Is it safe?

A question on many Americans' lips.

Herman Eskin, circa 1930

My grandfather, Herman (Chaim) Eskin was a nervous man. He viewed the world through dread-colored glasses. He was anxious, for instance, when I would climb the oak tree behind our house, that a twig would gouge my eye or that I would fall to the ground. For Herman, danger seemed to be lurking around every corner. Some nights he would yell out in his sleep, seeming to be in a life-or-death struggle. His arms flailed, and anyone who tried to wake him risked getting punched in the face.

As a child, I thought he was silly. Why was Pe-Pa so terrified? I only came to understand his terror when I got older.

Herman was born in Gomel, Belarus, on Russian Christmas, 1906. Belarus was than part of the Russian empire, and he always said that he was from Russia.

No long after he was born, Herman, his parents Binyamin and Rivka, and his eleven siblings fled the vicious antisemitic pogroms that were erupting in the region, one of which took place in Gomel just three years before Herman was born. According to family legend, one of the children was born during a pogrom: Rivka was hidden in a haystack, where she was gagged to prevent her cries of pain from betraying her presence.

Towards the end of 1906, the family embarked upon the long, hard journey to the United States, traveling in steerage. Like so many Jewish refugees, they settled in New York City.

Although he was just a baby when the family fled, Herman grew up in a community that was riven with trauma. That legacy of terror and helplessness became cemented into his identity. Later it was compounded. During the post-war “red scare” Herman became terrified that federal agents would appear at his door to deport him back to Russia. One day his daughter Rose, my mother, brought two new acquaintances back to their Brooklyn apartment. When Herman learned that they were friends of the Rosenbergs—the Jewish couple who were executed for spying for the Soviet Union—he had what was then called a “nervous breakdown” which apparently scarred him for the rest of his life.

Many Americans (though certainly not all) have taken safety for granted for a long time. Today, a miasma of fear is enveloping the nation as visas are revoked, and people are harassed, abducted, detained, and deported. We now live in a country where professors of medicine are anxious about whether it is safe for them to continue to teach about vaccines; where historians, scholars of race, and other academics enter the classroom with trepidation, fearing that they may be muzzled or worse for telling young people the truth, and where Universities are increasingly wary of their faculty openly criticizing the regime—while others rejoice that America is finally becoming “great again.”

We live now in an atmosphere that my grandfather and his parents would have found all-too-familiar. I often miss Herman—his warmth, his humor, and his brilliance—but I also can’t help being glad that he did not live to see what his adopted country has become.