Thinking about Trump...and my dad

The more I think about Donald Trump – infuriating as it is to even do so – the more I think about my dad…and about what he would have to say about the Republican presidential nominee.

It wouldn’t be nice.

My dad – who would be 102 today – was born in Russia. He, his older brother, and their parents left Kiev for Berlin six weeks after his birth, when my grandmother was cleared to travel. Moscow natives and Jews, my grandparents had seen the writing on the wall in the rural community outside Kiev where my grandfather was working. They knew they had to leave Russia to prevent their sons from being conscripted into the Russian Army once they became teenagers, and being assigned the most hazardous duty because they were Jews.

So they spent the next five years in Germany, where my grandparents worked and saved the money for passage to the United States. When my dad was six and my uncle seven, they set sail for America.

Settling in Chicago, near other relatives, they moved into an English-speaking neighborhood and quickly added another language to their bilingual Russian and German skill set. My dad and uncle headed off to public school, and my grandparents went to work, soon opening a record and bookstore downtown. And they all became proud American citizens.

After World War II began, my dad, who had been working multiple jobs – helping in the store, working at a gas station and driving delivery trucks – enlisted. His leadership skills attracted the Army’s attention, and he was sent to Officer Candidate School. Commissioned as a lieutenant, he and his unit were eventually sent to Europe, where his fluency in Russian and German were critically important. He led that unit into Germany in the closing months of the war in Europe – leaving my grandmother to cry every day he was there, dreading the possibility that a Nazi officer might capture her Jewish son.

Instead, he and his unit captured a group of German officers who had refused to surrender, and he earned a Bronze Star for his valor in that armed exchange. He also made sure to get up in the faces of each of those officers to inform them, in his perfect German, that they were his prisoners, and that he was an American…and a Jew. He wanted there to be no question whatsoever in their minds that their anti-Semitism, their hatred, and their evil had been vanquished, utterly and completely.

I’m sure that’s what he would want to see on November 8, 2016, in his beloved America: the utter, complete, unquestioned, unmitigated vanquishing of the presidential candidate who this year has used hate, fear, paranoia, xenophobia, misogyny, name-calling, ridicule, distortion, misrepresentation, racism, sexism, anti-minority, anti-immigrant, anti-gay rhetoric -- and even outright lies – to garner the support of a sadly misled minority of voters.

My dad followed up his military career by returning to Chicago, where he helped his parents sell their store and move with him to Southern California to enjoy their retirement in the California sun. My mother followed him here, and they were married. After starting their family, they bought a home in a racially mixed corner of the San Fernando Valley – choosing that neighborhood because he’d been deeply troubled by racial segregation in the U.S. military, and the deeds to homes in our subdivision had no racial covenants.

He and my mom became friends to everyone in the neighborhood – black, white, Mexican, Japanese, Catholic, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist…it didn’t matter. My mom, raised as a Lutheran, learned to cook like a Jewish grandmother, thanks to my dad’s mom’s coaching, and put up the best kosher dills of anyone in town. My dad took great delight in decorating our Christmas tree every December, and in cooking up massive batches of potato latkes on the weekends – bringing a long line of neighbors to the door, plates in hand, to collect their share.

He also became the neighborhood’s moral compass at a critical junction – literally throwing a realtor off our front porch when the race-baiting salesman trolled the neighborhood looking for listings, conspiratorially warning the homeowners that “some Indians are moving in around the corner.” Word of my dad’s response quickly spread. The Indian family moved in, no one sold their homes, and we all learned to love dishes flavored with curry.

That is the America my dad helped build. And that is the America Donald Trump would all too willingly tear apart.

And my dad wouldn’t hesitate to say so – loudly and right in Donald’s face – if he were still here today. Just as he shamed those German officers, he wouldn’t hesitate to shame Donald for the hatred and bigotry that the GOP’s alt-right sympathizer has all too willingly encouraged here in the United States of America. That is not how someone who wants to lead the nation that welcomed my dad, his brother and his parents -- and millions of immigrants of all nationalities, religions and races, from around the world – ought to behave.