“No more than two days” turned into a week. The Gorinskis remained inside the house, as instructed. The Blumbergs’fifteen-year-old son, Sam, was sworn to secrecy, which lasted almost halfway through homeroom the following morning at school, where the teacher, aware of the rumors circulating among Marblehead High School’s large Jewish student body, came right out and asked for a show of hands, asking who took in refugees in the middle of the night. As hands were slowly raised, a good third of the students responded. Then, one after another, rather than raising their hands, they stood up, beaming, as their classmates applauded.
Helping refugees was a good thing, right? They’d be heroes. The kids who didn’t have refugees show up during the early morning felt as if they’d done something wrong.
All efforts at secrecy ceased within days of the sudden appearance of thousands of new cousins, uncles and aunts. Warnings to keep the new visitors hidden indoors began to seem pointless. A quick trip to the mall couldn’t hurt. After all, these people needed clothes, didn’t they? And maybe a nice meal out, and a movie—how could a movie hurt?
Jewish families that turned down refugees, families that said no or slammed down the telephone when asked to take people in, had second thoughts. What kind of examples were these parents to their children, especially when it seemed that all of their friends had said yes? Refugee families quickly became commodities, transferred from house to house as offers came in volunteering to share the burden.
Secrecy dissolved. The Salem Daily News ran interviews with Israeli refugees living in North Shore homes, changing names and addresses to protect the “secret locations” at which they were living.
A fundraising rally to aid refugees was organized five days after the escape. A Jewish community shell-shocked at the destruction of Israel, ashamed that their government did nothing to stop it and appeared to be buckling in to the demands of the triumphant Arab states, opened their wallets as they’d opened their homes.
A long-range resettlement committee was formed. It appeared that the escape of the passengers of the Ionian Star and the Iliad was a fait accompli.
Until the protests began.
The tone of newspaper editorials gradually changed from “The government must seek a long-term solution to this tragic problem” to “We cannot let one group take the law into their own hands and accomplish by lawlessness and violence what they could not accomplish by government action.” Boston’s Haitian community, stung by raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, decimated by deportations of longtime but undocumented residents, led the first march on the John F. Kennedy Federal Building at Government Center in Boston.
Deport White Illegals, Too, the largest banner read. Henrique Depardieux, the chairman of the Massachusetts Haitian Rights Committee, made his point clearly.
“ICE knows where these people are staying. It knows they are here with no papers. It knows they broke the law to enter this country. Yet we see these people on the news every night being taken to shopping malls to buy new clothes. We see the Jews raising millions of dollars to give to these people. Why doesn’t the government round them up the same way they rounded up my brothers and sisters?
“We will return here every day until every one of these white illegal immigrants is placed on the same airplanes that took black refugees away from us. We will not be stopped. We have suffered. Now it is time to prove to us that our suffering was not in vain, that this country treats blacks and whites alike.”
A half dozen uniformed storm troopers from the United Nationalists Movement drove through the night from Mississippi to parade in front of the Kennedy Building. Swastika-adorned flags straddling a banner declaring Jail the Jews were broadcast on TV news.
By the third day of demonstrations, the Haitians were in the minority. Mexicans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans marched with them. They, too, had lost family members to deportation. A South Boston Irish contingent joined the demonstration, as did a small group of Chinese.
The South Boston group carried a different banner. They, of course, could not complain about different treatment for whites. Their uncles and aunts, cousins, nieces and nephews who came to Boston from Cork and Galway, from Dublin and Donegal, looking for work after the Irish economic bubble burst, only to be rounded up and sent home when their tourist visas expired, were as white as the Jews from the two ships. The South Boston banner said, No Special Treatment for Jews.
While these events took place, Howie Mandelbaum, the only person arrested the night of the sinkings, remained in the Charles Street Jail. He would not be alone for long.
CHAPTER 13
At five seconds per channel, it took Adam Shapiro three minutes to flip through the circuit of cable TV selections. It drove his father crazy. It was a skill Shapiro’s generation lacked but his son seemed to have been born with, just as his son could carry on a conversation with his parents while at the same time slaying enemy soldiers on his Nintendo. Cartoons, movies, talk shows, commercial after commercial cycled past on the screen, all while Shapiro hoped to spend some time with his son. TV time together might not be “quality” time, but it was time together.
Shapiro lost patience.
“Okay. Enough. Stop that,” he barked. “Why don’t we look at the listings and decide what we want to watch.”
“That’s not how I do it, Dad. I have to see what’s on before I decide,” Adam responded. “It just takes a minute.”
“All right, but come on, make a decision,” Shapiro said, only half paying attention to the TV, fascinated by his son’s intense concentration on the screen, eyes pinched together, analyzing each five-second segment and literally making instant thumbs-up or down calls.
“Call me back when you’ve decided.” He walked toward the door of the room they called “the TV Room,” much as Shapiro disliked that label.
Just as he reached the door, a phrase caught Shapiro’s attention. He swiveled around.
“Punish the so-called Chosen people for spitting in God’s face,” he heard a voice say from the TV as the channel flipped to a Toyota commercial. “Zero percent financing…”
“Wait,” Shapiro told his son. “Flip back to that last one. I want to hear what he’s saying.”
“Dad, no. It’s some God show or something.”
Before Adam could say anything more, Shapiro grabbed the remote and toggled the channel button to return to the previous show.
“What I am saying, in plain American English, is that God wants us to round up the Jews in this country. Time to take our country back.”
Shapiro saw two men in dark suits standing in front of what looked like a living room set—two comfortable chairs and a coffee table. The man speaking was being ejected from the set, none too subtly. A young blonde walked on, smiling and excited, bouncing up and down in her enthusiasm, her hemline demurely below her knees, two breasts that someone other than the Lord gave to her bouncing to a rhythm of their own. The show’s host, however, took a couple of seconds to recover before greeting the woman with a broad and perhaps overly enthusiastic hug.
“Why does that man want to round up all the Jews, Dad?” Adam asked. “I don’t understand what he’s talking about. I thought that was something they did back in history. I don’t understand.”
Shapiro saw the tentatively fearful expression on his son’s face. This will be a quality parenting moment after all, he thought.