Great piece, Mary. I would like to add a piece smaller in scope but along the same lines.
This is unfortunately, the America I knew
People say that the Obama administration, with its self view of European socialist superiority, is foreign to our shores. Mostly I agree with that statement, but in my immigrant extended family, I have to say this administration has recreated an attitude about America that is all too familiar to me.
Growing up with European refugees in New York, I knew too many people who had no real concept of what America was other than a rich nation. I had one older cousin, a man in his fifties named Tsrulek. He had worked on a job and invested his money in real estate, having bought an apartment house in the Bronx. One day when I was in the fourth or fifth grade, I visited his family with my mother. Tsrulek, in a moment alone with me, looked me in the face and said derisively, “You’re a richterker Amerikaner (real American).” There was no point in talking to this Old Country adult, as anything I would say would be met with his fat faced sneer. I should, however, have asked him why he came to America if he thought about as little of the country as did Barack Obama’s father did, but being around ten years old I was not confident arguing with adults, even when I knew they were wrong.
A few months later, my parents were discussing Tsrulek’s situation when they mentioned that his investment, the apartment house, had been badly damaged by fire. Although he had fire insurance, he did not think to take out a RENT insurance policy, so when the tenants weren’t then paying him each month and the mortgage was still due, Tsrulek could not stop the “richter Amerikaners” down at the bank from taking away the title to his apartment house. He had to start all over again.
So much for European superior thinking. It was, for my older cousin, a one way ticket to financial ruin – and I suspect the same for the Europhile socialists in the Obama administration who are also quite ignorant of how to run a business.
Many years later, I was visiting Israel and attended a boys’ soccer practice with my first cousin. Much to my amazement, one of the kids was named Tsrulek, an Old Country European name which I thought I’d never hear again. Some of the kids on the bench were razzing him when he took the field, calling out, “Tsrulek hoo ben zona.” In Hebrew that phrase literally means he is a son of a prostitute but its’ general meaning is a person with no upbringing or character.
I didn’t know the soccer kids were familiar with my old cousin from the Bronx.
