Chapter 2: A political adolescence
Early Life: Milwaukee
"But I was delighted by my pretty new clothes, by the soda pop and ice cream and by the excitement of being in a real skyscraper, the first five-storey building I had ever seen. In general, I thought Milwaukee was wonderful. Everything looked so colourful and fresh, as though it had just been created, and I stood for hours staring at the traffic and the people. The automobile in which my father had fetched us from the train was the first I had ever ridden in, and I was fascinated by what seemed like the endless procession of cars, trolleys and shiny bicycles on the street. We went for a walk and I peered, unbelieving, into the interior of the pharmacy with its papier máché fisherman advertising cod-liver oil, the barbershop with its weird chairs and the cigar store with its wooden Indian. I remember enviously watching a little girl of my own age dressed up in her Sunday best, with puffed sleeves and high-button shoes, proudly wheeling a doll that reclined grandly on a pillow of its own, and marvelling at the sight of the women in long white skirts and men in white shirts and neckties. It was all completely strange and unlike anything I had seen or known before, and I spent the first days in Milwaukee in a kind of trance.
Very soon we moved to a little apartment of Our own on Walnut Street, in the city’s poorer Jewish section. Today, that part of Milwaukee is inhabited by blacks who are, for the most part, as poor as we were then. But in 1906, the clapboard houses with their pretty porches and steps looked like palaces to me. I even thought that our flat (which had no electricity and no bathroom) was the height of luxury."
"In September, when we had been in America just over three months, my father told us to be sure and watch the famous Labor Day parade in which he, too, would be marching. Dressed up in our new clothes, Mother, Zipke and I took our places at the Street corner he recommended and waited for the parade to begin, not knowing exactly what a parade was, but looking forward to it anyway. Suddenly Zipke saw the mounted police who led the parade. She was absolutely terrified. 'It's the Cossacks! The Cossacks are coming!' she screamed, and sobbed so hard that she had to be taken home and put to bed. But for me that parade - the crowds, the brass bands, ,the floats, the smell of popcorn and hotdogs - symbolised American freedom. Police on horseback were actually escorting the marchers instead of dispersing them and trampling them underfoot, as they were doing in Russia, and I felt the impact of a new way of life."
"No modern hippie, in my opinion, has ever revolted as effectively against the ‘Establishment' of the day as those pioneers did at the beginning of the century. Many of them came from the homes of merchants and scholars, many even From prosperous assimilated families. If Zionism alone had fired them, they could have come to Palestine, bought orange groves there and hired Arabs to do all the work for them. It would have been easier. But they were radicals at heart and deeply believed that only self-labour could truly liberate the Jews from the ghetto and its mentality and make it possible for them to reclaim the land and earn a moral right to it, in addition to the historic right. Some of them were poets, some were cranks, some had stormy personal lives; but what they all had in common was a fervour to experiment, to build a good society in Palestine, or at least a society that would be better than what had been known in most parts of the world. The communes they founded —the kibbutzim of Israel —have endured, I am sure, only because of this genuinely revolutionary social ideal that underlay and still underlies them"