Stuff piles up at Christmas and my wife and I only get to it later. She was having a bath this morning and asked me if I was as shocked as she was the other night when an older relative of hers mentioned something about a great aunt of hers, to me, over dinner: "Did you know that Aunt X thought it was a great idea that Hitler wanted to shoot the Jews?" Well no I didn't.
Usually when confronted with crude antisemitism, I adopt a line I heard from a sophisticated Manhattan architect years ago, when we were walking thru the 26th Street flea market in New York and saw some Nazi memorabilia for sale. "How charming," he said. That's what I learned to say, How charming. But this comment went way beyond that, and I just shrugged and said I hadn't heard it, and the party was quiet for a moment. I think everyone was a little shocked, embarrassed.
My wife and I took it apart a little this morning. She said that antisemitism of that intensity was probably common in small towns in Pennsylvania in that age. The great aunt surely felt the same way about blacks. She was not a sophisticated person. Though she was a beauty. Thanks to the beauty, she married well, and left a big house with a lot of great old junk in it. My wife's sister visited the old house not long ago and brought back two chairs she knew my wife would like. So I'm the beneficiary. I pointed that out to my wife, too. Well we got those chairs, and that great old gilt-framed photograph, out of it.
Then I said with typical optimism, The world moves on. Attitudes change slow, then they change fast. My wife's great aunt is the reason blacks and Jews made such a public identification 50 years ago: it was politically/culturally effective. Obama's in the White House and I'm at Christmas dinner.
