Tonight on a Dallas CBS affiliate ran a story about a Parisian Jewish woman who hid her heritage for over 60 years. Her father was killed at Auschwitz in 1942 and she was a member of the Resistance but after the end of the war married an American soldier who told her to keep her religion a secret. And she did so for 67 years. She lived and prospered in Texas where outsiders would not have been at all welcomed and all the while smiling through the pain. To have to bear that kind of pain is a burden I could not imagine having to live with. Although, she presented herself as a Christian woman for so many years, a few of her children have decided to embrace their Jewish faith. I can only imagine what this woman had to endure, having lived through the German occupation and then living in the American South; I only have limited experience with outright racism and discrimination though I still carry around that yoke everyday.
A professor in college once told the class that no one knows what it's like to come from a family of slaves. Imagine me in that room with 99% non-Black students and a European teacher telling
me about slavery. That class that night was Early American Literature, which I hated because of the racial connotations found in the genre. She looked me in my face, as if to gauge my reaction and then she explained: she was born in Russia, the grand daughter of a Russian slave. So she
did know what I felt. I then realized that I didn't own the phantom memories of my ancestors; that people of African descent weren't the only people who wear their pain like badges. In this we are all the same and it is a humbling lesson to learn.
Tonight on a Dallas CBS affiliate ran a story about a Parisian Jewish woman who hid her heritage for over 60 years. Her father was killed at Auschwitz in 1942 and she was a member of the Resistance but after the end of the war married an American soldier who told her to keep her religion a secret. And she did so for 67 years. She lived and prospered in Texas where outsiders would not have been at all welcomed and all the while smiling through the pain. To have to bear that kind of pain is a burden I could not imagine having to live with. Although, she presented herself as a Christian woman for so many years, a few of her children have decided to embrace their Jewish faith. I can only imagine what this woman had to endure, having lived through the German occupation and then living in the American South; I only have limited experience with outright racism and discrimination though I still carry around that yoke everyday.
A professor in college once told the class that no one knows what it's like to come from a family of slaves. Imagine me in that room with 99% non-Black students and a European teacher telling me about slavery. That class that night was Early American Literature, which I hated because of the racial connotations found in the genre. She looked me in my face, as if to gauge my reaction and then she explained: she was born in Russia, the grand daughter of a Russian slave. So she did know what I felt. I then realized that I didn't own the phantom memories of my ancestors; that people of African descent weren't the only people who wear their pain like badges. In this we are all the same and it is a humbling lesson to learn.
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