Our Last Christmas Tree

  The troubling news that Wal-Mart, Walgreen’s and several other big box stores had caved into the pressure of religious Christian right and will bring the theme “Merry Christmas” back into their stores, replacing the more palatable, “Happy Holidays” sent my mind spinning back to the early 1930’s and the year of our last Christmas tree.  I suspect that we were not the only secular or Reform Jewish family in Cleveland to erect a Christmas tree in the living room during those blustery final weeks of December during the Depression.

  Our tree, of course, in my impressionable young mind, was special.  It was enormous, majestic. And the center of a lot of excitement and anticipation, that had absolutely nothing to do with the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ.
    For me Christmas was sneaking downstairs in the early a.m. of that “holiday” to get a look at what “Santa” had brought. It brought joy to our house. At age five I thought nothing more of it than that. In fact, Christmas, the tree, the gifts, the songs was the major topic of conversation among classmates and in the classroom at Coventry School in Cleveland Heights.

Resurrecting Memorial Day

  

Welcome to My Shtetl—or is it a Shtot?

  If I do a Google satellite search to my house in the very heart of Beachwood, then pull back perhaps a mile in each direction, I will have, in the camera’s eye, what is perhaps the most impressive aggregation of Jewish institutions in the Western world.

  Welcome to my shtetl, or, to be more technically and historically correct, my shtot. 

  There is something enormously impressive, yet curious, about, what has become of this very small area of the Greater Cleveland Metropolitan area in a relatively few short years. Not long ago this same community found itself angry and deeply divided over what seemed to be happening. The New York Times included us in a major Jew vs. Jew Sunday Magazine special. Perhaps the time has come for that gray lady and the story’s author to re-visit my shtetl.