Lotty’s grandfather had sent her and her brother from Vienna to London with the Kindertransport in the summer of 1939. English immigration laws meant the adults had to stay behind, and they all— grandparents, parents, aunts, as well as her cousins whose family lacked the money or connections to send them west—had perished in the death camps.
Lotty and Max—who’d come to London from Prague, also with the Kindertransport—had grown up in central Europe listening to anti-Jewish hatred on the airwaves and in their schools. I could only imagine how painful it must be to hear the same lies bleated again in America.
Jake gave Lotty’s shoulder a sympathetic squeeze and went into the apartment. We heard him at the piano, softly playing “Erbarme dich,” from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. We sat for a long time in the dark, watching the moonlight ripple on the black lake beyond, as Jake improvised on the melody. The bass is his instrument but he can handle a piano—he says it’s just a bass with two hundred thirty strings.
After a time, I went to sit next to him. He put his right arm around me; with his left, he played the chords and coached me through the aria.
Later, back at our own building on Racine, Jake came into my place with me. From some perverse impulse, we turned on the television to see if we could find Wade Lawlor’s show. Since GEN broadcast it four times a day, we caught the ten-o’clock broadcast.
I fetched my mother’s Italian wineglasses and a bottle of Black Label—I had a feeling that we’d need something to calm our nerves. After the appropriate drumrolls and logos and ads, the camera moved in on a stern-looking Wade Lawlor, sitting in an armchair next to a small table covered with books and papers.
He was wearing his usual blue-checked shirt, his thick hair in its carefully arranged tangle. When I met him last night, I hadn’t noticed the intense blue of his eyes, but I realized now he wore the blue shirt to make his eyes stand out on camera. At the beginning of the show, he leaned back in the chair, but as the broadcast wore on, his urgency moved him to the edge of the seat and his head came up and out at the viewer like a frenzied adder’s.
“My fellow Americans,” he began, as if he were the president of the United States. “My comrades in arms, my brothers and sisters who share my passion for liberty and my fear that we are letting Fascists, Communists, even terrorists who are hiding under protection of our Constitution”—here he broke off to wave a piece of yellowed parchment in front of the camera—“we are letting terrorists flush our precious freedoms down the toilet to Mexico.”
He took a sip of water—his emotion was so powerful he had to steady himself.
I’ve talked to you before about one of these terrorists. He operates brazenly, boldly, right here in Chicago, and he has no use for America or Americans any more than he had use for his parents or siblings or friends in the country of his birth. That’s right. I’m talking about Chaim Salanter.
“Chaim” should be pronounced to rhyme with “time,” or even “rhyme,” but Lawlor deliberately mispronounced it to make it sound like “shame.”
When he was thirteen, Chame Salanter came of age, under Jewish law. Now, I’ve gotten ugly e-mail from terrorist sympathizers, telling me I’m not saying that name right, but I’m an American and I only know how to talk one language, American.
So back in Foreignland, the first thing this new young man Chame did was get rid of his parents. Yep, Chame sold his parents to the Nazi invaders, and they let him out, maybe the one life they should have taken, but they spared him so he could operate ruthlessly on the streets of Vilnius. Chame bought and sold the trinkets of desperate people and began to amass his fortune.
Lawlor opened a book and the camera panned on photos of gaunt Jews with stars on their coats, standing in a barren city square. There was no way of knowing where or when the picture had been taken.
Using the chaos of post-war Europe as a convenient cover, Chame Salanter came to the United States, pretending to be a refugee. A ruthless Communist like him learned how to milk the capitalist system. He’d dealt in poor people’s last hopes in Lithuania; here in America he turned to the same trade, scrap metal, but he soon saw that the real money was in the fake markets, the stocks and bonds and options and other things too sophisticated for people like you and me to understand.
Chame took our savings and turned them into one ginormous fortune. And now he’s using that fortune as a Trojan horse. He has a foundation, the Malina Foundation [background footage of the Malina Building with a big wooden horse rolling through the front doors onto Van Buren Street].
Malina looks out for the “rights” [Lawlor made air quotes with his fingers] of refugees and immigrants. What is that but a big cover for sneaking terrorists into America, just as he snuck here himself ? What about your rights?
And last night, an American citizen, a hardworking American trying to make an honest dollar, was brutally murdered in an abandoned Jewish cemetery.