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Donna Minkowitz's avatar

I really appreciate everyone's comments! Thanks to everyone for taking the time. I just wanted to add, about my own dad, that I realized he was also incarcerated, while in the military. After his sergeant viciously Jew-baited him, he physically attacked his sergeant, and was put in the stockade, and given a psychiatric discharge. Yet another way someone can be "lumpen." (Also like my mom, who, as I mention, was also incarcerated in the home for incorrigible girls.)

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Michael Broder's avatar

I love this piece, Donna! Our backgrounds have some points in common, but others very different. But even the differences are somehow of a certain piece, so to speak. You and I are close in age but my parents were probably about 10 years older than yours as I was the youngest of four—in fact, my brothers and I span the baby boom from 1946 to 1961. Jewish. Very working class. Similar maternal anxieties around in adequate education. And my father, too, was a salesman, in particular selling novelties to concessioners— erotically themed decks of cards and cigarette lighters, and so forth. In fact, they were probably sold at the same types of establishments for which your father handed out flyers! Even the photograph of your father reminds me of my own father—What was it with Jewish man of that era with hairy backs and shoulders? Anyway, I could go on forever and I haven’t really even touched on class issues per se. But this all I have energy for now; more another time.

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