Son of a Bircher
My wife once told me how embarrassed she was when her mom handed out healthy fruits for trick-or-treat at Halloween. I told her I could beat that story by a mile. During the Halloween trick-or-treat of 1968, when I was only 10 years old, my dad handed out “George Wallace for President” bumper stickers. The next day, there were Wallace bumper
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My mother was born in Mako, Hungary--the town that Jospeh Pulitzer (as in Pulitzer Prize) was born in. It had--before the Holocaust--a 30% Jewish population, and there was diversity within that population.
My mother considered the deportation of Hungary's Jews to be a bad thing, and she had memories of her school friends being taken away. So, she considered herself to be a good Christian.
At the same time, she thought nothing of referring to her doctor in L.A.--a Hungarian Jew--as "my little Jew". She didn't mean it in a disparaging way--it was purely the paternalistic attitude of someone who knew that she was one rung higher up the moral-cultural ladder.
I am convinced that anywhere you go in the world, the local population who are the ethnic/religious/whatever majority sit around thinking "Thank God I'm a member of the *right* tribe, and not one of those primitives who live on the wrong side of the railroad tracks/river/ghetto wall."
My mother told me about how during the German occupation, she personally saw Jews who had "converted" to Catholicism praying in Hebrew, rocking back & forth. They were worshipping like Jews. Oh, the scandal. Really, some people have no respect.
At the same time, while her father et al were offended that the Jews were doing this, they would never have ratted them out to the Nazis, or their Hungarian counterparts, the Arrow-Cross Party members. I mean, come on: those guys were assholes.
I should call up Zs Zsa Grosz in Hollywood. I haven't talked to her in a long time. She was my aunt's best friend. The Nazis crammed her into a cattle car with all of her family. Here's irony for you: her aunt, Hajni, died of a heart attack in the 1990s in Szeged, at the same train station where the Nazis shipped her off to Auschwitz when she was a little kid. She was clutching two bags of groceries in her hands.
Hajni could have moved to Amerika, or Izrael, but decided that her home was Hungary. Wow.
That makes me wonder about African Americans and American Indians who willingly, nay, courageously serve in the U.S. military. Why do they do that?
Right now, I'm reading a book about Teddy Roosevelt. Holy shit, after all the hundreds of thousands of Filipino civilians we killed between 1900 and 1910, I am amazed that they would want to move here.
But getting back to your premise, that you are not your father's son, yeah--I agree. I'm actually rather sensitive about this whole topic for the following reason. I've never told anybody this, but here's the real reason I don't like working in hospitals in West L.A. or Santa Monica: one too many incidents in my 20s when I was fresh out of x-ray school, and Jewish hospital employees in that part of town would do the following:
"Miko? What kind of name is that?"
"Hungarian."
"HUNGARIAN??? Do you know that they were the biggest collaborators with the Nazis? They tried to kill off all their Jews!" etc etc etc.
So, why is some 40 year old nurse/doctor/x-ray tech beating up on a 25 year old x-ray tech in the 1990s,accusing him of being an anti-semitic fascist? At the time, I didn't have the logical/conversational skills to deal with knuckleheads who treated me this way. I would always stand there, dumbfounded, with nothing to say. At the time, I didn't know that I had a relative on my father's side who was Raoul Wallenberg's Hungarian assistant. He actively worked to provide Hungarian Jews with false passports, and hiding places. I found all of this out 20 years later from a 90+ year old author and WWII vet. The problem is that these last 20 years, I had my bias against militaristic West L.A. Jews, who were to be avoided at all costs, and were not interested in me as an individual, but more interested in painting me with a broad brush.
Did I take into consideration all of my other Jewish friends who are also from the West Side? No, of course, not. I only worried about the angry ones who were going to harass me at work. Unfortunately, people tend to remember negative experiences much longer, and much more clearly.
Tom
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