In my very earliest memories my Grandfather is some kind of hero. He’s a policeman and he goes off every day to fight monsters. I stay with Grandma while Mom goes to teach school. Daddy’s a stranger who loves me very much. He’s a Marine, and it’s ok because he’s not in the war anymore, and he’ll be back soon to stay.
Grandpa is huge and bald with a mustache. He has a gun to fight the monsters, and when he comes home he talks about the monsters. These monsters are called “Jews” and they do all kinds of terrible things.
They hurt people for fun. They steal. They’re mean. They’re stupid. They’re that general kind of evil monster and though grandpa speaks specifically, I remember nothing about the specifics of what he would talk about, but as a small child I was very clear on how bad Jews were and that it was Grandpa’s job to stop them from doing all the bad things that Jews do.
He’d come home and talk to Grandma about what this Jew tried to do and what that Jew tried to do, and how he’d stop them, and arrest them so they couldn’t do it anymore, and it all made perfect sense.
And my best friend was Amanda who lived in the same apartment building we did, and sometimes we’d play together, and we had good neighbors that were always nice to us.
And I’m not sure when it was that I learned that Jew just meant black person. It was certainly after Dad came back and we moved into our own apartment. I don’t remember who told me that a Jew was simply a black person but I was sure they were lying because I remember Amanda was black, and many of our neighbors were black, and Grandpa was very nice to Amanda and our black neighbors, and they were nice.
They weren’t monsters and there’s no way Amanda would ever do the horrible things that Jews did. I also knew that Jews were bad and dangerous and there was no way my grandfather who was a policeman and
who’s job was to protect people from Jews would ever leave alone with such horrible monsters. Grandpa was a good guy. Jews were bad guys. Amanda and our neighbors were nice. Grandpa liked them. They were black. There was no way they were Jews.
Of course I found out later that black people were Jews. It was explained to me by my mother, but it was still too much of a concept. There were good people and there were bad people, black and white. Jew was my grandfather’s word for bad black people. My mother said he was wrong to say that word about anybody, because it was mean to people like Amanda and our neighbors who weren’t bad even if they didn’t hear it.
What I took from this was confusion. Either my mother was right or Grandpa was right even though they said different things. I didn’t know what to believe, and just figured there was something wrong that I didn’t understand.
This is not as distressing as it sounds because I was very young and most of the world fell into the category of confusing wrong and incomprehensible. The exception of course was my family about which I felt very sure of myself and secure. They were all good and they all loved me.
As I got older, I figured it out. I was in a public school in New Jersey. Half my classmates were black. They were ok and normal.
Grandpa talked about Jews a lot because we was mean and dumb, even if he was a cop. I learned it in Sesame Street and I learned it in class. I learned it on TV. I learned it from my parents. Grandpa was prejudiced and wrong, and we were supposed to feel sorry for him.
He retired. I got older and every summer we’d go out to Mastic beach where he and Grandma had a second house. We’d go to Fire Island with Grandpa, away from the queers of course (though I had no idea what that meant.) I hardly thought about it, but I guess if you had asked me what a queer was back then I’d have probably said that they were silly annoying men who ran around naked playing with each other’s butts.
I knew to run and scream for help if some silly man tried to play with my butt or my wiener, but the whole scenario seemed unlikely.
Other times Grandpa would take me out on his boat and we’d all fish for fluke and bluefish. At slack tide Grandpa and Dad would go in the shallows and go clamming and Mom and I would get crabs off the front of the boat. We’d come back with buckets of fish, a gross of clams, and a bushel of crabs after a morning out on the bay, wash off with the garden hose, invite the neighbors over and feast for hours.
As I got older I’d go out with Grandpa by myself on the boat, or he and Grandma would babysit us at our house. He taught me how to fight, and how to fight dirty, how to fight to win. Dad, a Recon Marine, taught me the same kinds of things, and I was a big kid for my size, and I learned how to fight pretty good. They taught me to always be a good guy and not start fights and to stick up for people, and occasionally when we wer by myself Grandpa would tell me some extra things about what to do if I got into trouble with Jews. Grandpa seemed to think my skills were necessary primarily because of Jews, and he’d tell me what to do in the context of all the people I was fighting being Jews. “If a Jew comes at you like this, what do you do?” he’d say, and I’d show him.
Mom and Dad were pretty good though, and I was taught that Grandpa was screwy in the head about Jews because he’d been a cop. So I never beleived any of this stuff about Jews and figure grandpa was just crazy on the subject the way he was crazy about all kinds of things. Grandpa had his own way of doing things, and while I didn’t know the term then, he was clearly eccentric.
Of course I got into all kinds of fights, and in hindsight I was the good guy in most if not all of them.
And then I got a little bit older and I learned that maybe Grandpa wasn’t so crazy after all. Public school was getting bad and maybe I understood a little bit about the scary monsters that Jews really could be.
There were big scary black kids, and they were monstrous and evil, and mean, and they were all black and you couldn’t fight them or do anything. They weren’t like me or my friends or Amanda or our old neighbors, at all. Maybe there really were Jews after all.
Though I was still in grade school at this times there were race riots at Montclair High School. It was a scary time, and off I went to Catholic school for the remainder of my middle school years.
And then I figured it all out, and I figured I understood Grandpa, and I learned all the right attitudes, and about prejudice, and socioecenomics and all that happy crap, so that I was enlightened and I held Grandpa in the contempt that he deserved to be held in for his bigotry.
He was getting old and feeble and a little senile, and something of an object of derision in my mind. He was like a big old dog, that was dangerous but you could still poke fun at. I looked down on Grandpa very sincerely, and thought ill of him. Still, every summer we’d go out to his house and the beach and the boat, and those were some of the best times of my youth, in spite of Grandpa’s pitiable attitudes.
Then, one day, I saw Grandpa in action.
Me, Mom, Grandma and my brother were at the beach at Fire Island with Grandpa. There’d been a storm and the water was rough but it was fun to play in the surf.
Later I flew a kite. I was 13. Grandpa went for a jog down the beach. He’d go 10 miles and be back in an hour and a half.
This was the “swim at your own risk” part of the beach away from the lifeguards, and some people swimming got caught in a riptide and pulled out. Some people tried to help them and they got caught. Some more people went out in a raft and got caught as well.
My mother ran to get a life guard and I started reeling in my kite and watched with a bunch of other people as 100 yards away six or seven people struggled for their life.
Grandpa came back at that moment from his jog, and he didn’t even acknowledge us but just dived in and started swimming for the people with slow powerful strokes.
As I reeled in my kite I felt very small and contemptible. It was a scary thing, and I was one of 30 people just idly watching without doing anything. For grandpa there was no question of anything else but helping.
He must have been 70 and had just run ten miles, but he went.
Ten minutes or so I watched, and it looked like everything was ok. People were hanging on the raft, and I could see Grandpa hanging on the raft. Every couple of minutes he’d leave the raft and come back.
Then he started to swim back to shore with those same powerful strokes. Then he turned on his back and came more slowly. Then the life guards showed up and started rescuing everybody.
Grandpa pulled himself out of the water, and he had no swimming trunks anymore. He stood there naked and watched, and Mom got a towel. Then he sat down and watched, and he started to cry.
Somebody was still missing. A young black man. As he sobbed I heard what happened. Everything was not all right out there as I’d watched. There were too many people on and holding onto the raft, and they were all scared and exhausted.
Grandpa had pulled this young man to the raft and handed him to the people on it… and they’d let go.
Grandpa went and got him again, and yelled at them, and told them to hold on to him, but they were scared and they let go.
So Grandpa got him again and yelled again… but they let go.
So Grandpa went again, but couldn’t find him, and got in trouble himself and came to shore half-drowned. The current had been so strong it ripped his shorts off.
And never before and never since in my life have I seen a man so utterly demolished. He was like a fallen titan, a complete wreck. My mom practically dragged him to the car and he sobbed and cried out in anguish the whole way, and he sobbed the whole way home. They took him home and they put him to bed, and poured jameson’s down his throat and he struggled with them. He wanted to tell it again and again.
How he’d had this kid, how he told them not to let go. Why didn’t they hold on? He couldn’t do it himself. He was so tired. He cried and sobbed for hours, until they’d poured enough booze into him that he slept.
We saw in the paper that the young black man’s body washed to shore.
There’s a moral in here, a desperately important one. Grandpa’s in a nursing home, and he’s not the man he was when he was 70. Still, he struck a black orderly in his semi-dementia because he thought the “Jew” was casing his apartment in the assisted living center when he swept the hall.
He’s still big and strong, and when we moved him down to the Home, and packed him and Grandma out of the house in Mastic I saw all his medals and citations for bravery, I read that they’d called him “Rocky” because as Chief of narcotics for NYC he’d bust down doors with his shoulder and be the first one in, and his shoulder was like a rock.
They think poorly of him at the nursing home. There’s no doubt that he’s a mean old bigoted nasty man.
What I learned that day in the surf was that this was not true. That I had been wrong. There was nothing in this man to look down upon. Nothing.
He was a great man, and he had great failings. There was nothing of smallness or pettiness in him at all.
I hear other people deride him at the home, and this makes me very very angry. They deride him in a small petty smug ways, comfortable in their superiority, a superiority I’m quite certain they do not have.
I’m certain because there are faces are familiar. It’s my face and the face of everybody else who stood and watched on the beach that day.
Perhaps he was worthy of hate, but not ridicule. I see the workers at the home talk down to him, treat him with a contempt for his attitudes, and he doesn’t understand what is going on, and I know that this is wrong.
My father who has always hated my grandfather, always, agrees. My father figured it out in his own way in Vietnam.
The contempt of those who stand and watch means nothing, because they are nothing.
