Birthright citizenship, fascism, and Trump

This is about birthright citizenship — how my family was nearly wiped out for the lack of it and was saved by a country that had it. But of course, this is really about Donald Trump and his threat to end birthright citizenship in the United States by executive order. Yes, I know, he can't really do that; it's an election-season stunt. But it's nevertheless important to understand what he is saying, why he is saying it, and to whom it's meant to appeal.

Trump and his followers would have you believe that this is a simple numbers game — that it's about the right of a sovereign nation to protect itself from an overwhelming number of immigrants becoming a burden on society. But what it's really about, now and historically, is not numbers of citizens, but kinds -- as in, keeping out the wrong kinds. If you doubt it, look at the 1898 Supreme Court decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which established that the 14th amendment should be applied to all people born on American soil: “The Fourteenth Amendment, in clear words and in manifest intent, includes the children born, within the territory of the United States, of all other persons, of whatever race or color, domiciled within the United States.”

Justice Horace Gray recognized that the case before the court was aimed at making it possible to withhold American citizenship from non-white people by excluding them from the birthright defined by the 14th Amendment. In fact, the 14th Amendment was a Reconstruction measure guaranteeing citizenship rights in response to to questions about the status of former slaves following the Civil War. Whatever specious arguments are brought against birthright citizenship today, in reality, the attempt to end it is still about giving the state the ability to keep out certain kinds of people. In promising to end it, Trump is telling his followers that he will stop at nothing to keep America white and Christian. The moment we require American-born children of non-citizens to apply for citizenship rather than be automatically granted it, we open the door to denying them citizenship for reasons like “race or color.” Trump’s followers get that, loud and clear.

Which brings me to my own family history.

My father arrived in the United States on July 4, 1939, with his parents and brother, refugees from Nazi Germany. It was a miracle they made it — and the lack of birthright citizenship in Europe played a major role in their harrowing tale. You can hear my father tell the whole story in the video below, but here are the key elements as they pertain to the citizenship question.

My father’s father’s parents were Poles who emigrated to Austria in the 1880s, where my father’s father was born. Since there was no birthright citizenship, my father’s father was a Polish citizen by virtue of parentage. He grew up in Vienna. He spoke German and learned no Polish. As an adult, he moved to Budapest, where he married, and where my father’s brother was born. He, too, was a Polish citizen — no birthright citizenship. Eventually, the family moved to Berlin, where my father was born — also no birthright citizenship.

In the 1930s, there were tens of thousands of Jews who were Polish citizens living in Germany. I don’t say Polish Jews, because many of them, like my father’s family, had never been to Poland, spoke no Polish, and had no affinity for that country. After all, they had fled what had been, until the Nazi era, the more virulent anti-Semitism of Poland for the greater tolerance of Germany.

But as Nazism took hold of Germany, Poland anticipated that all those Jews with Polish citizenship would come flooding back from Germany, and they weren’t too keen on the prospect. They announced that they would require any Polish citizen who had been out of the country for an extended period to obtain a special note from a Polish consulate before being admitted to Poland. But Jews couldn’t get that note. Essentially, Polish Jews in Germany were left stateless. Germany, meanwhile, was interested in ridding itself of as many Jews as possible. Deporting Polish Jews seemed like a good place to start.

On October 28, 1938, the SS knocked on the door of my grandparents’ apartment in Berlin, handed my grandfather a deportation order (pictured here), took him away, and put him on a train bound for Poland, a country totally alien to him. The Germans had decided to deport all Polish Jewish men over a certain age, whether the Poles wanted them or not. My father was too young for the deportation. His brother, while old enough, got away with lying to the SS about his age, and was not taken. But my grandfather was given a few minute to pack some belongings, forcibly removed from his home, and deported within hours.

German persecution of the Jews always took place within the framework of its own laws. The Germans prided themselves upon being a nation of laws, as we do. But laws can be made to serve evil ends. The targeted, anti-Semitic deportation of Polish Jews was simply the selective enforcement of a sovereign nation’s right to expel non-citizens, most of whom were Poles simply because birthright citizenship did not exist.

Months earlier, my grandparents had begun a desperate attempt to obtain visas to the United States. Miraculously, they succeeded — but only after my grandfather’s deportation. My grandmother, father, and uncle were in Berlin. Four American visas were at the embassy in Berlin. But my grandfather was stuck in Poland. In order to receive his American visa, he had to appear personally at the embassy in Berlin. Had he not devised a risky scheme to re-enter Germany, rejoin his family, pick up the American visas, and hightail it out of there, it’s likely my grandmother would have elected to join my grandfather in Poland rather than emigrate to America without him. The whole family would probably have perished in the Holocaust. How they managed it is a long story (which my father tells in the video below, if you’re interested), but suffice to say, they did. That’s how it came to pass that my father had his first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty on the Fourth of July, 80 years ago.

By awarding citizenship based on blood line rather than place of birth, European nations in the 19th and early 20th centuries were preserving their ability to enforce a narrow, exclusive idea of nationality — of who belongs and who does not. It was the perfect tool for fascists. Trump’s backward nationalism is a throwback to that ideology, and it’s no wonder he landed on the issue of birthright citizenship as a means of telegraphing that. Make no mistake: Trump is signaling a promise to preserve white, Christian dominance of the United States. Given his fear-mongering and dog whistles about immigrants, non-Christians, and non-whites, who can doubt it? His rabid base know exactly what he’s getting at -- and they love it.

This Christmas without my dad

In memory of my father, Michael Wyschogrod.

Warning: Contains Doctor Who spoilers through "The Husbands of River Song." 

Another Christmas, another Doctor Who special that seems to have been written for me personally.

After last year’s special, I was moved to write about my own situation. I was staying with my father, who was deep in the throes of advanced dementia, while my brother and his family were away. No longer safe on his own, Dad had been living with my brother and his wife, empty-nesters, for about six months. We are Jewish and don’t celebrate Christmas, so my brother had planned a much-needed and well-deserved vacation; rather than drive my father four hours to my house, which would have been very disorienting to him, I went to my brother’s, where Dad was settled in and had aides to help him nearly 24/7.

Here, in part, is what I wrote on Christmas day, 2014:

    “‘Do you know why people get together at Christmas?’ [the Doctor] asks her. ‘Because every time they do, it might be the last time. Every Christmas is last Christmas.’
    “A lump swelled in my throat. Surely, this is my last Christmas with my father. It makes no difference that Christmas is just a date on the calendar for us. Whatever the coming year holds, I don’t think there will be even a glimmer of my dad left by next December 25.
    “Is there anyone my age who heard that line and didn’t react the same way? Anyone of any age who has felt the sting of loss, or who knows he or she soon will, who didn’t shed a tear? We mark the turnings of the seasons, the year’s end, the milestones, with gatherings of friends and family because, for each of us, there will be a last one. It’s not a truth we generally speak aloud, but we all know it.
    “‘Last Christmas’ is about the nightmare of dreams within dreams within dreams; about not knowing the dream from the reality. In the end, the characters are returned to their own realities – awakened -- by Santa Claus and a Time Lord, as absurd and unlikely a pair as any you could dream up. But of course, it doesn’t end there. There is one last awakening. I turn off the TV; Santa and the Time Lord disappear, and I am back in my niece’s old room in my brother’s house, with a father who is with me for one last Christmas.”

You can read the whole piece here.

My father died on December 17, 2015, a week before the next Christmas. I watched this year’s Doctor Who special the day after getting up from shiva, the traditional weeklong Jewish period of mourning, which we observed at my brother’s house. I spent the week sleeping in the bed my father had occupied the previous year; eating at the table where I’d given him his meals; greeting visitors in the living room where we had sat together in his quieter moments. Last Christmas had indeed been my father’s last.

It was a long, sad year with my dad, predictable as it was. In the first half of the year, his delusions, confusion, and agitation had grown steadily worse, even as his strength declined and he became less and less steady on his feet. The demands on my time from my own family meant I could only visit Dad about once a month, and so the change from visit to visit was obvious and painful to see. Then, at the beginning of the summer, he came down with pneumonia and was hospitalized. Realizing it no longer made sense to try to care for him at home, my brother and I decided to put him in a nursing home. We felt guilty and awful. In the home, his decline accelerated, which made us feel even more guilty. In the last couple of months, he was difficult to rouse; he spoke little; it was hard to tell how much he understood. We felt that the brilliant man who had always been such a powerful force in our lives had departed long before his body finally shut down for good. When the doctors told us it would just be a matter of weeks, my husband and I brought our three teenage kids to see him one last time. That was on a Sunday. On Thursday, he died in his sleep.

Last year, I wrote, “It’s a funny thing about Doctor Who lately: It’s a family show that often seems to be speaking more to the adults in the room.” In season nine, that’s been more true than ever. Steven Moffat has a gift for transforming a fanciful premise into a poignant tale about a lot of very un-childish things, and the twelfth Doctor, as played by Peter Capaldi, is the perfect vehicle for such tales. This is a Doctor who is decidedly not in the business of candy coating harsh reality; who expects joy to come mixed with equal parts sorrow; who rages against the inevitable, and then accepts it as the bitter pill it is.

It feels to me like Steven Moffat, who wrote the last two episodes of the regular season, “Heaven Sent” and “Hell Bent,” as well as the Christmas special, “The Husbands of River Song,” is writing from a place of sorrow tempered by an innate ability to see dark humor in everything and a stubborn refusal to give up on the idea that, if we’re very clever and very lucky, we can find joy and love along the way.

The character of Ashildr is the embodiment of the idea that if you live long enough, life’s suffering will become your constant companion, and that if one is to know joy, it must always be in admixture with sorrow. When you get right down to it, there’s no denying that, looked at one way, the Doctor did a terrible thing by giving Ashildr immortality. If pain is inevitable in life, then endless life inevitably brings infinite pain. But then, one could condemn anyone for bringing any sort of life into this world, and what would be the point of that? Life may be a bitch, but it’s all we have. The alternative is nothingness, and that is truly terrifying.

Which brings me to Clara. We’ve watched her heading toward her inevitable end ever since she first showed up. Her character actually starts off by dying a couple of times. That doesn’t bode well. So when we find her fate finally sealed in “Face the Raven,” it hardly comes as a surprise. And then comes “Heaven Sent,” which is mind-blowingly, devastatingly sad and painful, as the Doctor faces a trial that lasts a near-eternity, with none but his remembered Clara to keep him company and help him through.

What a poignant way to capture just what I felt as my father slipped further and further away, and I superimposed on his fading presence my own vivid sense of who he was and what he’d meant to me over the years. My remembered father, who taught me the “duty of care,” as the Doctor put it, guided me when it all got to be too much -- when I was splitting my time between my three endlessly needy teenage kids and my increasingly confused, delusional father, especially when he was in an independent living facility an hour from my house, and I was trying to manage his wandering episodes, his inability to manage his medication, his persistent delusion that every older woman he saw was my dead mother, his near-total loss of sense of time. I found myself in a surreal world, my own personal confession dial where, at first, day after day I broke it to my father anew that his wife was dead and that he couldn’t be seeing her, and eventually gave up and invented stories for him about where she was and why she kept appearing and disappearing. And all the while, I could feel death stalking the poor man, ever since a neurologist diagnosed him with Lewy Body disease and said, “There’s only one way this goes.” Don’t try to tell me Steven Moffat wasn’t thinking of me when he wrote the story of the Doctor trapped in the confession dial. I know better.

Then come “Hell Bent” and “The Husbands of River Song,” and we see the same thing happen twice: A beloved character heading for certain death gets an extended reprieve during which she gets to do exactly what she wants. For Clara, it’s her own Tardis and all of time and space; for River, it’s quiet years (one Darillium night) with her beloved Doctor, with no crises, no running, no apocalypses. What a lovely fantasy. It’s all my if-onlys come true: If only I’d been more accepting of our differences when I was young; if only I’d been more understanding of his faults; if only I’d spent more time with him when he was well; if only we’d traveled more together; if only I’d read his books and asked him about them; if only I’d written down all his stories; if only I’d brought the kids to see him more often.

If only we had more time.

The ending of “The Husbands of River Song” feels bittersweet, because of course I don’t get the fairy tale, the extra time, the reprieve. Memory and legacy are all well and good, but the finality of my father’s passing is unrelenting. I will wake up every morning for the rest of my life to the reality that he, and my mother before him, and others I’ve loved, are gone. Someday, my kids will do the same with me. Eventually, we will all mourn, until the time comes when others mourn us. But we’ll also take some comfort in stories about rescues and reprieves -- stories that move us all the more when they rest, as Moffat’s do, on a profound understanding of the psychology of grief and loss, and the very human urge to deny the inevitable.

“The Husbands of River Song” made me laugh (“Does sarcasm help?” “Wouldn’t it be a great universe if it did?”) and it made me cry (“When the wind stands fair and the night is perfect, when you least expect it, but always when you need it the most, there is a song.”). When all is said and done, we’re left with the songs and the stories that live in the nexus between past and present, memory and experience. As we sat shiva for my father, my brother and I repeated the stories of our father’s life over and over, and showed the pictures and documents that prove that, yes, the man was real, the stories are true.

And they’re all we have left.

I think perhaps, when I’m thinking about my father, and my mother, and all the if-onlys -- when my own mortality is pressing in, and I feel trapped in my own confession dial -- I’ll watch “Last Christmas” and “The Husbands of River Song” again. Maybe they’ll be the songs I hear “when the wind stands fair and the night is perfect.” Or maybe something else will be. But anyway, I’m grateful to Steven Moffat for creating lovely bits of fluff that tap into such a deep, vulnerable place and somehow make grief a little more bearable. I’ll end with the exact words I wrote a year ago:

“It’s a funny thing about Doctor Who lately: It’s a family show that often seems to be speaking more to the adults in the room. But I guess that’s what happens when an old, old show about an old, old time traveler is taken over by a middle-aged fan. Steven Moffat grew up with Doctor Who; now Doctor Who is growing up with Steven Moffat.”

Last Christmas with my dad

WARNING: Contains Doctor Who spoilers through "Last Christmas."

As I write this, I am sitting in my niece’s old bedroom in my brother’s house, my temporary home for the week. I am Dad-sitting. Dad, who is now 86, has lived with my brother for the past six months, ever since his dementia progressed to the point where he could no longer live on his own. I can only imagine how hard this has been on my brother and his wife. They are away on a much-needed vacation, and I am staying with Dad to keep an eye on things and to fill in where there are gaps in the home health aide schedule.

It’s so difficult, seeing Dad like this. It’s gotten to the point where he either sleeps most of his day away, or he is visibly agitated about some imagined appointment he must keep, or he prattles on nonsensically, using words and phrases reminiscent of his old self – “…it is a well known phenomenon…,” “…in Europe before the war…,” “…I have had no communication…” – but trailing off into meaningless non-sequiturs. Simple activities like walking to the bathroom, getting dressed, and eating meals present great challenges, not because he is physically unable to do them, but because he becomes confused and lost mid-act, and no amount of explanation seems to help.

My father was a professor, a philosopher, a theologian. There’s the obvious irony of a strong intellect brought low by a disease of the mind. But for me, the worst part isn’t watching this scholar – this man not infrequently referred to as a great thinker [“perhaps the most original Jewish theologian of the past half century,” wrote one rabbi] -- struggling to remember how to put on his pants. It’s watching my father – my FATHER -- struggling to remember how to put on his pants.

My father. He and I have had our differences over the years, and as I grew older I learned to see his flaws, but that never changed the fact that he was the quintessential father: steady, reliable, hard-working, strong, devout. Both my parents were brilliant, but Dad was the one who took care of things, who managed all the practical details while making his expectations crystal clear: Get an education, live a life of the mind, be a good Jew. I was never sure I’d measured up to any of these; I know he was disappointed with my choices on the latter, though eventually his affection for me, and even more for my children, impelled him to treat us with unfailing kindness.

The man with whom I’ve spent the past week has shown flashes of his old self, but my father is being steadily erased by the chaotic malfunctioning of his broken brain. Dad is here and not here simultaneously. He is less here all the time.

Christmas day, yesterday, was especially challenging. For one thing, I was on my own with no aide during the day. And for another, he chose this day – or to be more precise, evening, as that seems to be when he is most wakeful – to become really agitated about a delusion that recurs from time to time: that someone from the IRS is coming to conduct some unnamed, urgent, unpleasant business. He repeatedly checked the front door to see if someone was coming [an alarming habit, as he has more than once wandered outside], and he paced fretfully in anticipation of the dreaded visit [also an alarming habit, as he is unsteady on his feet and was injured in a fall just this Thanksgiving].

Finally, he tired himself out and lay down for a nap. This was my opportunity to do the one thing I’d been looking forward to all day: watch the Doctor Who Christmas special, “Last Christmas.”

I love Doctor Who. I wasn’t a fan as a kid – it was always Star Trek for me – but ever since the 2005 relaunch, I’ve fallen in love with the British madman in a box, all the more so since Steven Moffat took over as show runner in 2010. His intricate stories and nuanced characters, wrapped in the fluffy fantasy of family-friendly sci fi, are my idea of perfect escapism – pop-culture myth-making at its best.

So with Dad safely tucked into bed, for the time being at least, I settled down to watch. I may not celebrate Christmas, but I felt like I could use a good dose of the kind of adventurous, wistful nostalgia Doctor Who could be relied upon to dish up at this time of year. Christmas specials are designed as treats for the kids, so you know that, after all the terror and dashing about, there will be a happy ending. I needed a happy ending.

And of course, I got one. But here’s what I didn’t expect: Along the way, I got a very adult-strength shot of reality -- very immediate, and not a little painful.

At one point, Clara, the Doctor’s companion, trapped in a dream state, finds herself at home on Christmas day with the love of her life, Danny – who died in last season’s finale. The dream is a kind of trap that keeps her helpless while an alien feasts on her brain. The Doctor finds a way to enter her dream and urges her to reject it,  wake up, return to reality, and save herself. The Danny of her dream, so real to her – and after all, don’t we tell ourselves that our memories keep our loved ones alive? -- urges her to miss him for only five minutes a day and then get on with her life, because he is dead.

“Do you know why people get together at Christmas?” he asks her. “Because every time they do, it might be the last time. Every Christmas is last Christmas.”

A lump swelled in my throat. Surely, this is my last Christmas with my father. It makes no difference that Christmas is just a date on the calendar for us. Whatever the coming year holds, I don’t think there will be even a glimmer of my dad left by next December 25.

Is there anyone my age who heard that line and didn’t react the same way? Anyone of any age who has felt the sting of loss, or who knows he or she soon will, who didn’t shed a tear? We mark the turnings of the seasons, the year’s end, the milestones, with gatherings of friends and family because, for each of us, there will be a last one. It’s not a truth we generally speak aloud, but we all know it.

“Last Christmas” is about the nightmare of dreams within dreams within dreams; about not knowing the dream from the reality. In the end, the characters are returned to their own realities – awakened -- by Santa Claus and a Time Lord, as absurd and unlikely a pair as any you could dream up. But of course, it doesn’t end there. There is one last awakening. I turn off the TV; Santa and the Time Lord disappear, and I am back in my niece’s old room in my brother’s house, with a father who is with me for one last Christmas.

It’s a funny thing about Doctor Who lately: It’s a family show that often seems to be speaking more to the adults in the room. But I guess that’s what happens when an old, old show about an old, old time traveler is taken over by a middle-aged fan. Steven Moffat grew up with Doctor Who; now Doctor Who is growing up with Steven Moffat.