by Barbara Fischkin
It was the summer of 1961. I was six years old. My mother and I had arrived in Omaha the night before, flying out of what was still “Idlewild,” not JFK International Airport, as it is now named. We would visit relatives with roots in the same Eastern European shtetl as my mother. Unlike most of the family, this branch had left the New York area for the cornfields of the American Midwest.
The relatives—Max and his wife, Sarah, their grown children Geraldine and Stanley and a bachelor brother, Sam—were the only Jewish people on their street. My mother told me this before we left—to prepare me. She knew that coming from the Midwood section of Brooklyn, I would find this odd. No other Jews? My mind, though, was fixated on adventure, being so far from New York for the first time, meeting new cousins and taking my first airplane ride.
Cousin Sarah, her hair already white, told me she had never been on an airplane. I remember the envious tone in her voice. I noticed her tone carried a signal that I was too young, thus undeserving, to have been granted this privilege.
I blew that off, as kids do at an age when guilt does not, or should not, get in the way of a good time. My mother suggested that I go across the street to play with a little girl who lived in a big house. I probably guessed she wasn’t Jewish but my mind was still fixated on this new adventure.
With curiosity but without an iota of fear, I walked across that wide Omaha street by myself. Remember, those were the free-range days. I rang the doorbell and a girl my age answered. She had dark hair, not as black as mine, and a few dense freckles. I do not remember her name, perhaps because within minutes she said something so terrifying that it has blocked out everything else I learned about her that summer.
“Are you are from New York?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Who did your parents vote for, for president?”
“Kennedy,” I said, amazed that she would ask. In Brooklyn, as far as I knew, every adult had voted for Kennedy.
“My father says he should be assassinated,” she replied.
I now know Kennedy had lost the state of Nebraska with only 37.9% of the total vote. And two years later he would be assassinated. In Texas.
But back then, as a child, all I could do was stand shocked. Somehow, at six, I knew what the word “assassinated” meant. Maybe I had heard it mentioned in connection with Abraham Lincoln. Although now when I think back, in school we had only learned that Lincoln was “killed” by John Wilkes Booth. Could I have heard “assassinated” mentioned in Brooklyn—that Kennedy, as the first Catholic president and a staunch Democrat could be a target?
We played for a while. Then, I went home. I remember telling my mother what this new friend had said. I do remember using the word “assassinated” with my mother. As a child, I shared all details with her. She must have been shocked but she didn’t let on. We were in “foreign” territory. With so few Jews, it might be enemy territory as well. I played with this little girl for the entire month we were in Nebraska. Maybe my mother thought that such a thing as the assassination of a president could not happen in the modern America of the 1960s.
I believe it was educational for my mother to send me across the street alone. I have considered how this would have been a different experience if my mother had walked me across the street, helicopter style, and heard the same threat. She might have tried to take over the conversation, likely telling the little girl that such thoughts were “not nice.” How would she have dealt with a situation in which she told a child that her father’s opinion was a bad one? Would she have demanded to see the little girl’s parents and caused a scene, leaving some kind of indelible mark on me? There’s no way to know. What I do know is that I “survived” this incident with my own stamina and that alone taught me the value of being an independent child—and an independent adult.
I write this as the second offering of my memoir-in-progress, because it was the first time I can remember thinking that America might not be safe. And worse, that in my own times Americans wanted to kill other Americans. By the time I was four I knew about the anti-Semitic pogrom my mother had escaped “in the old country.” She was six-years-old when she ran from a burning building dodging murderous Cossacks. Later, with her family, she literally walked across Europe to escape to the United States, when she was the same age as I was that summer in Omaha.
Americans killing Americans soon became a current-day reality, with the assassination of JFK, then Martin Luther King, then Robert Kennedy. And on college campuses. Four students shot dead by the National Guard at Kent State. Eleven days later police killed two students and wounded a dozen at Jackson State.
We have returned to widespread campus protests for the first time since the end of the Vietnam war. Students across the country have created tent cities and set up vigils demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. Hundreds have been arrested. The current speaker of the house Mike Johnson went to Columbia University to suggest the National Guard was required to tame the chanting Ivies. The outlandish suggestion ignored the fact that the NYPD was already arresting students, for better or worse. (My opinion: For worse). What more would the National Guard do? I contemplate this and shudder.
It is a symbol of our troubled times that such a preposterous notion did not bring jeers. We live in a time when a celebrated campaign speech included the presumptive GOP nominee displaying a cartoon depicting the President of the United States hog-tied in the back of a pickup. We live in a time where a majority of GOP voters think history books should whitewash the January 6 attack on the Capitol, a time when seemingly legitimate folks—including Senators and members of Congress—claim that that the folks who chanted “Hang Mike Pence” were only joshing.
There is a notion that the country needs to return to the “good old days” a time when students were kept in line with military rifles, a time where “separate but equal” education was accepted. We are now in a time when otherwise reasonable folks suggest violence as a legitimate response to folks who disagree with them. I wonder what the little girl I once was would think about sending soldiers to college campuses with rifles to get students to pipe down. I wonder what her Nebraskan friend would think. And what would the father who wanted JFK assassinated think? I do not want to contemplate this last question too deeply.
Postscript: REMARKS OF SENATOR JOHN F. KENNEDY, OMAHA, NEBRASKA, MAY 7, 1960
“And in this vital process of selecting a candidate Nebraska has always played an important role. For this is a historic primary — one of the first in the nation, dating all the way back to 1911. Every Democratic President in this century has come to Nebraska to submit his candidacy to the judgment of your people—Woodrow Wilson in 1912, Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, and Harry Truman in 1948. And Republican contenders too—over the years—have come to Nebraska. Your primary is an important vital tradition in Nebraska politics, forged in the spirit of the progressive popular reform movement which inspired both parties in this state under Bryan, Norris and a host of others.
“For if a candidate wishes to understand the needs and aspirations of the people he seeks to serve—he must go among them. He must view the cities and towns and factories and farms first hand. He must campaign in all sections of the country—the East, the West, and the Far West—if he is to understand the problems of all sections— and not merely his own. He must listen as well as talk, see as well as be seen, learn as well as teach. And the primary is the greatest instrument there is for that kind of education.”