Why, I wonder, do I feel so close to you, even though we’ve never met? Perhaps it is that I was born in1937, close to when and where you gave birth to Donald. I even grew up in Queens, near Jamaica where you lived, and my brother went to Kew Forest High with your kids. I still remember the day Donald was finally kicked out of school for bullying his classmates, and was sent off to a Military Academy where, it was hoped, the harsh discipline would finally keep him in line. My brother told us at supper that it was a relief not to have to put up with him in class anymore.
But it is you I think of when I remember those days – the mother of the bully in my brother’s class – and wishing we could have sat down together over tea, sharing our stories of coming from ‘elsewhere.’ I wish we could even do it now. We actually have similar histories, although from different traditions, and we have both come a long way since then, but our paths seem to have much in common, although one generation apart. In any case I wish I had known you then, and we had shared our stories in confidence: who we were and what we loved; where our people came from and what scared us; what languages our people spoke, and what we hoped for.
I would have wanted to know about living on an island of sheep crofters in the Scottish Hebrides, and what it was like to live by the sea. I would ask you about why and when you left for America, and who you left behind. I would have told you my stories about the Jewish shtetls in Russia my grandparents came from and how my people made it to America, and how they coped. I would have choked out to you descriptions of the “Hospital for Incurables” my Grandmother lived in.
I might have whispered that my mother was a musician, longing to play the piano, but had to quit high school to care for her mother; I would have told you stories about my grandfather in the shtetl, a Leninist revolutionary who escaped from jail by the skin of his teeth, and my 4 great-aunts who drove us all crazy.
My forebears were angry revolutionaries during the Russian Revolution, mostly uneducated, Yiddish-speaking Jews with nothing but the ‘shirts on their backs’ seeking safety from the Cossacks by getting on boats that crossed the ocean. My great-grandmother Bubbe, as the story goes, left home with 4 children hiding under her skirts and took off with them to find “the boat” that would take them to America. And found it! They actually, made it across the sea to Ellis Island, but were then not admitted ‘in’ because one child was found to have glaucoma! They were actually sent back from Ellis Island when they arrived – that, or leave one daughter behind! Quick decision at the point of entry, and they turned around and all went back to Russia – all of them – and years later all tried again, five babushkas with their matriarch, and that time all got ‘in’!
I grew up with those 5 babushkas – my grandmother and 4 great-aunts – these feisty women who, God bless them, were powerhouses and crazy as loons but I believe they came by it honestly. I’ve told their stories in almost every book I’ve written, shaking with laughter and tears each time, but the fact is that they were survivors, making it safely across an ocean three times, one sister eventually producing the woman who produced the daughter who was me.
Their mother, Bubbe, was run over by a truck on Delancy Street before I was born, shopping for soup chicken and pickles. I wish I had known her.
I come from these women, these “tired and poor” survivors of abject poverty and war from across oceans and mountains who were promised haven here, welcomed by a Statue of Liberty in the New York Harbor that shone a torch to light their – our – way in.
And they came; your people and my people. You preceded me in by a single generation, and I’d say that both Donald and I are proof of your generation’s success.
For better or for worse.
You and I both came of age in the streets of New York, finding our way by the luck of the draw and some good instincts. In the suburbs called Queens County, we each caught the attentions of the “boys” who would become our husbands – each a refugee himself and each making his mark by being smart enough and gutsy enough to work the system. Yours was a German Goy and mine was a German Jew – themselves both survivors. Your man came to this country before the war, and mine escaped from Germany one generation later, a 3-year old when Hitler began showing his face. That baby, my man, almost died in a London orphanage before his parents managed to grab him out at the last minute and escape on a boat bound for New York Harbor – a boat that was torpedoed and sunk on its return trip to Europe.
The man that you married and the man I married were both survivors of that war, barely a generation apart, in a country called America. And they both found their footing again in New York City, in Jamaica, Queens on the Union Turnpike busline – as enemies.
I wish you and I could have confided our stories to one another, somewhere in Time and Space and between wars, still wishing I could have known you. And you, known me.
I could tell you what it was like for me to be a Jew at the edges of your neighborhood during a war that pitted my people against ‘your people’ exactly when you were finding your way out of poverty and I was growing up afraid and sad.
I would so love to know, from you, how it felt to come from sheep crofters on a North Sea island, to give birth to one wild child who got away with murder from the beginning for reasons you may still not understand? Can there be a larger purpose that you have contributed to by birthing this child? And if so, what is this purpose? Could you and I have known one another before this incarnation, and agreed that we would come in around the same time to watch this whole wild drama unfold – together? I am here, no matter what, watching things unfold and holding hands with you, his mother. I am a witness – even a recorder but not a changer, although I am so tempted to stick my hands into the pot and add a few extra grains of sugar to sweeten up the story.
Not sugar, you say? Sap.
Tell me more about this, please?
Take it from the trees? Really?
Keep it liquid. Boil it down, let it intensify, thicken – like syrup.
Say more, I whisper.
“Tap the trees,” I hear you say. “Tap the trunk and let sap drip into a hanging-bucket. Pour the sap into cauldrons heating on wood fires out in the Sugar Bush, all day, all night. Boil down to thick syrup; let water steam off like fragrant smoke. Keep tasting; let it thicken; keep tasting. It is a long process, but do not lose patience.
Yes, it takes awhile; stay patient and just keep feeding the fire. You will know when it is ready; trust yourselves to know.
Trust me, I am his mother. I suggest you note how this boy of mine is so outrageous, so dangerous that your collective response is already warning you to reconsider everything you have presumed you wanted, forcing a change of hearts and minds clear across the board.
Trust this process; trust that you will know when to lift that steaming syrup off the fire. Keep an eye on the weather; notice when it changes. Trust yourselves to know when the time comes to move quickly, so be ready.
Trust…the world…
Trust…yourselves…
Trust…and listen to….
the universe…evolving…blossoming …singing……
Give me your tired, your poor…
Your huddled masses yearning to be free…
The wretched refuse of your teeming shores…
Send these, the hopeless tempest-tossed to me…
I lift my lamp beside the golden door…
Breathe and trust. I believe She knows that She, with the help of our people – like your son, for example – is precipitating some deep changes that need badly to be made. At this point they may not appear logical, nor smart, nor kind, but we never know the ways we need to get knocked out of our ‘comfort zone.’
May it be time to trust that the Universe, including ourselves, knows what It is doing.
Even when it uses some very odd props.
I thank you, Mrs. Trump, for offering one of your own to help us all wake up to our expanding, loving Future…
May it be so.
May all beings be blessed…ALL Beings….
