IMMIGRANT JEWS
The Orthodox
Jewish community is a cloistered group. Charity is given to other Jews: Jewish
causes, schools, synagogues, elderly, poor, and especially Israel. My parents
were Orthodox and my father donated as much as he could to the synagogue and
Yeshiva school a block away from our house, though of course not as much as the
millionaires who donated enough to get their names on plaques in our school
buildings where their children walked around as if they owned the place, which
in fact they did. The rabbi even had a Lincoln Continental the millionaire
builders bought him which he drove with as much arrogance on the road as he
exuded in person, never making eye contact with anyone but the millionaires.
Whenever something bad happened to someone in the newspaper, my parents would always look at the name to see if they were Jewish. Over the years, our neighborhood became less Jewish and more Cuban, Haitian and other recent immigrants.
Whenever something bad happened to someone in the newspaper, my parents would always look at the name to see if they were Jewish. Over the years, our neighborhood became less Jewish and more Cuban, Haitian and other recent immigrants.
When anyone
criticized immigrants, illegal or not, my mother always said "They're just
like me. They want to start a new life with their families in a new country
where they are not oppressed. It's disgusting the way they treat illegal
immigrants."
My mother was a concentration camp survivor taken to Auschwitz at sixteen. She and her younger sister were there for a year. After the war they lived in Paris for two years, making my mother nineteen, too old for the sixteen-year-old quota to get into the U.S. So she changed her age on the papers to sixteen to just make the cut and enter the country. She herself was an illegal immigrant.
I used to wonder what would happen if the authorities found out, sixty or seventy years later, that she had lied on her visa. Would they send her back to her village in Hungary that was plundered by the Nazis? Would they send her back to her thatch-roofed house that was inhabited by squatters while she was in Auschwitz and other camps, while her family was gassed?
None of it matters now. She is dead and lies next to my father in Israel. US immigration officials can never send them back now. They are at home, at peace in a country at war, safe amid the names of the lost ones, those without a grave in the homeland.
My mother was a concentration camp survivor taken to Auschwitz at sixteen. She and her younger sister were there for a year. After the war they lived in Paris for two years, making my mother nineteen, too old for the sixteen-year-old quota to get into the U.S. So she changed her age on the papers to sixteen to just make the cut and enter the country. She herself was an illegal immigrant.
I used to wonder what would happen if the authorities found out, sixty or seventy years later, that she had lied on her visa. Would they send her back to her village in Hungary that was plundered by the Nazis? Would they send her back to her thatch-roofed house that was inhabited by squatters while she was in Auschwitz and other camps, while her family was gassed?
None of it matters now. She is dead and lies next to my father in Israel. US immigration officials can never send them back now. They are at home, at peace in a country at war, safe amid the names of the lost ones, those without a grave in the homeland.
CP
Gloria
Garfunkel has a Ph.D. in Psychology and Social Relations from Harvard
University. A former psychotherapist, she has published many stories in
literary journals and anthologies.
1 comment:
This gives me something to think about. Maybe that doesn't sound right, but it is a compliment. There's so much honesty in your work.
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