The story goes that my paternal grandfather, Nathan Goldberg (originally Majofis), walked across the Canadian border into the United States in about 1896. A young man, he was born in the Russian Empire and left around 1894 to look for his father who had emigrated to what was then Palestine. After a very long, arduous journey, he discovered that his father had been murdered several months before.  

Without a reason to stay in the middle east, he headed to America, making his way first to Canada and then to the United States. He knew he couldn’t go back to Russia because he would face potentially deadly discrimination. Although he never got to know it, several of his siblings and their families never made it out before catastrophe descended on them in the mid-twentieth century. 

In my grandfather’s time, there were very few restrictions on new immigrants: The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was one. Mostly, anyone could get off a ship or simply walk into America – like Nathan. Once here, he kept walking – months of walking – and ended up in Lowell, MA, probably because he had heard that there were jobs in this bustling, industrial city. He did what most other immigrants did: located a place to live, worked extremely hard, and found a wife. He and Rebecca Wernick, also an immigrant, married in January 1900. They toiled ceaselessly, lived in poverty, became citizens, and had seven children, one of whom died in childhood. 

Nathan was killed in an accident in 1918, leaving Rebecca with six kids from age sixteen to two-and-a-half. She kept going, found a way to make money (including illegally), and made sure her kids graduated from high school.

This is not an unusual story. Putting food on the table, endless, grueling struggle, and ultimate survival are universal themes of impoverished immigrants. Rebecca and Nathan produced good, productive children.

I consider what would have happened If my grandparents had stayed in the old country. I, along with them, my parents, and siblings would have been murdered. I would have been about four years old.

This forces me to reflect on current anti-immigrant policies and attitudes. Certainly, in my grandparents’ time there were hostile attitudes towards immigrants. “No Irish Need Apply,” “No Dogs and Jews Allowed,” “No Italians Allowed.” And, yes, there were dangerous criminals among these groups as there are today. But most people then and now come to the U.S. to  flee life-threatening circumstances, escape overwhelming poverty, and establish a future for themselves and their children. 

In the twenty-first century, although it is hard to determine exact numbers, a 2024 study by The National Institute of Justice in Texas, for example, found that undocumented immigrants were arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes. Arrest rates were used as proxies for actual rates of commission. Yet, in sickening irony, while immigrants are targeted for deportation, the new administration, pardoned fifteen hundred – mostly white – Americans who were convicted of violence against individuals, police and property. How can that be?

One potential answer for me is that we are approaching, or already in, an era of tyranny – “a government or situation where a small group or single ruler has too much power and uses it in a cruel and unfair way.” In this case, against immigrants and for a favored constituency. 

In 2017, Timothy Snyder published “On Tyranny” in which he explores how tyranny can quickly take over democratic governments and institutions. He notes that our “…Founding Fathers sought to avoid…the usurpation of power by a single individual or group, or the circumvention of law by rulers for their own benefit.” (p. 10) Is this is what is happening here and now? Yes, and it’s alarming!

One thing I – just one person – can do about this ominous situation is write about it.

Nathan with Family, 1917