When is it time to go? by Steven Lance

As each of my sons approached his bar mitzvah, I thought a lot about how to make it more than just the modern suburban American “graduation from Hebrew school.”

While the clichéd “Today, I am a man” speech is the widely accepted trope, the real meaning is more complex. According to tradition (there is no specific reference in the Bible, Mishnah, or Talmud), at age 12 for a girl and 13 for a boy, a child officially becomes responsible for keeping the commandments.

One part of their pre-bar mitzvah preparations was a trip each of them took with me to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. It is an emotionally powerful experience that begins as each visitor picks a passport of a European Jew from a bin and carries it with them throughout the tour. At the end, you scan your passport, and the display reveals whether your surrogate lived or died. (Both sons died.)

Towards the end, we came to a display map of Europe showing all the towns and villages that were completely wiped out by the Holocaust. Almost dead center was the village of Zelva, which the boys’ great-grandparents fortunately emigrated from right after the Russian Revolution.

As we somberly left the museum, I explained my reason for having taken them. “Every 100 years or so, Jews are forced to leave the country we thought we were safest in. From Western Europe, when we were blamed for the Black Death to the disruptions of the Crusades to the Spanish Inquisition, the 1648–49 Chmielnicki massacres in Poland, the pogroms following the Russian revolution, Germany’s ‘Final Solution.’ If history holds, your children or grandchildren will have to flee this country with the shirts on their backs.”

ARE WE THERE, YET?

Among American Jews today, there is a small sub-current of a conversation where they ask each other, perhaps rhetorically, “Is it time to go?” Most of us nervously laugh off the question; some of us seriously ponder it.

In 1933, a week after the Reichstag fire, the brilliant film director and screenwriter Billy Wilder (Shmuel Vilder), fled Berlin for Paris. Ten months later, he arrived in the United States with a little money in his pocket and the clothes on his back. Over the years, the quip, “All my friends died for their living room furniture,” has been attributed to him.

In 1937, Tony Award-winning composer (and my friend) Albert Hague and his mother fled Berlin for Rome.  An aunt in Ohio got him a musical scholarship to the University of Cincinnati. Because he had no legal immigrant status, a kindly eye surgeon adopted him.

I was told about an elderly Holocaust survivor who, during the Q&A following his talk, was asked if he knew when it was time to go. “When they knock on your door,” he purportedly replied, ironically making the observation that you keep kidding yourself and denying and denying until it’s too late.

I think about the current Trump administration and how quickly it is dismantling the rule of law and the pillars of democracy, yet I continue to believe that good people will “never let it happen here.” Then I try to imagine myself having those same thoughts in Berlin in the 1930s. If I’m honest with myself, I realize I would have been just another Jew loaded onto a train bound for Sachsenhausen,  Theresienstadt, or Auschwitz.

There are, I believe, significant differences that tilt the balance in favor of sticking around.

• Trump’s actions might be evil, illegal, and immoral, but they don’t yet rise to the level of ruthlessness exhibited by Germany’s Nazi Party. As someone (rightly) pointed out, the British threw Mahatma Gandhi in prison; the South Africans did the same with Nelson Mandela. Both would have been executed under a Nazi regime, immediately ending any uprising or revolution.
• Efforts by the Right to discredit, dismiss, and belittle those of us who oppose Trump have not (yet) substantially diminished our right to assemble, our right to vote, our right to protest. So as long as I can still be allowed to stand up and be counted, I owe it to my fellow Americans to stay and fight.
• In 1969, my best friend (still, to this day) emigrated to Victoria, BC, Canada. He and I have each had long, satisfying, and productive lives. I stayed, in hopes I wouldn’t be drafted; he left in order to remove hope from the equation. Neither choice was a mistake, and proved that we can never really know what the future has in store.
• A few years ago, in Los Angeles, my oldest son met a lovely Canadian woman. She is now my daughter-in-law, he is a landed immigrant in Canada, and I can stop worrying about one of my sons. Like parents who sent their children off on Kindertransport from Germany, I know I can stay and fight without worrying about him.  

All of which means that we have no idea what will happen. The only thing we can do is what is right in the moment. And right in the moment, I choose to stand and fight.

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