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princessofelia · 4 years

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Dear America

Dear America,

I love you for all that you are and all that you strive to be. You never fail to surprise me, in both good ways and bad. I am so very lucky to find a home among your multitudes, in all your pretty places. I have thought much about what you mean, for me and for the world. It’s taken me years to understand you to the point that I do, and yet it’s probably incomplete. You are my adoptive mother after all.

My first impressions of you are misremembered fragments. As a 9-year-old I did not know much about you. Everything I thought I knew came from an out-of-print Western I read 30 times during our sojourn in Italy, because it was the only book I had. I did not arrive on your shores in a boat as did the millions before me but on a jumbo jet from Rome to JFK. The people in New York startled me, their varied skin tones, accents, smells, fashion statements were like nothing I had ever seen. The other kids quickly indoctrinated me into New York’s tribal divisions, but I never fully accepted them.

As a public high school freshman, I quickly amassed a multicultural friend group. James Madison High in 1994 Brooklyn was an idiosyncratic place, nearly four thousand souls filing in through doors equipped with metal detectors and security guards. I understood nothing of what was expected of me as a Russian Jew. Pretty soon I was harassed by the other members of my “tribe” about not sticking with my kind. I guess that was how they survived.

After my mother sent me to parochial school, we got an exciting letter. We would get to become US citizens. I didn’t get to take the oath with everyone, as a minor I got automatic citizenship once my mother got hers. But I remember everything about that mundane event of signing a paper in an office. I was an American citizen. It meant everything.

American meritocracy saved me, maybe quite literally saved my life. Many others, mostly boys, from my part of Brooklyn did not get to see their 40th birthday, the age I am now. Others lived a life that was slightly above the standard of their immigrant parents. I remember two events that have shaped my journey. My SAT score came one spring day. My uncle opened the letter while I was on the phone. I had him read it three times. One year later I was in college with a full ride.

My MCAT score came 6 months before I became pregnant with my oldest daughter. I was in the narrow hallway of my mother’s building, lined with silvery mailboxes on one side and apartments of pleasant old Jewish ladies on the other. When I saw my score, I laughed so hard, tears streaming down my face that I had to reassure one of them that poked her head out.

It’s a simple story. Immigrant girl perseveres, through a tough time in a tough neighborhood, single mother and all, and becomes a doctor. The American dream come to life.

But that’s just part of you America isn’t it?

What did I sign when I became a citizen? It wasn’t just a deal to study hard, succeed, make money and have fun along the way. It was a contract with all your bloody, shameful and heroic past.

It took me many years to understand that the accepted position of a Jewish person in America means. In every other country (except the ones that don’t have Jews), the Jews are a favored scapegoat. Even now antisemitism is rising on both left and right in the US and some Jews feel like they don’t have political home. It is still with us, and I fear it always will be. But we got to be part of the establishment in the US only a few decades since Johnson–Reed Act and the S.S. St. Louis. It took thirty-four years from being sent back to die in Europe to the appointment of the first Jewish Secretary of State. You see America had a different underclass; we didn’t need to be America’s scapegoat.

But what responsibility did I, an immigrant with likely a half a dozen centuries of history in the Ukraine have for the wrongs of the past? Especially since I am repulsed even by the idea that the sons have to answer for the sins of the fathers?

I realized there was only one way to proceed. To educate myself about all of America, to truly know it, through experience and the written word. I recall the Central Park jogger case with the physical response of something that had happened to me. My mother had accidently left a Russian tabloid open and I devoured the case in all its gory details as a 10-year-old. It was the stuff of nightmares. Settled and done, perpetrators put away forever, right? It was a closed book in my mind. Until one night as I traveled through the maze of aimless internet research where I learned that the “perpetrators” were in fact freed. It was more than shocking because I also remembered very well how old they were at the time. Fifteen-year-old “super predators”: that was part of the lurid interest in the case.

Many nights in the past I have read about others, Emmet Till for one, and I would come back to the story in the evening, every few years, looking at the photos and trying to understand: Why? It was similar to the way I would venture into Holocaust literature occasionally, also trying to get at the nugget of explanation that didn’t exist.

I would read about the heroes of Abolition, Civil Rights Movement during “Black History Month”. Black history is rich and full of amazing stories, I would think. The woman that won her freedom in court, slave that taught himself to read and then wrote books still read by millions, all the people that proclaimed their worth as human beings to a hostile majority. But I didn’t understand how that fit with my conception of you, America?

I also read about the worst of the slave era – as a mother, the separation of families especially got to me and the lies that the white mothers of the time told themselves about their slaves supposed inability to love their children the same way as they did. Doesn’t that just get at some of the worst of human nature? Both the ability to dehumanize “the other” and the ability to completely delude oneself to preserve a sense of self-worth. Slavery “ended” in 1865, but well into the 1910s former slaves were publishing wanted ads to find their kin, who they never forgot.

In the meantime, a slew of “laws” were passed, Vagrancy Laws for example, essentially punishing being at the wrong place at the wrong time with hard labor which had a high maiming and mortality rate. Many of these so called “criminals” were children.

I think it is no accident that a Jew wrote the words to “Strange Fruit”. How could one not see the parallels between the experience of the Jews in Europe and the experience of African Americans in the United States? Hitler was an ardent admirer of American racial policy and German eugenicists were greatly influenced by their American colleagues.

What does justice mean, when your words are counted as nothing while the words of your accuser no matter how suspect, are held up as the unvarnished truth? What did it mean for George Stinney, who had a one-day trial and was sentenced to die by an all-white jury in 1944 at the age of 14? When I read Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, I chuckled grimly along with him about the rich irony of wrongly accused black man getting the death penalty in Monroeville, Alabama, the birthplace of none other than Harper Lee. This was in 1988. I thought of Faulkner’s words: “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”

How could my heart swell with pride when I heard the national anthem, or when I hear of an American made or an imported American visionary entrepreneur, in a place where those kinds of things have happened? When I sometimes feel faint with gratitude at the incredible opportunities given to me? Where no matter how my friends and acquaintances toy with the idea of going to utopian Scandinavia or Canada to escape this crazy place, I know that I would never want to live somewhere else. And that all of the above is just the story of one marginalized group among others, although wronged so badly it is hard to compare anything to it. How does one resolve this impossible conflict?

It happened last year when I finally saw it. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about struggling with the question that was posed to him as a racist put-down “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?”. It was many years later when he realized well “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus”. It was a profound realization for him, and I must have kept it hidden away in my mind somewhere.

I was reading the words of David Walker, a black Abolitionist: “Let no man of us budge one step, and let slaveholders come to beat us from out country. America is more our country, than it is the whites - we have enriched it with our blood and tears.” I thought “What a great American!” All of a sudden, I could see that David Walker did not belong in African American History Month at all. He was an American hero. The failure to claim him as such is a huge loss to my fellow citizens. I owed my American freedom to him, much as I did to the founding fathers, the service members that died in Americas wars, all the marginalized groups that fought and often died for their freedom. America has never fully lived up to its promise, but Americans have. What does this time have to teach us other than that our citizens will continue to strive for a more perfect union? America is a great human experiment. Which citizen of the world would truly want to live in a time where the idea of America ceases to be?

With Love,

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