So here’s to you, Manny. Let me share a memory about you that has stayed with me for roughly thirty years. Even now, I can remember being there as if it were yesterday.
I am maybe 16 or 17 and sitting on the couch in your living room, gazing idly at the crossword puzzle that Pearl completed in five minutes earlier that day. There is some talking and laughing and gesticulating and more than a little Ladino in the air. The conversation turns to politics, as often happens, and my ears prick up. I have been reading Engels on the condition of the English working class, Marx on the contradictions at the heart of capitalism, and Orwell on the perils of proletarian dictatorship. I am close to what I would become in college, a democratic socialist. But I know nothing – and I mean, zippo – about the history of progressive social movements in the United States. So then you start talking about the McCarthy period. I am riveted, but also shocked and anguished, disbelieving. To me, the United States is a country of freedom and limitless possibility, the land of opportunity, the melting pot, the shining beacon to oppressed peoples everywhere. You are teaching me that there is truth in this, but not so much because of what politicians say and (less often) do, but because of the relentless pressure boiling up from below, from people of all walks of life who press for equal rights for women, for people of color, for the elderly, for Jews and Hindus and Muslims and Buddhists, from people of all walks of life who insist on justice for criminal defendants, who fight and march for clean water and safe workplaces and better pay for schoolteachers and sanitation workers. I am learning this by hearing it through your voice, in your words, rather than by reading a book. I am hearing that sometimes the people who see the truth are in the minority, that fear (of Negroes, of Communists, of Jews, of Negro Communists and Jewish Communists) is a powerful force that affects ordinary law-abiding folks as well as politicians, and that the fight for justice and equality and the promise of true freedom can be derailed by a small group of powerful populist hatemongers, led by a hard-drinking sociopathic demagogue who has no more regard for progressives than did Hitler and his minions. I am riveted, but also sick to my stomach when you play me a record of the “have you no sense of decency” speech of Joseph Welch’s at the Army-McCarthy hearings. I am learning that democracy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, that it can remain strong and vibrant only when the voices of hatred and fear are marginalized, that the reckless and cruel decisions of vote-hungry politicians who appeal to the worst in our natures have serious and dramatic repercussions on the lives of real people, hard-working people, good people, veterans who risked their lives to fight for a country in which hard-drinking sociopathic demagogues are free to speak their minds. The scales have fallen from my eyes. And I want to learn more. About your life, your courage, your strength, your endurance. A strength that many do not possess, a strength that I do not possess. The strength of a man who does not give up in the face of injustice even at serious personal cost. Before this moment, I saw you as Uncle Manny with the smile and the infectious laugh and the strong hug. And, of course, as short. After this moment, I see you as, well, Uncle Manny with the smile and the infectious laugh and the strong hug. But I no longer see you as short. I see you as tall, the tallest person in the room, the tallest person at the anti-war rally, with Pearl striding confidently beside you and Ruth-Joy on your shoulders, towering above the pro-war zealots shouting epithets in your direction.
