Canada’s immigration website crashed at around 8 PM on November 8. So I know I’m not the only American whose first impulse that night was to run away screaming. As the initial wave of panic subsided, though, I started to think about what my grandparents would have done.
In March 2015 I had started the process of applying for German citizenship. The German Basic Law of citizenship offers restoration of citizenship to German citizens, mostly Jews, who lost their citizenship while in exile from Nazi persecution. Their descendants may apply for German citizenship as well. My grandmother had recently received her medical degree in Hamburg when laws restricting Jewish doctors took effect. She headed for New York almost immediately, in 1934, to continue her medical training because she could not do so in Germany. My grandfather, who already had an established ophthalmology practice in Magdeburg, stayed until 1937. They met in New York and married shortly after.
In 1937, my grandmother went back to Hamburg to retrieve her mother and older sister, who were hesitant to leave and apparently required some convincing. They would not have survived the deportations. Instead, my great-grandmother lived into the 1950s near her family on the Upper West Side, where, I am told, she enjoyed chatting with friends on the islands in the middle of Broadway. Her favorite bench was at Broadway and 84th Street, facing uptown. I think of her when I visit New York and see those benches. The older sister eventually settled in Israel, with one of her brothers.
To apply for citizenship, I had to submit official copies of birth and marriage certificates and immigration papers. To sort out some of the dates and other details, my mother and I searched on-line census files and sites like ancestry.com and made some wonderful discoveries. We came across the passenger manifest of the ocean liner that brought my grandfather to the United States. That long list of names, illustrating the exodus of Jews from Germany and neighboring countries, offered glimpses of dozens of other interesting stories that are held in family memories — the city of origin, profession, and race (“Hebrew”, in my grandfather’s case) were listed for each person. What was that passage like? What became of them all? On one form my grandfather had written a few details of his military service. I knew that he had fought for Germany in the First World War, but I had no specifics. He never talked about it, at least not with my mother, except to say, with a hint of dry humor, that he had fought on the wrong side. I now know that he served from April 1915 (when he was 19 years old) to December 1918, as a sub-lieutenant in the medical corps of the German infantry.
While I was exploring this trove of family history, Donald Trump was coming on the scene, winning followers and horrifying the rest of us with his anti-immigrant tirades. I thought a lot about what it means to be an immigrant over the course of the campaign, which roughly corresponded to my quest for German citizenship. The hatred directed at immigrants sickens me. I owe my life to the fact that my grandparents were able to come here. No one who is simply seeking a safer and better life deserves to be met with such contempt. Syrians are now desperately trying to escape a war zone. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Skittles analogy would have been applied to my grandparents and their fellow refugees. Jewish immigration was curbed by nativists who stoked fears that a few Nazi or communist spies might sneak in.
I have also thought a lot about what it would mean for me to leave the U.S. My grandparents didn’t live long enough for me to ask them about the circumstances that compelled them to pack up. I wish I could have asked: How did you know it was time to go? Did you think the move would be permanent? My grandparents were reluctant immigrants, in that they loved Germany and would have happily stayed there if they could have. They considered themselves German as much as Jewish. My mother tells me of her embarrassment as a child when her mother would ask her to help haul a Christmas tree through their mostly Jewish neighborhood on the Upper West Side—a custom my grandfather scorned and my mother did not carry on in her own adult life (I was not told of this dark family secret until I was 30). My grandfather regularly took the crosstown bus to a German deli in Yorkville to get the pickled pigs’ feet he craved—even when, in the late 1930s, the East Side neighborhood was festooned with Nazi insignia.
All through the primaries, and even earlier, in the summer and fall of 2015, my husband and I joked that we would head to Germany if Trump were elected. How ironic it would be to flee persecution in the U.S. and be taken in by Germany! This was idle talk: we didn't expect him to be nominated, much less elected.
So now what?
There is, of course, a difference between feeling persecuted and being persecuted. I'm not about to be loaded onto a train and shipped off to some version of the Riga ghetto, where, according to German records, my elderly great-great-aunt Harriet was murdered in 1942. A few years ago my mother and her Israeli cousin arranged to have a Stolperstein placed in front of Harriet's last address. That brass cobble and a few others are all that remains in Hamburg of my grandmother's extended family; they either fled or perished, and their descendants are now scattered across four continents. I cannot bring myself to imagine that this could happen to Jews, or anyone, here in the U.S. But forms of persecution short of systematic murder may be in the works for various minority groups, some of whom have already been the target of hate crimes in the wake of the election. For now, many of us can feel persecuted as we see elected President a man formally endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan and enthusiastically received by neo-Nazis, a man who has raised the specter of internment camps and threatens to round up the Muslim and Latino immigrants among us.
My life and livelihood are not in danger. Like most Jews, I am not a recent immigrant, nor does my appearance, dress, or accent mark me as a target. Sure, if our lives were threatened, we would go, but short of that, fleeing the country isn’t much of a solution to anything. The influence of the U.S. is global. Leaving won't allow us to escape from global warming, or from whatever havoc Trump may wreak on foreign relations or the world economy.
But more importantly: it's not just about us! Leaving the country now might offer a bit of personal consolation, and I suppose it might make a statement—but like voting for Jill Stein, it doesn't actually achieve much. We would be abandoning the most vulnerable among us, because they don't have the means to move. Jews, along with all who understand history, have a special responsibility to join the fight. If one's life is not in danger, the moral option is to stay and work hard – to make America a just and decent place. Or, in the words of Langston Hughes, to let America be America again.
I didn’t apply for German citizenship with plans to emigrate, but rather to honor the memories of my grandparents, and to recognize the tolerant, peaceful country that Germany is becoming and that my grandparents would have been grateful to see. My application finally went off to Germany for review a few months ago. If my German citizenship is approved, I (and more importantly, my children) will have a backup. But that’s all it is, for now. Rather than abandon my country, I will do all I can to keep it from going in a direction that any conscientious German would recognize and fear.
My grandparents were driven out of the country they loved by a crazed leader and the people who cheered him on. I do not intend to let Trump and his minions do the same to me, or to anyone.