I grew up in a Jewish household in a Jewish neighborhood visiting grandmothers and cousins and observing holidays with the typical complaints of a child with too much energy to sit still and do nothing while the parents were at temple. We were often told to quiet it down while all of the kids were doing their best (or not so best) in the temple parking lot. I can still feel the heat on my face that came up from the asphalt even on these early fall days. These were my formative years. I lived this way in Queens, New York until I was ten, almost eleven when we moved to Long Island, which was different as night was to day.
While we moved east, my cousins moved south to Florida, and while we wrote often, we were bereft [th] of each other’s company which had been constant practically since I was born. My grandmother was their aunt, and my Bubbe (great-grandmother) was their grandmother. My new neighborhood was more diverse than Bayside’s Oakland Gardens, although our immediate neighbor was Jewish and he had a mixed accent of Eastern European and the Yiddish language. We traveled into Queens to see my grandmother, and into the Bronx to visit my uncle.
My other grandmother was living with us now, and instead of walking the few blocks to P.S. 46, I spent a year cutting through a soccer field for my final year of elementary school before I began taking a bus to the middle school named for Jonas Salk. Let’s just say there was no anti-vax controversy when I was a kid.
The end of World War II was very far away to ten year old me. As an adult, I can see that thirty-two years is barely a scratch in the historical record. Since our family was all born in the United States (except for my Canadian-born grandfather), while the Holocaust was something part of our collective memories and experiences, we didn’t have anyone talking about or giving witness accounts. It’s possible that people were too traumatized. My teacher at shul was a survivor, but in reading his story as an adult I see how much I got wrong in my memory up until that point.
I don’t remember if Anne Frank’s Diary was part of my school reading or just the reading that I did as a kid for pleasure. I always had my nose in a book, and if not in the book then writing a book or notes or essays. I related to Anne Frank easily. She was a young girl, like me. She had dark hair, like me. She was a writer, or at least a diarist and she wanted to be a writer if I recall correctly, like me. I also kept a diary when I was younger. Silly things. Nothing like what Anne wrote in her diary. Mine had a puffy cover with rainbows all over it, and a gold colored clasp with a lock and key. My sister and I even shared the attic room in our house, which of course, was nothing like Anne’s experience in her family’s attic room. I don’t even think we pretended it was.
My world revolved around school, family and friends, and the holidays we celebrated. Our year beginning in September with back to school and Rosh Hashanah, moving solemnly into Yom Kippur and celebratory for Sukkot. The fall was a busy time with events at shul, special dinners at home, and days off from school for the High Holidays. Schools were closed on those days as well as Passover since we wouldn’t go to school anyway. Passover wasn’t restrictive apart from food, but closing the school probably saved them money on kids not buying lunch for the week.
As an adult, my mind was blown that Anne Frank was born the same year as Martin Luther King, Jr. She seemed so far apart from his time. When I moved to Long Island, they would have been only forty-eight. I’m fifty-nine. She would have been ninety-seven today. Imagine if we never knew who Anne Frank was, if the world was a better place, if there was no holocaust, no death, no destruction, no antisemitism, no Jew hate, where would this world be? Where would it be if a lot of things?
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl is one of first books I owned and one of the books I read on my own. I recently bought the 75th anniversary edition e-book to have on my kindle and to re-read. The time for that might be now.
I see many keyboard warriors telling what they would do, would they hide Anne Frank. They say yes, of course. But looking at their other posts about Jewish people and celebrations, it is obvious that not only wouldn’t they hide Anne Frank, they’d turn her in, but only after beating her and taking her shoes.
The world I grew up in is gone.
My family is going on vacation to Toronto, Canada, the place where my grandfather was born; the place where I visited his sisters and their families for my entire childhood, the people I loved and talked about and with my entire life, and I don’t know if I or my children will be safe there. In Toronto! It used to be one of the safest cities in the world, and maybe it remains that, but only if you’re not Jewish. A doctor, a cardiac specialist in Montreal is leaving, moving to the United States. I don’t know if he’ll find it safer here. We are not protected. Not even by our government that think the establishment clause means the establishment of the Christian faith everywhere, and other faiths nowhere.
I’m going to re-read Anne’s book. I think it will be sadder than the last time I read it. My safe bubble of childhood is gone, and so is my children’s.
Happy? birthday, Anne. What have we become?
“Where there’s hope, there’s life. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again.” – Anne
Griffins and Ginger Snaps 