Behind the Bookcase: Why the President's Recent Speech is So Disturbing
(The bookcase behind which Anne Frank's family hid for two years before being discovered and sent to die in a concentration camp. Anne's parents were denied their request for entry into the U.S. in 1942.)
I reflect today on how it felt to read The Diary of Anne Frank at age eight. Why today? Until now, I have not been as fearful as many of my friends about the inauguration of the Trump presidency, focused instead on the ways diverse people around the country (and the world) have come together to promote justice in these strange times. Yet, for me as a Jew, the way President Trump’s recent address to Congress singled out the rare crimes committed by immigrants was deeply unsettling. We know all too well what happens when a leader consolidates power by finding a scapegoat and inculcating fear in the populace.
We now have a President who reacts quickly to a snub on Saturday Night Live, but takes weeks to respond to 100 bomb threats against Jewish organizations, and who is more concerned about vilifying immigrants with misleading anecdotes than bringing our country together to enhance safety for all.
In my childhood, the town librarian, my new friend, knowing my passion for biographies, recommended Anne’s Frank’s diary soon after we arrived in Wisconsin.
As a Jewish kid, of course the story frightened me. From birth through age eight, across a few moves, our family lived in New York. Growing up, most people in my neighborhood had been Jewish, proudly and comfortably so. I stuck out a bit, though, with my long white-blonde hair and blue eyes. So non-Jews never guessed I was Jewish, and even some Jews needed convincing: “Which of your parents is Jewish? Really? Both of them?”
In 1970, my parents, two older brothers and I piled into our weathered brown station wagon for the two-day drive to a new part of the country. The change was supposedly driven by my father’s job, but I think Mom was also relieved to put some miles between us and her hovering Orthodox parents. While I relished the adventure of a long-distance move, and became fast friends with a kid named Pam next door, one part of my new life came as a shock – almost no one in this Wisconsin neighborhood was Jewish. Okay, make that no one.
Commence my first encounter with ignorance, some of it mean-spirited. “Menorah, what’s a menorah,” I remember one boy saying after my upbeat classroom show-and-tell of the silver candelabra. “Sounds like manure,” he sneered. Many of my classmates, it turned out, had never heard of Chanukah. Shocked, defensive, I almost blurted out, “Do you really believe a fat man in a red suit flies around the world delivering presents down your chimney?” Thankfully my brothers taught me to hold my tongue on that one.
The inoculation of spending my earlier years surrounded by all kinds of Jews allowed me to posture, “What a bunch of bozos if they don’t even know about other people’s religions; I know about their holidays.” But sometimes the comments – and my deepening awareness of difference – frightened me. My brother Jeff was the only other Jew in school.
Against this backdrop I opened Anne’s diary each night, alternating pulses of power and fear coursing through me. I would lie in bed, sleepy, in that state somewhere between dreaming and imagining, wondering if Nazis would rise again and come to this country. Suddenly, I heard it. They are here. Soldiers storming in to the house. I rush under the bed. They search the room for me. I watch their boots go by, heart pounding. Eventually, in my fears, they find me; three big men in uniforms drag me out from the under the bed.
But aha, I tell myself, keep breathing, I am okay. I can pretend not to be Jewish. I have the cloak of my coloring. They might even believe me to be a nice Aryan girl. Right? Right?
I can remember what it felt like, soon to turn nine years old, climbing back into bed after acting out this scene over and over. Pulling up the covers, safe for that moment, I wondered aloud a question that haunts people and peoples around the world today: “Is it okay to lie about who I am in order to save myself?”
(Wisconsin, 1970)
