Remembering Dad and Dad's America

It's getting close to that time of year.

My father was a fallen plutocrat. In the 1920s, he owned shoe stores, inherited from his father. The Great Depression of 1929-1933 wiped him out. He went to work as a salesman in one of the stores he used to own.

He never made any real money after that, but at least he had a job in a period when 25 percent of the labor force was unemployed.

Despite his former economic status, Dad was a life-long  Democrat,  with Socialist leanings. What was a Jew supposed to be? Jewish Republicanism, though it existed, was almost an oxymoron, or at least an antilogy.

During my early childhood, the position of world Jewry was becoming increasingly precarious, which reinforced Dad's leftism, although, to be sure, he never seemed to have time to become active in politics.

Politics in the late 1930s were about as bare-knuckled as in any previous time in history. The present period is rough, but no rougher than then.

It was a time of elemental struggle between isolationists and interventionists--between those who rejoiced in Hitler's rise, or at least were reconciled to it, and those who understood that we would have to go to war to stop fascism.

The Republicans branded Roosevelt a war-monger, which he was, but, as subsequent analysis revealed, not really a rabid one.

Since we had broken the German naval code, Roosevelt could have directed American warships onto a collision course with German U boats in 1940-41 if he had been looking for an incident that would lead to war. The evidence suggests that he studiously avoided this.

After the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor and, four days later, Hitler's declaration of war on the USA, everything changed. The country pulled together with vertiginous speed. Old antagonisms didn't disappear, but they certainly receded.

Jews felt more secure. I felt more secure. So did Dad.

I lived far more intensely in the 1940s than in the previous decade. Of course, I was growing into the years of emerging sensibility, but some of that intensity resulted from the war and the feeling of being part of a unified national struggle.

In early April, 1945, Dad took the family to a concert in Harlem. A singer did a little riff on the Russians being close to Berlin. The audience cheered itself hoarse. I cheered. Dad cheered.

There is something transcendent about losing  oneself in the collective consciousness. I was never happier than at that moment. And, I believe, neither was Dad.