Very recently, Emirjeta Xhelili of Bath Beach in Brooklyn attacked two Muslim women while they were taking their babies for a stroll. Xhelili tried to rip off their hijabs after yelling, "Get the fuck out of America, bitches!" and "This is America -- you shouldn't be different from us." She punched and tried to kick the women, and even attempted to hurt one of the babies by tipping over one of the strollers.
Let's put the hate crime aspect of this aside for a second: attempting to physically assault a BABY is so horrific that any decent person likely cringed while reading this just now.
I read about the hate crime in Gothamist. I left some comments there which actually prompted me to write this diary as we switch boros and go to the Bronx, of which I am proudly the fifth and last generation in my family to live there. This diary is the story of my father's side of our family. My mother's story is a whole other one, rife with plenty of its own injustices and discrimination, but my father's side is Eastern European Jewish. Galicianers, to be specific. Which for those who aren’t aware...well, we've been popular targets at certain points in history.
I was prompted to tell my family’s story when I pointed out to another commenter that the neighborhood I live in is home to one of the, if not the absolute largest, Muslim communities in the Bronx and I frequently have back-in-the-mind fears that my neighborhood could be attacked: graffiti, ransacking businesses, maybe even trying to torch whole buildings.
Then I stopped in my tracks and realized I was thinking exactly what my great-grandfather was thinking in the late 1800s. Except that he was targeted and amidst it all.
And funnily enough, some little douchehound in the comments said that the following is such a common story in New York, insinuating that it can't be that special.
So what if it’s common? To millions of others, maybe they've never heard a story like it just like I probably haven't heard theirs. I was lucky I got to hear these stories because my grandparents and great-grandparents are no longer around to tell them, my father is the absolute last connection I have here and he is also the last to remember the stories passed down to him.
Common or not, it's a story I feel needs to be told in the wake of this hate crime; hate crime that is happening sadly too often in varying degrees. The story also needs to be told in wake of the widespread vocalization of hate towards Muslim, Hispanic, and Black communities that a certain orange gremlin has basically made acceptable to yell in public. Vocalization which if left unchecked, can quickly turn into far worse things. It already has.
My great-great-grandparents were the first of my family to arrive in America in 1889. My great-great-grandfather tried to make a living as a tailor after being continually locked out of every other trade. He left Gologory, Galicia and sent for the rest of the family, my great-great-grandmother and their two daughters, in 1889. One of those daughters, my great-grandmother, is my paternal grandfather’s mother.
If you’re unfamiliar with Eastern European history, the Kingdom of Galicia was this little stretch of land whose borders shifted more times than your average indie band has lineup changes. It was tucked within the Pale of Settlement, an area borne of oppression that no less produced vibrant Jewish communities called shtetls. Anyone who has Galicianer heritage and found census and ship manifest records isn’t surprised to see at least four different countries on those documents: Poland, Russia, Hungary, and Austria. Many Galician towns and cities are in modern-day Ukraine now, like Gologory.
They lived in a shitty little tenement on Willet Street on the Lower East Side. My great-great-grandparents longed to escape the squalor of the tenements and working themselves to death in sweatshops. Around my great-grandmother’s 14th birthday they saved up enough money to move to the Bronx, where they heard there were forests with mushrooms in Bronx Park that looked just like the agricultural communities in Gologory, and that a huge Jewish community was forming up there including many from Gologory and Zloczow who were looking to reunite with friends, family, and neighbors. The first generation of Bronxites in my family had settled. (And technically second-generation, through my great-grandmother.)
It was maybe around 1901 or thereabouts that my great-grandfather decided to leave the Pale. He’d lived a decent bachelor’s life in a small Polish village that was home to many Jewish scholars. He had strong community ties, went to shul, and worked in his grandfather’s shoe shop. While he always felt uneasy on account of there being one law for the Jews and another for everyone else, it was either a bug or a feature in Russia’s plan to create the Pale in the first place in that placing large amounts of Jewish communities into one settlement made the whole place rife with pogroms when the shit would hit the fan miles away but everyone was looking for a scapegoat for all their problems.
Houses and businesses were ransacked. People were ruthlessly murdered, women raped. Grandfather and his shop were gone, shuls were desecrated. (Only one synagogue remains in Kopychintsi to this day, as the rest of the village was razed with almost no survivors in the September Campaign in WWII.) My great-grandfather wasted no time arranging for passage to America where he could attend shul without fear of being attacked. He persisted and moved into a similarly shitty tenement where he paid rent to another family as a lodger and had to share the bed with three people.
He hemmed pants, fixed shoes, then moved up to operating sewing machines at a dress factory. He also made it out of the LES and into the Bronx, after he met my great-grandmother through a mutual friend and knew that he wanted to start a new life with her. My great-grandmother was overjoyed that she didn’t have to cover her hair like she’d be expected to back in Gologory, but my great-grandfather was overcome with the freedom from fear of simply going to shul.
They got married and moved into an adorable saltbox for rent on Clinton Avenue, and my grandfather was born in 1919.
While my grandfather was now the third generation of my family to live in the iconic and thriving Jewish community in the dead center of the Bronx, he was technically a first-generation American. A third-generation Bronxite based on my whole family’s settlement patterns, yet a first-generation American.
Life was pretty good for my grandfather, who had a good job at a furniture factory in Brooklyn. He met my grandmother in Coney Island, and thought she was a no-nonsense spitfire who’d make life interesting for him. It wound up being the other way around as my grandmother had to constantly be on the lookout for my grandfather’s antics. They got married right around the end of WWII and were hoping to buy a house to raise their family in. Despite the huge Jewish communities that had been living there since the late 1800s, many landlords and realtors still had these “gentlemen’s agreements” not to rent or sell to Jews in certain developments. Because of this clandestine redlining, they missed their chance to buy something. The money they saved withered when my grandfather got seriously hurt at the factory one day and it rendered him unable to work for three whole years. The entire family of four had to live in a 1-bedroom apartment on their savings as well as my grandmother’s salary as a secretary for the City. Because you know, women only earned money back then to buy luxuries for themselves. At least the City wasn’t as terrible with pay disparity as a private employer would’ve been, but while my father has a lot of fond memories of the Bronx in the 1950s he agrees that it’s completely batshit people seriously want to go back to this era.
He was the first person in at least six or so generations of our family to own property.
My grandfather died when I was 9 years old in the 90s. In addition to missing his stories that ran the gamut from sad and ponderous things to hilarious tales of the mishaps he’d get into with the neighborhood kids looooong before the days of cops arresting mothers leaving their kids in the car for 10 seconds while using the ATM, he’d open up about the things my grandmother wouldn’t.
I don’t know a lot of her family’s stories. She died when I was 23, but hadn’t been lucid enough to have a conversation since Dubya’s first term when I was in high school. Like my grandfather, she was a first-generation American but born in Harlem. A late in life baby to two people who literally wanted to start all over again in America in the 1920s after leaving Praga, a suburb of Warsaw. They’d had two adult sons who were in their mid twenties who wanted to stay in Poland but promised to visit. They never did.
1939 came and went. All the letters my grandmother and her parents sent in their dying days went unanswered and the worst was presumed. Decades later with the help of JewishGen.org and ancestry.com my family was able to reliably confirm that her brothers were murdered in Treblinka.
What were they even murdered for? What was their crime? What was my great^3 grandfather’s crime to be killed in his own shop after he watched those vandals raze it?
While I was taught a whitewashed version of atrocities like the history of slavery in the United States and the Holocaust in my school, I strongly remember hearing over and over,
Never again.
Remember, but don’t dwell.
This wouldn’t happen in America.
This wouldn’t happen in America.
This wouldn’t happen in America.
But it’s happening.
Maybe we don’t see death camps being erected, but all the precursors are happening at an alarming rate.
First, it’s the total utter acceptance and refusal to challenge hate speech, and known bigots aren’t being referred to as despicable human beings by the very people trying to rule the country. When people think it’s okay to say totally racist shit— even when it’s aimed at at CHILDREN— many hateful people see that acceptance of ignorant, hate-filled speech as getting an inch, so they turn it into a mile and then some.
Like trying to tear hijabs off Muslim women in public to go back to the hate crime that prompted me to write this. Which really isn’t too dissimilar to what happened during the Holocaust when Nazi guards would literally tear peyot (side curls) out of religious Jewish mens’ heads. And as we all know, Nazis had zero reservations about hurting and killing children and babies. Even when they came home to their own which is something I find even more chilling.
Then it’s the boycotting followed by ransacking of businesses owned by people they don’t like. That’s also already happening, and the Southern Poverty Law Center has been keeping tabs. What they have reported on is sickening, to say the least.
After that, it’s a slippery slope from this accepted harassment and hate crime to walled-off ghettos and systemic genocide.
It makes me ask what the hell drives humans to do this. Especially in a nation built on the backs of immigrants, and was stolen from Native Americans.
According to whitehouse.gov, 15% of my generation— Millennials, although I’m on the older end at 31— are first-generation Americans. This the largest amount of first-generation Americans in over a century, compared to 1910 when 20% of Americans were first-generation.
Whether you consider someone like me to be third-generation based on birth country alone, or fifth-generation because of generational settlement, it matters not.
I think of how many families who are first-generation, second, third, fourth, tenth, not to mention the Native Americans who were here long before the boats from Europe ever showed up: how many families who must have stories like my family’s. Families who have stories laced with far more persecution and loss that is also far more recent. Families who were torn apart just because of their heritage; brutally attacked, dehumanized, or murdered in cold blood for absolutely no good reason.
Families whose losses may still be felt generations later, where these tragedies colored every moment of their lives.
I think of the incredibly large Muslim community right in my own neighborhood. How many were refugees fleeing certain death under despots and flocked to Castle Hill, Parkchester, Norwood, and other neighborhoods where they could feel in touch with their roots and culture, and even reunite with friends and family members who made it to America. Just like my family did over a century ago.
I think of the first-generation Americans who face vitriol whether it’s in the form of racism, hatred against immigrants in general, the whole “Dey dook AR JAAHHHBS!” mentality, all while they have to deal with the challenges that come with being a first-generation American in a capitalist hellscape that loves to exploit them yet blame them for all the country’s problems.
(I also think about how when I read all those censuses and ship manifests, and saw how many immigrant workers were waiters, tailors, clerks, factory workers, day laborers, and other jobs that the elitists would say are not deserving of a living wage today. But they worked those jobs and were able to put a roof over their heads and even save for the future, despite horrid living conditions. Many immigrants today are also working the above jobs that haven’t been automated out of existence. Yet.)
All of that.
Yet so many of these brainwashed people will still mindlessly hate. Even the very same people who once escaped persecution, or had parents or grandparents who fought tooth and nail to make it to America with just their lives.
And it is indeed happening in America.
I cannot understand this hate. Maybe these hateful people didn’t have stories passed down to them, or perhaps they were framed the wrong way.
But when I hear these neofascists talk about “respect for the real Americans”, I know they don’t mean the melting pot of first-generation Americans in my neighborhood who have worked hard to build a livelihood and form communities here because they can; and the many who would face certain death if they ever returned to the countries they emigrated from. They don’t mean the people working the shit jobs they don’t think are worthy of a living wage, who still fought like hell to get here to have freedom to worship, dress, love, befriend, and express themselves.
That’s not who they mean, even though it doesn’t get more American than that.