The Sunny Side of the Street

My father, Sidney Rosenberg, with mustache, on one knee in the front row. 
My mother, Henrietta, hands on knees in white shoes.

Out of the blur of my childhood, I see my fundamental relationship to the world coming into focus. My witness to the famines, the refugee camps - from the end of WWII to the present - has somehow not altered my essential optimism.
The American Journal of Epidemiology reports that this may be good for my health. I'm not sure about that. On the contrary, a tablespoon of harsh reality taken once a day might improve my vision. But, insofar as the Journal's prognosis is true, I owe my conviction of well-being to my father. Last week, I observed his yahrzeit. He died on December 14, 1978. Lighting the memorial candle, I remembered him a little more than usual on 14 Kislev, the anniversary of his death on the Hebrew calendar. This year, the Hebrew and secular dates coincided on the 14th which is unusual, but then these are unusual times.

My father was born in New York and raised in the Yorkville section of the city where German was the predominant language. Too young for WWI and too old for WWII, he came of age in the '20s with no memory of trench warfare and no capacity to imagine the coming horror. He was an antiques dealer by trade, a clever business person, but also a man with any eye for beautiful things. He bought and sold objects made in Europe that became signifiers of culture to Americans who admired the filigree and gilt, the expert craftsmanship. It was understood that the merchandise in his dusty shop, an allergist's paradise, could not be arranged neatly in shelving and bins like so much underwear at Macy's. The display had to be casually profligate, haphazard, a commotion of cups and saucers. The customer was invited to wade through the stacks of dinner plates and tureens, wandering up and down the aisles, past the Meissen figurines and the Dresden dessert dishes, without a care in the world, without a thought of the real and very recent history of those places. This was the '50s, after all. My mother stood behind the glass showcase gossiping with the customers. My father cruised West End Avenue doing his best to acquire, at the most advantageous prices, the cherished valuables of widows with goulashy Viennese accents before the wobbly old ladies decamped for Florida. Like a surgeon, he extracted the heirlooms, polishing each piece with care so the old world tarnish would be removed. Then he re-sold the porcelain and sterling to shiny Americans, willfully ignorant of history. My father was a gentle, unmarked man. For him, Majdanek was like Aleppo. Something observed from a safe distance. Something that happened to someone else.

In our house, we took a sanguine view of things. We voted for Stevenson. We believed our country would one day embrace the Puerto Rican children my father lovingly tutored in English after school and the black people we saw on the IRT local, even the woman who came down from Harlem to clean, hanging her coat on a hook in the back bathroom off the kitchen. We were well-intentioned and criminally naive.

In our house, we were convinced that America would win the Cold War. That in the end, no country with a vulgarian head of state who banged his shoe on a desk in the sacred confines of the U.N. could come out on top. Poignant, isn't it? 2017 is the centennial of the Russian Revolution. We thought we had disposed of the Russian bear, but here he is again sniffing around the remains of our picnic. We continue to forage for the lessons of the last century. My father is gone, but I am still processing my grandparents' immigration and assimilation stories, the long journey out of the old world and into the new. We all drag our family stories around with us wherever we go, rarely setting them down long enough to listen to all the other stories. Your ancestors were brought here from West Africa in chains? Generations of the men in your family got their paychecks and their emphysema in the coal mines? It would shock my father and other shopkeepers in New York and Cracow and Budapest, where his parents were born, to discover that things could go bad and from there to worse. He provided my mother, my sister and myself a down-market version of the life of the wealthy family in the 1970 Italian movie, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, all out on the court dressed in tennis whites when the SS came for them.  Like my father, most of us know what we know and not much else. I have friends whose fathers survived the Holocaust and friends whose fathers were blacklisted. Mine was neither. I am a child of optimism, raised in a household blissfully ignorant of rage and despair. I have no prior training in catastrophe.

A good place to begin is this piece by Timothy Snyder, originally a Facebook post: http://qz.com/846940/a-yale-history-professors-20-point-guide-to-defending-democracy-under-a-trump-presidency/

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