The Nazi Holocaust is very much a part of my personal story. However, this does not in any way reflect my feelings about the current tragic and heartbreaking situation in the larger world.
Home
Our Dad always said his first view of the Golden Gate Bridge was from below. He would reminisce that when he first came to this country as a young refugee, they sailed under the Bridge. The Bridge is such a majestic sight, it was hard for me to imagine that view, it sounded rather unsightly, even obscene, or like a scene from a dungeon or gutter. I suppose I was more accustomed to his unsavory recollections, but as I recall, it was a sweet memory. My mother, who arrived at the other coast, described her initial greeting as the Statue of Liberty, another majestic icon, with the famous words “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” She must have taught us Emma Lazarus’ poem, because somehow those words still echo in my memory. Especially now as there is so much commotion in the US about immigration, deportation, and who is from where. I grew up hearing that we, from the beginning, were always an acclaimed “melting pot.”
In my City by the Bay, especially with aberrant weather of late, masses of homeless huddle under freeway overpasses in windswept, threadbare, ragged tents. Almost daily I exclaim to my husband, “I am so glad we live indoors!” And that he bought our house in 1983. I complain of the cold here when it has been 41 degrees F (5 degrees C) which does not begin to compare with some of the freezing climes where people are homeless and starving, that we daily hear about on the news.
Being immigrants and refugees blur together in my memory. Both were confusing. And where identity and affiliation are chronic areas of confusion for the child of trauma and neglect, I remember the chaos of messages. On one hand my parents both were shocked and stunned by the sudden and extreme lethal rejection from the places that had been up until then, home. Shockingly and violently threatened, only the lucky escaping with their lives…the meaning of “home” became shaky at best. I remember the heart-breaking story from when I was very young, of my mother losing her best friend from one day to the next. Out of nowhere, adorned with swastikas, an up until then unfamiliar image, the door slammed in her stunned face. To me, yearning for the dreamed of “best friend,” that was particularly unbearable.
The messages we got growing up were messy to sort. We were on one hand fortunate to be “welcomed” here. But were we? The simultaneous messages were “…We can’t trust them here,” “We are not like them…” with an undeniable measure of judgment and contempt. “Fit in- but not too much.” Assimilate was one of those long, many-faceted words that stayed muddled. Although New York City, where we lived when I was small, seemed to teem with people of different colors, accents and languages, in our apartment building were mostly people like us, with sad eyes, numbers on their arms.
My mom had three record albums: Pete Seeger, Harry Belafonte, and Burl Ives. I did love the Calypso rhythms most. The child of neglect categorically feels like a lonely outsider even in the family, even at home. The bustling outside world where I did not really belong anywhere, was like a concentric ripple in the pond, that continued undulating outward. My mom, vociferous about Civil Rights, my dad advocating for more money for the underpaid African American (then referred to as Negro) custodian at his work; those were some important and deeply remembered messages.
Rejection
And there were others. Ironically however, my first serious boyfriend when I was fourteen, was Chinese American. The fact that he was much older than I, old enough to be in trouble by today’s legal and ethical standard, did not register. But his ethnicity did. My dad having escaped Germany to the Shanghai Ghetto, where he also lost his mother, exhibited a prejudice that did not fit with the other messages I had previously gotten. I guess the fact that not only was I hanging out for years with a non-Jewish guy, he was so obviously not Jewish, was particularly objectionable. I don’t think my dad ever learned his name. If he did, in the seven years I was with him, that name was never uttered aloud.
My boyfriend’s parents were immigrants from China. I remember attending a few family banquets where many dozens of his relatives of all ages, teemed in a large restaurant private room. I heard barely a word of English. My boyfriend did not speak Chinese either, so we were both in the dark in the noisy Babel. Heaping platters piled with unfamiliar foods, addled my eating disordered mind. I felt dizzily out of place, and questionably welcome there. I, the skinny Jewish girl was about as welcome in his clan as he was in ours. How strange and incomprehensible this otherism.
A few holiday seasons I worked in my boyfriend’s parents’ florist shop, where I felt that same rejection of me. I did not understand what they were saying to each other in Mandarin, but I figured it was some kind of head shaking disapproval. Truly none of it made sense. Which is how I am feeling about the sorry state of affairs in the US now. I now have nieces and nephews who are brown skinned. I wonder if I need to be worried about them.
I remember shuddering to hear the stories back in probably 2015, of long lines of unaccompanied young children, streaming north from over the border, in search of safety, refuge, a home. Little children, tired, thirsty, hungry and under hot sun for hours on their little feet. Or waiting seemingly endlessly and confined, at the border, some held in cages. Without families? I wonder what has become of them. What will happen next. More orphans, more attachment trauma, abandonment, loss, disenfranchisement, loneliness, more existing in the world, or barely, without a place to belong, Much like our child of neglect, more neglect.
Labor
I remember when I was first in college in 1973. Cesar Chavez was organizing the farm workers to help them get decent working conditions, living conditions and a survival wage. Most of the farm workers were migrants from Mexico, probably without papers, living in hellish squalor, harvesting our crops so we all had food. Every Saturday morning a group of us were out picketing the supermarket, and trying to convince people to boycott – I think it was mostly lettuce in those days. It was our regular weekly get-together for quite a while. Without those migrants, who would do that unsavory work? We were fortunate that we had people who were willing to do it…
When my father was in his final years and he and his second wife could not care for themselves, he had a caregiver who was an angel. None of us could have done what she did for him, with efficiency, tireless kindness, gentleness, plenty of common sense and love. We all believed Dad loved her more than anyone else in those twilight years. She probably cried most when he died. Similarly, my husband’s mother in in her final years and days, had a devoted and beloved helper, in what was certainly a thankless task. In both of these cases and typically in this country – at least in my part of the country, these jobs are most often performed by immigrants and refugees from many places, with varying skin colors. Who will do this work if they are all cast out?
For many of us who are children of immigrants and refugees, the intergenerational transmission of trauma and neglect produces an ever larger, universe of nothing. What are we going to do?
Today’s song:
