A new view on old terrors
I’m a single person. Scared. This is my country. My entire life.
My ancestors came from the old world. Russia. My mother was born in Liverpool.
Inheritance? Nothing. Immigrants, they came with nothing. No relatives here — nobody.
Grandma, who spoke no English, scrubbed stoops on the Lower East Side. Grandpa, a tailor who made no money, kept just enough to apply for legitimate citizenship. To pay for their taxes, mortgage, children, doctors, schooling, food, old age, transportation, future — no help from the government.
Forget stories about immigrants arriving with hidden jewels sewn into their skirts. There were no gems. No hems.
Hard-knock life
When I was in public school, long ago but so painful that even now I remember it clearly — even though at this moment I can’t remember where I left my phone — back then I was given a used secondhand dress. Pale blue. Silky fabric. Garnished with fluffy fake fur. Excited, I paraded in it around our house.
Enter tragedy. A stain. From where, how I got it, who knows. Nothing but a scissor would’ve removed it. I was crazy. Inconsolable. “No problem,” said my mother. “I’ll wash it.”
WASH? Accented with fake fur?
The fake-o crapola immediately turned stiff — like cardboard — and peeled off. My mother worked two jobs to be able to feed me, dress me, take me to doctors, buy medicines because I was always ill.
But this was my only party dress. I was inconsolable. That’s 90 years ago. I still remember it.
By the time I could buy my own clothes I was a working reporter in Asia. The recent unrest and turmoil in Los Angeles has reprised two terrors I survived. One in Jakarta, another in Tehran.
Jakarta. An ungovernable mob flooded the roads. Barricaded the streets. Angry about some official edict. Came with guns, flames, knives, flags, signs, the usual. We were locked in traffic. Terrified. Me a foreigner. Alone except the driver, who knew to call someone as our car was rocked side to side, bottles thrown at our windows — and people came to save us.
Thrilling escape
Another time. Iran. A guest of the Shah, I was up country in Isfahan, a hotel owned by his then-Majesty’s twin sister Princess Ashraf. I was in their official black car. Their official driver. En route back to Tehran. It was the first days, the exact moment, the move had begun to oust the Shah. A small village through which we drove saw their movie theater set on fire.
If not protected by the Shah, who knows what might’ve happened. His people caught us en route, escorted us with guns to the hotel, watched as I packed up and then threw me at 5 a.m. onto a plane out of Iran and home.
That story — and its saga of embassy personnel sheltered by my late friend Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor — I mightn’t be here today. He, too, spirited me out and onto a waiting Pan Am jet. The story was immortalized in Ben Affleck’s 2012 Oscar-winning movie “Argo.”
It’s terrifying. They looking to turn us into Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Russia — the cauldrons from which they fled?
This story originally appeared on NYPost
