My maternal grandfather, who couldn’t read or write and could do only enough arithmetic to not get cheated, ran his own soda company. In New Haven, he made and bottled soda and installed soda fountains. His wife, the only one of my grandparents to have been born here and the only one with much education, graduated from a business high school and did his books. My mother was the youngest of 6 – he got rid of his horses and carts, replacing them with trucks, just before she was born in 1921. My father’s parents did a variety of things, from running a kosher dairy store to farming in NJ. Mostly, they were in the rag trade and were union organizers for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union. The name “Dubinsky” was never utter in our house. Grandpa, who I met a very few times, would sit and eat in the window on Yom Kippur just to upset people. It worked. My parents, first generation American Jews, went to college on the GI Bill, volunteered for WWII, nearly moved to Canada to keep their son from being drafted into the horror that was the Vietnam War and were both members of their teachers’ union. And raised two kids who’ve done their best to honor all of this.
