Part One: The Person I Most Admire.
Back when The Great Trumpkin first descended the escalator, we were visiting Grandma Miriama at her house in the Slope, at first, she softly growled in gradually ascending volume and then she spat out, “I know his type well; I remember when they marched into Poland.”
Miriam recalled “The Prime Minister announced we were ready to fight the Germans. Two days later they marched into town without firing a shot.”
Once time, just before my son was leaving for his summer of Reform Jewish recreation in the Berkshires, he asked “Bubbe, did you ever go to camp?” and she said, “no we had an attic.”
Later she told me ‘they called it an attic; the Franks had a attic; we had a little space.” Mostly she occupied herself by keeping her only companion, a younger cousin, from crying. Most of her family was killed (“my sister was 11, she never saw 12”).
As a bar mitzvah project, my son did visits with Holocaust survivors; a gentleman we visited in Sheepshead Bay proved more responsive in Polish and Yiddish than English and my wife decided to bring Miriam on the next visit.
“Where were you?” the gentleman, a former resident of Auschwitz asked. “I was in hiding,” said Miriam.
“Hiding?” said the man, “you had it good”
“Good,” said Miriam, “at least in the camp you got to see people; you had a social life.”
After liberation, some Jews left Poland as soon as they could; like many other Jews, her cousin eventually left for Israel; others returned to their towns, where the Poles who had taken over their property often greeted them with pogroms. Many more got the message and left. Miriam’s husband never got the message, even after 1968, when Jews were expelled from the party, and their government jobs.
“How can I leave?” said her husband, Hershel “I have the keys to the cemetery; who will let the Bobov in when they come to mourn at the Rebbe’s grave?”
Communism left opportunities for those so inclined; Hershel, the town’s only capitalist, opened a shoe store (known as “The Jew Store”) but mostly, between bouts of prison, he ran the local black market.
Once, they interviewed Miriam on television to counter the notion that Poles were anti-Semites. They asked her if it was true that Poles had saved her life. She said “it Is true that Poles saved my life; it is also true that they informed upon my mother.”
One daughter visited New York in 79, and overstayed her visa, applying for political asylum. After her husband died, Miriam left in 83, with her other two daughters, and sought asylum while staying in a shelter for refugees in Vienna.
Their house was sold at a discount to an American priest, who promised to bring them back them their money later (and mostly did). They snuck out through Slovenia. The train was delayed and they had to sell their umbrella for some food money.
Six months later, they finally arrived in New York. Her son and a grandchild arrived years later.
After a bout with breast cancer, Miriam sat at home and leaned English watching soap operas and becoming a voracious reader. She eventually got a job in a Chasidic owned Williamsburg drug store, where most of her conversations took place in Yiddish. She worked there until she was 89.
Her family is like something preserved only in amber, a fantasy version of what postwar Eastern European Jewish intelligentsia would be like, if only it had been allowed to exist. I call them “The Rootless Cosmopolitans.”
Almost exactly two months after 9/11, on her first date with a ne’er do well political operative, Miriam’s youngest daughter was told, “I have no money and I live over a funeral home.” She thought he was joking and she laughed.
She responded “My life’s ambition is to sit home all day and read Proust.” He thought she was joking, and he married her.
That he would be me.
Anyway, to Miriam’s distress, Trump won.
“Mr. Graubard, what are we going to do now?”
“C’mon, Miriam, you’ve lived through worse.”
“Mr. Graubard, if you think reminding me of the Holocaust is going to cheer me up, you are probably not going to succeed.”
Miriam spent four year knitting pussy hats and attending Black Lives Matter demonstrations, speaking at Synagogues and religious schools, when she got the chance, and once playing herself in a production at Yeshiva Flatbush. But mostly she watched CNN. She stopped going to survivor events when she found them too full of Trump followers. “They want to complain about blacks; I told them a black man didn’t kill my mother.”
Every morning she called to ask me the same question; “is he gone yet?”
We worried that when he was gone, she would have nothing to live for. But now, at 97, she still spends her days worrying that Trump will come back, alternating that with complaints that Bibi is running Israel.
The last few weeks have been difficult times for Miriam and her family. To them, the idea of a place which would take in Jews, when no one else would admit them and they had no place else to go, is not merely theoretical, because there is no way they can go back to the place my wife sneeringly refers to as “Sunny Poland.”
Part Two: A Person I Admire With Somewhat Less Enthusiasm
At a Democratic Club meeting in the 52nd AD, my soon to be former Councimember, Lincoln Restler, noted that he was losing a large chunk of the area to redistricting. He smiled and joked “I regret that I am losing Howard.”
“Not as much as I regret it,” I responded.
He may not have meant it; I did.
The Anti-Defamation League’s last annual report showed a 52% increase in antisemitic incidents across the city in 2022, with 395 reported incidents of antisemitic vandalism, harassment or assault in New York City, including 66 reports of physical violence, 52 of them in heavily Orthodox-populated Brooklyn neighborhoods.
On April 27, 2023, Councilwoman Shahana Hanif voted against a resolution introduced in response to this report, to recognize April 29 annually as “End Jew Hatred Day.”
As I noted last month, there was an arguable reason (a line hailing an astroturf group of bad actors) to abstain on such a resolution, if one explained it, but when there is a resolution condemning acts of violence against a religious group, it is probably the better part of valor to raise your quibbles and then say, “but this is too important to do anything but vote Yes.”
But the Councilmember didn’t abstain, she voted no.
On October 7, 2023, the terrorist organization Hamas, which governs the Gaza strip by force, unleashed a violent attack on Israel, targeting civilians, in which 1400 hundred were brutally murdered, tortured and/or raped while over 200 were kidnapped and held as hostages.
According tom the Atlantic, one set of terrorists surrounded a Thai man they had shot in the stomach and discussed their next move. One shouted “Give me a knife!,” but sadly the cupboard was bare, so, being resourceful, he instead located a garden hoe, swinging it repeatedly at the man’s throat.
Another called his parents, telling them he was calling from a Jewish woman’s phone. He told them he was a “hero” and “I killed 10 Jews with my own hands.” He also told them they should open up WhatsApp, because he had sent them candid photos with the proof.
As Charles Sykes noted, the cruelty is not an anomaly; the cruelty is the point.
October 13, 2023, Councilwoman Hanif tweeted (https://ShahanaFromBK/status/1712911136067076510) “The root cause of this war is the illegal, immoral, and unjust occupation of the Palestinian people. The Occupation has brought violence toward Israelis and Palestinians for over 75 years. There will be no peace unless the rights of all people in this region are respected”
Translation from Newspeak: Since the occupation actually began 56 years ago, in 1967, this is a clearly a declaration that the occupation is defined by the Councilmember to include the entirety of the State of Israel, and to signal to those who know the secret code that the Councilmember questions the legitimacy of the world’s only state which serves as a refuge for the Jewish people and that she wants that state abolished. Her last sentence here is a might ambiguous; she may mean she finds the actions justified, or it may be that she just finds them inevitable (hitting a gravely injured man repeatedly in the throat with a garden hoe is possibly neither, but there I go editorializing again).
The truth is. that if the Councilmember wanted to resolve the ambiguity, she would have done so.
It is notable that, nowhere in her statement, or in any statement since, has the Councilmember mentioned, let alone condemned Hamas. Instead, she gives us a shrug of her shoulders, and perhaps a sly wink.
On October 17, 2023 Councilwoman Hanif retweeted a post (https://twitter.com/nycDSA/status/1714386903791730810), in support of a rally sponsored by the Democratic Socialists of America, which stated “No more helping Israel destroy hospitals.” This is either a blood libel, since many experts believe it to be disproven, or (if one believes the NY Times) a jump to conclusions not yet based in any evidence. At any rate, it wasn’t a hospital, but a hospital parking lot, and many experts believe the responsibility belongs to a terrorist group called Islamic Jihad. It must also be noted that, on the same date, as a result of the circulation of the unproven rumor, which the councilmember knowingly chose to recirculate, an historic Tunisian synagogue was destroyed.
On October 16, 2023, Councilwoman Hanif posted (https://twitter.com/ShahanaFromBK/status/1713946976402751671), that the murder of a six year old boy in the Chicago suburbs had been “facilitated by rampant Islamophobic rhetoric stoked at the very highest levels of our government” and that “His blood is on our government’s hands”, thereby extending a blame to the Biden administration she has yet to extend to Hamas. By her own twisted logic, this would make her personally responsible for the destruction of the Tunisian synagogue
As reported in the Times, On August 3, 2022, a homeless man in Prospect Park attacked a woman and her dog with a wooden staff and a bottle of urine, killing the dog. With no arrest having been made, both the woman and another area resident, who was concerned about safety in the Park, separately went to Councilwoman Hanif’s office for help and “came away feeling her staff members were more concerned with the safety of the man — whom they presumed to be homeless and mentally ill — than with the threat he might pose to others.” The other resident was told “‘We don’t want the police involved in this.’”
On October 20, 2023, Councilwoman Hanif, in a somewhat justified slap at the Mayor’s failure to extend messages of consolation to his Moslem constituents, said “In every corner of this country, Muslim communities are asking for solidarity as we grieve. But at every opportunity, we are met with condescension from the people who claim to represent us. Muslim communities need support right now, not a stern talking to.”
So true, and I believe in every corner of the 39th Council District, there are many Jews who have the same problem with the Councilwoman who claims to represent us.
Maybe we need to do something so she would find us worthy of an extension of her sympathy.
Maybe we could kill a dog in Prospect Park.
But I like dogs.
Nonetheless, something else might get her attention.
Having talked to the anti-vax conspiracy monger running as the Republican, I can’t give him my vote. And anyway such votes would be rightly dismissed as an embrace of reactionary lunacy.
So, I’m writing-in the persona I most admire, my 97year old Holocaust survivor
mother-in-law, Miriam Tyrk.
You should do so too. The message of that vote will be unmistakable.
Call it a vote for the Shoah E’Nuff Party.
One Comment
Finally….