Why I? A "Mayflower" American

My Husband Calls Me A "Mayflower" American

It started on our honeymoon, as the train sped South on its way to Florida.
"Here's where my forefathers lived," I said, waving my hand proudly at the passing landscape.
My European husband looked at me quizzically. "My "Mayflower American!" he said indulgently mocking.
He has used the term many times since and always with that same sardonic old worldly smile.
The remark has become a kind of motif.

About 1838 -- A ban on Jewish marriages in Posen! After four green miserable seasick months, my great-grandmother and my great-grandfather prayed together, " Blessed art Thou, Oh Lord our God, King of the universe, who doest good unto the undeserving and who hast dealt kindly with us."
The got married in Baltimore and looked forward to their lives as Americans and as Jews in the loved tradition of their fathers.
It wasn't only the Pilgrim fathers who came to America for religious freedom!
Maybe that's why he calls me a Mayflower American.
About 1848 -- Gold is discovered in California!
"You'll get killed by the Indians," my great grandmother protested.
"And I thought you were a pioneer," he mocked her into agreement.
Tallith and Tephillin in one hand, the sieve for gold in the other, he set out on the trails of the covered wagons. Exactly what happened to him in California, I do not know. I only know the sieve stayed in California and the Tallith and Tephillin came back to Baltimore.
About 1861 --Shots on Fort Sumter!
"I don't like it." said my great-grandmother uneasily.
"You are right," said my great-grandfather. "Henry Clayism is finished. In some things there is no compromise. This means war!"
"And Lincoln is the man to lead it?"
"Yes," he said, "God willing, we follow Lincoln."
Not everyone agreed with my great-grandfather. Some of the family followed Jefferson Davis.
In my mother's attic, I spent many a rainy Sunday afternoon looking through the old newspapers my great-grandfather had collected in those days and had bound in leather. They were much better than history books!
My great-grandfather supplied hats to the Union army, left Baltimore and moved to New York where my mother was born -- uptown as it was then known on East 9th Street in a brownstone house.
Mother used to tell us how the made tremendous fires on Election Day and once burnt Bryan in effigy. One sister swan the East River in the new tight bathing suits of the l870's and another followed Susan B Anthony down Fifth Avenue in
in bloomers, demanding women's right to vote and mother voted for the first time in 1920 foe Eugene V. Debs, then still in prison because he had been against the war.
About 1918 -- Armistice Day! I was 7 years old then and Mother took all her five boys and one girl to see the victory parade. We knew a lot of soldiers as they marched down Fifth Avenue but we watched especially for one. My cousin's grandfather! He Had been a drummer boy in 1863 and would appear in the forefront of the procession with all the other Civil War veterans.
We kids shouted ourselves hoarse yelling, "Hurrah for old man Kaufman! Hurrah for the red white and blue.
My mother said to her sister, his daughter-in-law, "Look how straight he marches for his age." And my aunt answered, "there aren't many of his buddies left any more."
I remember also blushing in shame, though not knowing why, when I asked my mother as we watched, "But where is Uncle Poldi?" Everybody laughed at me. Uncle
Poldi was my father's youngest brother, an he was in the army -- the German army!
Since then I got to know the difference. There was hardly a meal when mother didn't preach, "How can you children waste food like that when the children of Europe are starving!'
We collected tinfoil and United Cigar coupons to buy things for Mother to pack along with the sugar, flour and matzos that my mother kept sending to our cousins in Germany
About 1933 -- Nazism in Germany: My uncle Poldi, by then a well-known journalist, appeared in the first Nazi black list with Thomas Mann and Stephen Zweig. He escaped to Paris. "Get the rest of the family out of Germany." he wrote, get them affidavits to America."
An affidavit was a guarantee by a relative that the immigrant would not become a public charge. You had to prove financial reliability. How much financial reliability did anyone have in 1933?
And besides, there was the question of quota. The accident of birth became a grotesque joke. If you were born in a place where there was room left on the quota it was most unlikely that you had relatives in the United States.
If you had plenty of relatives in the United States, there, naturally was no room left on the quota. Selection not by need, not by creed, not by color, not by race, not by position, not by intellect. not by possible service to the community but by where your mother happened to be on the face of the earth at the instant when you were born! The American consulates in Europe were full of people who had been born in the wrong spot on earth. Sometimes, I think that is why you are not allowed to mention God's name in the Public schools of America. He wasn't born anywhere, so He couldn't come under a quota!
We were getting letters from all over.
Germany: The affidavit came too late for Reiner. The Germans shot him yesterday!
Switzerland: Theodore was turned back at the border. Impossible to get work permit. Send money, affidavit or both. Am destitute.
England: have been interned as enemy aliens. Get children, at least to America.
France:
Belgium:
Holland:
Affidavits or death
We could only make out so many affidavits. We looked for more relatives. We looked for more countries. We sat over the globe at night seeking for one more country to let in one more Jew! We began to realize that Palestine was the only hope. Could that be why my husband jibed me about being a Mayflower American?

About 1941 -- Pearl harbor and all doors closed. Blackout!
About 1946 -- The Zionist congress in Basel. The gates of Europe had opened. never had a congress had such conversations in its corridors.
"Chaim! You! Really alive? When I saw you squeezed in that closed train - I never expected to see you again." Embraces, kisses, happiest unbelief!
"I jumped the train in the dark and lived in a hole in a forest for two years, coming out to dig roots only at night. Cut off from everything except the seasons, I thought I was the only Jew left alive in the world until one day I heard voices singing English songs. The Americans had come! I ran to meet them. It was a miracle."
The place rang with miracles. Every life left alive was a miracle. We were a family united back from the valley of death.
Like a plow it forked up the soil of my soul and turned up roots that sprouted and grew.
About 1948 -- The State of Israel declared in May. My husband was intoxicated with the idea. He had prayed for it often enough and his father and his father's father. "Renew our days as of old." they sang and they believed that it would happen. For two thousand years, they believed.
"In my lifetime," he kept repeating, "I, of them all, past and future, am alive now at this moment, when Israel is reborn."
He couldn't get over the wonder of it that he should have been chosen.
More than a haven, Israel was a proof of faith.
He sent me a telegram from Jerusalem. "As voted at the Zionist Actions Committee to declare Israel a state, think I should accept invitation to work as undersecretary of Trade and Industry. What do you think?"
I wired back, "I can't think. I'm packing."------------------------------------------
and signed "Your Mayflower American still."

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