![]() ![]() ![]() There my mother was educated and assimilated, married a Jewish atheist attorney, and conceived me. Part of a minuscule Jewish minority when not the only Jewish family in town, my grandparents kept moving until, following my mother's birth in a Pennsylvania hamlet, the youngest of seven children, they moved permanently to a large Jewish community in Cleveland, Ohio, where they finally felt at home. What he thought of them wasn't much, I gathered from his dismissive remarks about the goyim. Though he wore no beard or yarmulke, I wonder what the Midwestern Christian burghers and farmers whom he solicited thought of him, a Jew with a heavy Yiddish accent who could lift the front of a car off the ground with his bare hands. From the first decade of the twentieth century until after World War II, first in a horse-drawn cart, then in a truck, he scoured rural Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio for abandoned machinery, cars, stoves, tools, pots and pans, which he sold by the ton whenever he amassed enough to fill a railway freight car. How startling to discover in my maturity an affinity with my grandfather the scrap-metal peddler. ![]()
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