Growing up, as a mixed race child, with survivor grandparents

Posted in Articles, Autobiography, Biography, Europe, History, Judaism, Media Archive, Religion, United States on 2022-03-15 22:27Z by Steven

Growing up, as a mixed race child, with survivor grandparents

Forward
2022-03-08

Kyla Kupferstein
Oakland, California

Courtesy of Kyla Kupferstein
Kyla with her grandmother Fela and grandfather Hershl

As a child growing up in the 1970s and 80s, my younger brother David and I did everything in Manhattan: it was where we lived, went to school and played with our friends.

Except for the weekends when my parents would take us to visit my grandparents in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx. Buba Fela and Zayda Hershl lived in the Amalgamated Houses on Sedgwick Avenue – a cooperative apartment complex that functioned like a reassembled shtetl, a Yiddish-speaking community of Jews from Eastern Europe who had somehow escaped or survived the Nazi genocide and lived to tell the tale.

As my brother and I (known at our grandparents’ home as Kylashi and Davittle) sat at our grandparents’ kitchen table, we were fed a steady diet of Holocaust talk. “The war,” they called it, when they spoke English, which they did only for us. Hitler, Stalin, the camps – all these were a part of their normal vocabulary. And their neighbors, some who had been my grandparents’ friends back in Warsaw, most of them Bundists ranging from agnostic to atheist, were the closest thing to an extended family that we had.

Unlike many other survivors who kept silent because they couldn’t bear to revisit the atrocities, everyone in this community told their stories openly; we waited for those stories, just as we waited for Buba’s misshapen cookies and trips to the sprinklers in Van Cortlandt Park. Countless times we heard the story of how they left: when young men were urged to leave Warsaw because of Hitler’s imminent arrival, my Zayda, Herschel, decided he couldn’t leave without his love, Fela. Her grandfather quickly married them, and they fled to Russia, innocently believing it would be safe for them as socialists. But they were arrested at the Russian border, and then jailed separately in Stalin’s prisons in Siberia

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How street kids in the Bronx taught me it’s OK to be biracial and gay

Posted in Articles, Arts, Autobiography, Gay & Lesbian, Latino Studies, Media Archive, Religion, United States on 2016-05-18 21:06Z by Steven

How street kids in the Bronx taught me it’s OK to be biracial and gay

Fusion
2016-05-18

Terry Blas

As a “nerdy, Mexican, gay, Mormon child of the ’80s and ’90s,” cartoonist Terry Blas had trouble figuring out his identity… until an experience in New York taught him a valuable lesson.

Read the entire comic strip here.

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Popup cafe uses derogatory drink names in bid to get people talking about race

Posted in Articles, Arts, Media Archive, United States on 2014-12-19 20:07Z by Steven

Popup cafe uses derogatory drink names in bid to get people talking about race

New York Daily News
2014-12-17

Ben Kochman

The bizarre java joint offers drinks with derogatory names like “The Half Breed” and “The Mutt,” which organizers insist will help start a helpful conversation about race, even if some are offended. (Ben Kochman/New York Daily News)

Come for the java, stay for the jolting chat about race.

Organizers of a Bronx pop-up café and art installation selling drinks with derogatory names are OK if you’re offended — at first.

“If you come in and you’re offended, then maybe you’ll leave and maybe be more sensitive before you say these things to other people,” said Vernicia Colon, co-founder of the Mix Coffeehaus, a temporary shop in Mott Haven.

Drinks include “The Mulatto” — part espresso, part milk — and “The One Drop” — a hot chocolate made from chocolate syrup dropped into hot milk — a play on the “one drop rule” colloquial term for people labeled black even though they have only one black relative…

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