that they used on the Jews.

A long time associate of mine once made the remark: "I don't have any friends who aren't Republicans." Astonishing! Because of that wicked self-imposed discipline of exclusion I cannot really condemn all Republicans (or Democrats) although its not uncommon to extend personal feeling — either negative or flattering — based on personal experience. And whether a particular incident is related to politics, or business, or social life, or religion or any number of crises of personal nature or rumor or fact concerning someone who is or was an influence to other concerns, it has the capacity to sear or it has the capacity to involve gratitude.

Non-Jews are in large measure in detached relationship with Jews particularly on a social level. This might be described as a self-imposed discipline (or prejudice) or an inherited one. "I don't have any friends who are Jews." Or: "some of my best friends are.......(fill in the blank). Under the best of conditions the remark, "some of my best friends" is fragile or empty-headed or wistful.

Friends are undefinable rewards that are gathered in when the worst of conditions erupt (and then even tend to be static), or they come out of natural associations which in time and space are not suppressed or diminished.

Influences save us from loneliness and from the presumption of this person or that person being our "friend" who might evenso be or develop toward friendship. Much of the failure of things is due to the interposition of one influence, an unnatural one, upon or over a more natural one and as I have come to understand things, they are the interference of outside imposed opinions upon pleasantly gained ones. And they have a tendency to erase far better courses...and have.

Fifty years ago I had already been exposed to naturally good influences, who by accident were Jews, even as I had with those who were catholics or loosely defined protestants. I had to be told, sometime later, that this or that person, within the accident of birth, was thus unsuitable, told so by the interposition of the teller's opinion and that, though senseless, carries the weight of the moment's vulnerability of reception. It curses an already fragile existence.

Sadly, antipathy to Jews persists. The cataclysmic annihilation of the European Jewish community by Nazis is regarded with little sorrow, with at best occasional passive or cursory remarks that don't even relate to sorrow. Instead, the mention of holocaust stirs up annoyance and criticism, if not boredom, in these times when holocaust is so long ago and irrelevant to the commerce of a newer world. Jews who know the horrible effect of hatred — older Jews — are dismissed as obstacles who tilt against that war, that, like other wars in dimmer remembrance, is profitably romantic as the property of novelists and storytellers. Society, immune to shock, is more tolerant of skinheads and neo-nazis than of Jews. How often do skinheads elicit damnation at parlor, table or shop talk? Weigh that with how often Jews are the subject of derision or contempt in the parlor, at the table, or in the workplace. Then turn history's page to when all the Nazis of the world could be fit into one room and sit at one table and think of what was wrought because of them and we see the darkest warp of logic appear.

Each bad thought murders a part of the world. And each bad thought, gaining currency, heightens the probability of bad deeds whose backwash dearly affects an ever widening unwilling portion of society. And all its losses are unfair.

Memoriter:1939

Larry Wallen, my first friend at school saved by the accident of geography.