There is an enormous amount for which I feel truly grateful to the United States on its 247th birthday. I think that most Americans could find something for which to give thanks to our country.
After my father passed away, my wife and I took about 10 days to go through decades of collected “stuff.” Letters, thousands of pictures, slides, ornaments, personal items—we went through them all and tried to make a very fast determination of what to keep and what not. After 32 pictures of my grandmother from Australia, should I keep the thirty-third or let it go? As it showed us at Four Corners during one of her rare visits to the States, how could I not keep it? The task was technically challenging and in light of my father’s passing, personally difficult. A lot of memories came rushing back. One always wants to put off such activities, but there comes a time when one has to face the mountain of collected goods and make some sense of them before the house is cleaned out for sale.
In a drawer in my folks’ bedroom, I found many of their personal papers. Some of them dated from Germany and had Nazi stamps on them. Others were from Australia, the country to which my father’s family fled. One did not choose in those days where to go; wherever you were accepted, you went there. I found the papers from my mother’s arrival in New York with her parents in December 1937 on the steamer, SS Washington. As I continued going through the papers and documents, I found two items that I brought back with me to Jerusalem. They both say a lot about America, then and now.
The first was my grandmother’s US naturalization papers. Mrs. Rosa Bamberger became a citizen in good standing on February 3rd, 1944. Associated with the naturalization papers was a statement from family friends who took personal responsibility for my mother’s family—in front of a notary—that the Bambergers would not be a burden to the state, and should they need money, this couple promised to provide for their upkeep. One did not just show up to the United States—or any country—in those days. If you wanted in, you needed to meet some pretty demanding criteria. The naturalization papers include one of the few pictures I have of my maternal grandmother, whom I never met.
The second document that I took home with me was the last will and testament of a certain Max Bamberger. Max Bamberger had come from Germany and moved out to Utah to take over a silver mine set up by his uncles. Those uncles left Germany in the mid-nineteenth century to find their fortune in the wild west of America. The uncles came single and never married. They asked that the family send someone to take over their business. Max Bamberger came to Utah and took over the silver mine and, apparently, some other properties owned by his uncles. Though there was a Jewish governor of Utah (also a Bamberger, though not related), there were few Jewish women and Max also did not marry. So before he passed away, Max Bamberger, in 1937, wrote a will that left his wealth to the family members back in Germany—including my mother and her parents. It was this money that allowed them to come to New York in order to start a new life away from the persecution back in Germany. He saved dozens of family members by setting up US bank accounts for them so that they would have money waiting for them upon their arrival to the new world. This will and testament I also brought home with me.
While my mother’s family made their home with many other German Jews in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York, my father came to Northwestern University from Sydney to get a Ph.D. in chemistry. When he returned to Australia in the early 1950s, he discovered that the country had no need for his skills. He tried to find a job that fit his training but Australia was at the time a backwater and did not need him. So he came back to America and became a professor at the University of Illinois. He taught there for forty-two years. During that time, I went to New Trier High School, which was considered one of the best public schools in the country. We sent 10 students to Harvard in 1983. I later was funded by the NIH during my Ph.D. studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Even my arrival here in Israel was paid for by a State Department Fulbright Fellowship to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
So where do I start to give thanks? For allowing two young German men to dream of wealth in the material resources reported out in the west of the US? For taking in my mother and her parents when she could no longer go to school in Wurzburg because of the Nazi youth that taunted and threatened her? For giving my dad a stable job and income for over four decades? For giving me an education second to none? These are the bigger points. There is quite a lot more for which to be thankful, from the wonderful American people to the beauty of the country from coast to coast. Is America perfect? Of course not, but where is it written that a country is supposed to be so? Is America facing some serious problems? Unfortunately, yes. I was in a store in which a guy walked out with bags of stolen merchandise, and this is only one of many problems faced by Americans from policies that fail to live up to the American standard of “one nation, under G-d, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
When then-Senator Barack Obama made a visit to Israel prior to the 2008 elections, he made plans to visit the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism. This visit presented a problem for the rabbi of the Western Wall. Presidents, kings, and other VIPs enjoy having the entire area in front of the Western Wall to themselves; others like CEOs or lesser politicians visit but without closing the space down to the numerous people who come there to pray. Mr. Obama was a senator and would thus not merit any special treatment; on the other hand, he was running for president and maybe he should already be treated as such. The rabbi made his way to a 100-year-old rabbi who almost never left Jerusalem to ask what he should do. “Give him the whole section. The United States is a country of great kindness and good; show him the respect owed to such a country.” My thanks to the US for all it has given me and my family.