The Bolsheviks toppled the Russian Empire in 1917. My father fled to California six years later to become an American citizen. Why America? Because he sensed that Americans believed not only in “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” but also in due process and in the law itself. ‘There is no czar or emperor in America,’ he thought.
He worked in San Francisco as a short order cook and a car salesman. He returned to Harbin in 1928 to court the girl he had remembered ever since she was 8, my mother. In 1940, when they no longer felt safe in Harbin, they made the 1,500-mile railway journey to Shanghai, the only place in the region that admitted Jews at the time. They married, and I was born months before Japan occupied Shanghai and attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
Being a U.S. citizen, my father was forcibly taken from our small apartment and confined in a notorious Japanese prison camp in Pootung, Shanghai, in 1943. Watching in tears and confusion as the Japanese police hauled my father away to the dilapidated tobacco factory that Japan had turned into a “Civil Assembly Center,” I absorbed an almost instinctive distrust of unbridled power, power to break up families and snuff out freedom.
My father survived more than two years in the unspeakable conditions of that prison camp. In 1945, as World War II ended and the camp was liberated by U.S. military, he secured passage in the hold of a decommissioned American troop ship and brought his growing family—my mother, me, and my infant brother—to San Francisco, where my brother and I soon became naturalized American citizens. We later became the first in our extended family to attend college.
When my father died on the fortieth anniversary of his marriage to my mother, she gave me an American flag that held a special place in her life with my father. Here is the story of that flag.
It was a present she secretly gave him when he was jailed. My father needed hope to survive that harrowing prison camp. And my mother knew that the American flag, the symbol of the country that had welcomed him, a stateless Jew, to citizenship years earlier, would supply that hope. After all, he was right to have gone to America: To him, and to my mother, the America that had gone to war against the fascist, antisemitic nations of Germany and Italy and their imperial ally Japan stood for principles of freedom and fairness.