Politics and Yom Kippur Don’t Mix. Or do they?

           My magnificent mother, whose lifetime in Cleveland literally spanned the 20^th century, (born in 1898 at 30^th and Orange, died 1989 at Mt. Sinai Hospital), was a tough, independent and lovely woman.

          Although she was a member of The Temple and often turned to Rabbi A.H. Silver, a personal friend of the family, for advice and comfort, she was more a pragmatist, and fatalist, than a religious Jew.

          When her husband William Weidenthal, publisher of the Jewish Independent, died in 1931 at the depth of the Depression, she was left, in her 30’s, with twin five year olds. She courageously (or perhaps stoically) told her friends, “It was meant to be”, and plunged ahead, without complaining, doing what was necessary to maintain a stable family.

          She took over the Weidenthal Co., our printing and publishing plant on Bolivar Rd. (just west of 9^th St.) and successfully ran it for a number of years. She insisted years later that she was no feminist. She left the kitchen and got into business because, “I had no choice”.

          Mother was by nature a serious Republican. She Disliked FDR and the New Deal with a passion. (It should be noted that in pre-depression days, much of the Jewish political establishment in Cleveland was Republican).  As a loyal son, I stood by her, and the cause.

          When Alf Landon the colorless governor of Kansas was nominated to challenge FDR in Cleveland Public Hall in 1936, I was excited about it and determined to do my part for the family.

          I recruited two friends at Coventry School, went down to the printing plant and printed out posters declaring LANDON FOR PRESIDENT.  Then we walked over to the Landon headquarters at the Hollenden Hotel, scooped up as many sunflower buttons we could fit in our knickers pockets and then headed back to the Heights.

          We were naively certain that our campaign efforts would swing Landon for Ohio, or at least Cuyahoga County.  As it turned out, it was a landslide for FDR. 
 Among my young Jewish friends who by now were almost entirely New Dealers, I was a rebel with a lost cause.

          In 1940 it was Wendell Willke, the One World idealist from Indiana who captured my allure. I was taken by his world view, and mother, now owner of Evelyn Wayne, a children’s store in Shaker Heights, continued her dislike for FDR. (Among other things, she resisted posting an NRA sign in her store window, as dictated by Washington.) When it was announced that Willkie would be coming to Cleveland for a campaign appearance at Public Hall, there was no doubt that I would be there.

          The situation got dicey when Grandma Kolinsky, an observant Jew, discovered that Willkie was coming to town on Yom Kippur. Her grandson, she declared at the dinner table, would not attend a political rally on the holiest of holy days. (It had been my habit to walk her to and from the synagogue on Superior Rd. up from Mayfield each year on the High Holy days, which complicated the problem.)

Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society

Wendell Willkie, Republican presidential candidate, campaigning with Harold Stassen in 1940.

        Over her protests, and somewhat guilt stricken, I rode the street car down to the terminal where the man from Indiana had arrived on his campaign train. I raced alongside his open car up Euclid Ave., down Ninth St. to Public Hall, where he gave a stirring speech in front of thousands of enthusiastic Gentiles and one Jewish teen-ager from Cleveland Heights, who thought he was cheering on the next president of the United States. Sadly, no such luck.

        Again a landslide for FDR. No hanging or pregnant chads. And no one even thought about asking for a recount.

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.

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.