A Secret Gift (38 page)

Reading the correspondence between Minna and the attorneys, I finally understood why she had felt so threatened by my inquiries into Sam’s past, and was so insistent that I give her my word that I would not pursue it. It was not only Sam’s good name at stake but her own as well. Out of her desire to protect her husband, she had allowed herself to be compromised, to enter into a kind of conspiracy with him. Her entire life, Minna had been a model of probity and forthrightness. Taking up Sam’s cause must have pained her greatly. The prospect of having the truth discovered by her own grandson, an investigative reporter, the one in whom she had invested so much ethical energy and teaching, would have pained her greatly. The promise she extracted did not bar me for life from pursuing the truth, but only protected her for the duration of her life from having to answer to me.

AT THE SAME time that Sam fretted over the Alien Registration Act, a world away in Dorohoi, things were quickly unraveling for the remaining five thousand Jews. The Christians in town received warning that the Jews were to be targeted and were advised to put religious icons in their windows so that the mayhem would pass them by. The next day, July 1, 1940, as many as two hundred Jewish residents were murdered, their homes looted, their bodies picked over and left in the streets. The victims’ families were forced to sign statements that the assailants had been unknown to them. The pogrom was only the first step in what would become a systematic effort to exterminate Dorohoi’s Jews. Such actions were being played out across the continent. Hitler was on the move. For Sam Stone, such news rekindled his worst childhood nightmares.

Sam and his siblings, indeed even many of their descendants, were so scarred by the experience of Romanian persecution and the accounts of Nazi horrors that they forever feared being sent back. Among them there was a sense that no matter how calm the surface, there always stirred, just beneath, the very real threat of a violent anti-Semitic eruption—even here in America. My grandfather said as much to me more than once. Call him paranoid or irrational, but history suggested otherwise. Against this wider canvas, the specter of persecution and the fear of prison or deportation, baseless or not, rose up inside him. The dread of being returned to that world against his will—or of it now reaching into the New World—was part of the Stone family’s emotional makeup. There weren’t enough miles to place them beyond such fears.

But rather than cower at the news, Sam chose to express his solidarity with those who were trying to stop Hitler and put an end to his maniacal anti-Semitism. In late May and early June hundreds of thousands of French and British soldiers had been evacuated from the shores of Dunkirk, and London had become a target of German bombing. So on October 5, 1940, even as he was mired in his own citizenship issues, Sam Stone wrote a letter to the British ambassador to the United States, Lord Lothian:

That week, Sam Stone anonymously paid for an Allied Relief Fund ad to appear in the October 13, 1940,
Canton Repository,
which produced additional contributions. And though the British Embassy in Washington knew his identity—a concession he made to the necessity of arranging the shipment of wool coats—no one else did. Once again, the
Canton Repository
wrote an article about this anonymous donor, under the headline, A GESTURE OF FREEDOM—DEMOCRACY LOVING CANTONIAN SENDS 50 COATS TO ENGLAND.

Into a pocket of each of the coats bound for London, Sam Stone placed a typed letter. It read:

Sam was an able wordsmith, especially considering his limited formal education, and he often spoke in dramatic tones about the virtues of democracy. But the eloquence of this letter, with its rhetorical flourishes, was likely also the work of my grandmother Minna, who was widely read and had a formidable vocabulary. Most likely, they authored the letter together, Sam providing the passion, and Minna, the oratorical high notes. From Sam’s point of view, the British were all that stood between the darkness he had grown up with and the America he had grown to love.

But Sam Stone’s concern for the British was not unique. By the end of 1940, the English War Relief Society reported that some twenty-five thousand coats were ready to be shipped from America to England, many of them coming from this nation’s clothiers and manufacturers. And among those who pitched in to aid the Brits were Sam’s daughters, Virginia and Dorothy, then twelve and ten. They are pictured in the
Canton Repository
among twenty-five girls “bending earnestly over knitting needles, working white, navy blue and olive green colored yarns into sea boots, scarfs, sweaters, wristlets and caps and mufflers,” all of which were to go to the British War Relief Society.

It was not only the individuals of Canton who reached out to the vulnerable but businesses as well. The Hoover Company arranged for eighty-four British children of its employees in England and Scotland to live with Hoover Company families and others in Canton for the duration of the war. Around town that Christmas Eve, in keeping with their homeland’s customs, the children hung pillowcases from the bedposts (instead of stockings) in expectation of Santa’s arrival.

VIII
.

N
ot long after the war ended, Sam and Minna bought a home in Florida, wintering in Golden Beach and spending their summers at the lake house in Ohio. Sam sold his clothing stores and, taking advantage of the real estate boom in Florida, helped develop Hollywood and Miami Shores. By the early 1950s they were living in an oceanfront apartment in the Carlton Terrace in Bal Harbour. That a man whose childhood was rooted in such hardship should come to enjoy such a retirement was a testament to his resourcefulness but also to that of the country that had made a place for him and so many other immigrants undesired by other nations. Throughout Florida, there were others from Canton who had written to B. Virdot in the terrible years of the Depression and who now, two decades later, shared in a retirement that had once seemed unattainable.

For Sam, those years were filled with irony. From his balcony he could look out across the Atlantic from where he had come half a century earlier. But in another sense, he did not have far to look to see where he was from. The building next door was the eight-story Kenilworth House, and it was, in the vernacular of the late fifties, “restricted.” That meant Jews were not allowed to live there. It was something of an anomaly in that area, which had drawn so many Jews, including many Holocaust survivors, that here in plain view was a testament to the New World’s brand of gentrified anti-Semitism.

From his terrace, the building nearly filled Sam’s southern view, but he chose to look past it. Its residents were affluent. Some were prominent, including restaurateur Howard Johnson and radio and television celebrity Arthur Godfrey. It is said that years earlier a sign was posted at the Kenilworth that read, NO DOGS OR JEWS ALLOWED. The story may well be apocryphal, but it reflected the fears and experiences of many of the Jews who lived in its vicinity.

Sam was well aware of the building’s status, but seemed to accept the idea of living next door to people who would rather be much farther away from his kind. The same could not be said of me. As a child visiting my grandparents, I was always hyperaware that I was unwelcome next door. When I took walks down the beach and crossed the Kenilworth’s property or came within its chill shadow, my pace quickened and I felt a tremor as if I were standing in some forbidden area.

But the ironies of Sam Stone’s residence did not end there. In 1974, my father, the son of a rabbi, dropped dead of a heart attack. He was fifty. My mother left Canton and moved in with her parents, Sam and Minna. A year after my father’s death, my mother, then a slim and attractive forty-seven-year-old, met a man on the beach and fell in love. His name was Donald Sharpe. They were married on Valentine’s Day, 1976.

But there was a problem. Don lived in the Kenilworth. Worse yet, he was a member of its co-op board, which had enforced the policy against Jews. If my mother—Sam Stone’s daughter—were to live there, concessions would have to be sought from the board. A waiver was granted (to my chagrin), and my mother moved in. Equally troubling was the fact that Don, now my stepfather, belonged to La Gorce Country Club, which was notorious for excluding Jews. For Don, the club was his home away from home.

Given my grandfather’s traumatic youth in Romania and his obsession with Hitler and the Nazis, one might imagine that he and Don would have had a frosty relationship. In fact, they quickly became best friends. They were both from humble beginnings in Pennsylvania, had no stomach for pretense, and enjoyed a good joke. When Don told my mother he was going to give Sam a present—a light blue windbreaker with the crest of La Gorce Country Club emblazoned on the pocket along with the letters “LGCC”—my mother predicted he would refuse it on principle.

But when Don jokingly told Sam the letters
LGCC
stood for “Large Gains Could Come,” Sam laughed and proudly donned the jacket. By then, Sam was well into his eighties and had made a curious peace with the world and its prejudices. The jacket became a favorite of his, a symbol of an unlikely friendship between my grandfather, the refugee Jew, and Don, the Gentile who lived where Jews were not welcome.