Photo credit: Ellis Island Immigration Landing Station Library of Congress
I can’t quite imagine my grandparents, all of whom came here from Eastern Europe/Russia, being sent to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, or to some other hellhole that would be the equivalent of the notorious black sites that hark back to the presidency of George W. Bush and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. South Sudan has now been added to the mix of places to send immigrants apprehended in the US, many of whom have similar rights to due process in the courts as do people in the US. Human rights are not one of Trump’s values and his administration! One in three immigrants apprehended by ICE has no history of any lawbreaking or wrongdoing in the US, a feature of Trump’s immigration policy that adds insult to extreme injury in a nation of immigrants. Emma Lazarus’ “Give me your tired, your poor…” was always tempered by one type of supremacy or another and fear of those different. Now, under Trump and his acolytes like Stephen Miller, it’s anti-immigrant white supremacy, the fuel that fires far-right groups in the US. Consult the lists compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center for those groups. Now the Supreme Court, that band of mostly far-right ideologues, has entered the deportation craze, green-lighting Trump’s deportations.
This commentary is not a case of meeting Howard’s grandparents, but they were somewhat typical of those immigrants who came to the US during the first quarter of the twentieth century.
I’ll begin with my mother’s parents. My grandmother Ida worked in my grandparents’ luncheonette in the small town in central Rhode Island where all of my grandparents settled. Ida was one of the few great souls of my childhood. She was kind and generous and loving, though she suffered greatly from money problems. Ida died when I was 13 years old and left a gaping space in my life.
My grandfather, Bill, was a distant man. He arrived in Rhode Island with a minor silver spoon in his mouth and became the superintendent of a textile mill in town. The mill pulled out of the area following World War II, which saw Bill open the luncheonette, after a fabric shop that may have been a reflection of his work at his brother’s mill. Bill had a nasty penchant for gambling. I have no idea of how much money he pissed away. A guess is lots.
I never knew my father’s father, Harry. He was literally a rags-to-riches man, at least a middle-class person. He plied the streets and villages of local towns, first with a cart and then with either a car or truck, and sold dry goods. He made enough money to open a successful family clothing store. He also funded my father’s two sisters with the money to open what were called kiddie shops at the time. My father inherited the family clothing store, and it remained a going business sometime into the 1950s.
My father’s mother was a cold and distant person with whom I never had any kind of relationship. I remember Rose sitting on a crate, the kind that holds apples, behind the glass display cases that held women’s wear to the right of the entrance to the store. She was invisible behind those cases. Her response to customers entering the store and asking about the size of items was, “A size to fit,” which I thought was quite a creative answer. When my father and I visited Rose, she would sit at a right angle to us at a round dining room table and speak a few words while looking toward the two windows on the opposite wall. She may have suffered from the untimely death of Harry, but that is only a guess.
The point here is that I can’t imagine any of my grandparents being sent to black sites such as Bush and Trump used and are using. It’s beyond my imagination that such cruelty and torture could have happened to my relatives. I don’t think that the current administration pays much attention to the needs of business and corporate interests, which want lots of cheap labor to fill certain kinds of industries like farming, tourism, restaurants, etc. The current spate of anti-immigrant actions by Trump, et al., have more to do with far-right ideology, meanness, and cruelty, all the ugly heads of white supremacy and hate.
https://thelastnewleftist.com/a-nation-of-unwanted-immigrants-and-my-grandparents-by-howard-lisnoff/
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