No Pogroms

            The question comes at the end of the tour. My simple answer arihses from the depths of my DNA.
            Back in the pre-ICE age of June, my 39-year-old son and I are at the end of the Tenement Women tour at the Tenement Museum in New York City. He’d invited me to join him in Manhattan for the weekend to celebrate our birthdays and see a few shows, and this feels like an appropriate way to spend a couple of post-Chinatown dim sum afternoon hours in this immigrant history rich city.
             We tour a cramped 3-room tenement apartment where the very knowledgeable tour guide talks about a specific family who had lived and worked there in 1902. It’s a steamy hot day and, thankfully, museum leadership has made the good decision for the apartments to be authentic up to the point of being air conditioned.  
             “Imagine this place,” says our docent, “without air conditioning. Five or six people working, sewing in the tiny front room. Mama cooking and washing with seven kids underfoot in the other two rooms.” I cannot. “Yet,” he demonstrates through diaries and other documentation, “they were generally happy, hopeful, worked hard, and had self-described good lives.”
             When the docent asks if anyone has questions, a golf shirt clad middle-aged man speaks up. “I don’t get it,” he muses. “Their lives were so hard. They were overworked in cramped, horrible conditions for little pay. They had to go up and down three flights of stairs with buckets just to get water. How did they get through the day, let alone feel happy and productive?”
              Without thinking, I blurt out “no pogroms.”
              The man looks confused, while some others in the group nod.
I proceed to explain that the life of my paternal grandmother, who, like so many Jews, came to the US from Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century, mirrored the mother’s life in the family we had just learned about.
             After lifelong persecution and being subjected to organized government sanctioned massacres, known as pogroms, she and her family braved harrowing conditions to get to America. Never for a second did they doubt this decision. Here, they had autonomy and could go about their daily lives in relative freedom without fear of sudden and deadly repercussions. While they still experienced antisemitism, here they had basic human rights. They could hope for and attain good futures for their children and grandchildren, and live without constant fear of pillage, assault, or worse. They could feel safe going to work or to a store, or to visit a neighbor. Their kids could go to school without fear of being kidnapped, or of coming home and finding their parents had been disappeared. Even in cramped, squalid tenements they could thrive, grow, and become the talented, hardworking, loving people they were meant to be. That was, and still is, everything.
             The entire tour group wholeheartedly and unanimously agrees. 
             The next day, my son takes the train back to Richmond and I stay in New York an extra day to go to an appointment I have at the Austrian Embassy. 
             My mother and grandmother, from a wealthy family in Vienna, had fled their country after Kristallnacht in November of 1938. This Night of Broken Glass was another pogrom – this time, at the government-sanctioned hands of Nazi thugs who took great pleasure is smashing windows of Jewish-owned storefronts, buildings, and synagogues. Along with the literal shards of glass strewn throughout Jewish Vienna, they shattered dreams, hope, safety, and trust of over 100,000 humans.
             My mother, barely four years old, and my grandmother, a widow and single mother, lived as refugees in England during WWII and then made their way to the US after the war. They, like so many others, lost everyone and everything to Nazi raids, assaults, and concentration camps. I, like so many other children of immigrants, heard innumerable stories of their excitement upon first glimpsing the Statue of Liberty and their pride at becoming American citizens -- the hope of living somewhere that allowed them basic human rights so they could thrive without fear of repercussion for simply being who they were. 
             Decades later, Austria now offers citizenship to descendants of Holocaust survivors. I had recently received my Bescheid (Austrian citizenship documents) and, while in New York, have an in-person appointment to apply for an Austrian passport.
             The day feels foreign as I immerse myself in all things Austrian. I move through Austrian bureaucracy surrounded by a language my family once spoke fluently, craving connection to my family history and newly adopted country.
             After lunch at a Viennese café, I visit the Neue Museum where I sit immersed in Gustav Klimt’s shimmery Woman in Gold, this iconic painting also a victim of Nazi seizure and -- like my newly acquired citizenship -- a symbol of redemption for future generations. 
             Keenly aware of the irony in feeling relief at the option of fleeing to another country if necessary – the very one my family fled from to survive – I wonder what my grandmothers would say if they were still here.
             It would probably be something about the importance of freedom, survival, and hope.
             And a simple truth: 
             No pogroms.


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Elizabeth Surlin Gordon lives in the Chicago area and writes poetry, essays, middle grade/YA fiction, and a holistic wellness column for Our Evanston magazine. Over the pandemic, she wrote the children’s book, Where Is Everybody? Her work is published in Open Secrets Magazine, BAC Street Journal, East on Central, 10th Ward Lit, and others. She has received awards from Point of View and Highland Park Poetry.