Home on a Distant Shore

My family drifted rather than fled from the stelts of Europe. I think. I'm not exactly sure; none of them really liked to talk about it, so I got a patchwork quilt of family history. Sadly, now most of that generation has died, leaving me with some yellowed pictures that get passed around the cousins with questions – “Who is that, standing next to Irving?” or “Was that Yankl’s anniversary party, or Adel’s?”

I know my zayde on my father's side left his village of some Unpronounceable Name - that was sometimes in Poland, and sometimes in Russia, depending upon which brand of Cossack was more successful at pogroms that day - he left and made the journey to Palestine, where (I'd like to believe) he helped to drain the swamps and make the desert bloom. And then he left, and came to America. But I don't know why. I don't know what drove him to Palestine any more than I know what drove him to the States. All I know is that he and his thirteen brothers and sisters settled in Chicago sometime in the 1920s.

The view from my mother's side of the Diaspora is even murkier. I heard there might have been a false-bottomed cart in which my zayde hid on the way to the harbor of some country-or-other, where he then boarded a ship that took him to Chicago by way of Ellis Island and Nashville and Indianapolis. There's an Uncle who stayed behind, who later became a fighter in the Resistance of the French Underground during the War, and I wish I knew his story - how he got to France, how he became a warrior, how he survived - but he settled in Florida after the war (whenever it was that he made the journey here), and we didn't know him all that well and I was young and didn't know enough to ask him before he died.

There are a couple of other Uncles who never made it to the States, though a post card came not long after the War, making its way through a small tear in the Iron Curtain, so that we knew they had at least survived, but that was about it. That was all we knew, for decades. We found them again - or they found us - about 20 years ago, and we brought them – sponsored them, and their families to come to the States and live here, with us. With family.

They settled, all of them, in each generation of drifting and flight, with their broken and heavily accented English, and their unfamiliarity with American customs, and they got married, had babies who grew and settled and got married and had babies who grew and settled and got married and had babies.

And now, because of all their wandering, there is me, and my beloved son, who is growing, who will settle, who may have babies, or not. He will work and live and play and vote and sometimes not. He will not always agree with the popular opinion, and if now is to give us any indication, he will not agree loudly. He will work tirelessly to prove that hope, and humanity, are stronger than hate. He will stand in indignation when this land - our land, forged in the fires of justice and cooled by the waters of freedom, and our people - all of us once strangers in a strange land - gives in to the fear of The Other, of the Stranger.

My family managed to slip through the gates to get to this place, and I am forever grateful for that. There was a time in our history, not too long ago (as history gets counted), that those very same gates were barred for so many of our people at a time of desperate need. Sadly, most paid the ultimate price and perished in ugly ways. We remember them. And today, oh, today! That gate, that glorious gate of hope and freedom and possibility – I fear that gate is shutting, its rusted iron hinges groaning with the weight of Dreamers denied – those who are here now, and those who still yearn to breathe free, to enter that gate and live their lives.

We cannot let them close! We must not allow that to happen. We cannot allow hate to swallow hope. We cannot stand idly by the blood and tears and hopes of others who, like our ancestors, fled the stetls and oppression and threats of death and poverty, finally landing on these shores, this “goldeneh medinah” where the streets were paved with, if not gold, then at least opportunity.

My son knows this patchwork history of our family, these precious bits and pieces that are all I have of them: how we started so very far from here, and suffered, and were afraid, and packed up and left, because their hope was stronger than their fear. And my son will stand on the shoulders of these beloved unknown giants, and he will make the desert of hatred and fear bloom. He will lift the lamp and open the gates wide, just as they were opened for us: tired, poor, yearning to breathe free, homeless and tempest-tossed.

My son, like his great grandfather before him, will surely make the desert bloom.