OCEANSIDE, California — Like anybody old enough, I remember when President John F. Kennedy was slain, 56 years ago, November 22, 1963. And I also remember Dr. Glanzberg frightfully clutching his loaf of fresh rye bread.
Our tiny Hebrew day school suddenly sent us home just before two o’clock—exactly when we would have concluded our day with the weekly, all-classes’ welcoming of Sabbath Eve. There would be no plastic mini cups of grape juice, thin challah slices, lit candles, and sung blessings that Friday afternoon—even as a fresh Thanksgiving wreath and some Indian corn were displayed.
Instead, we students stepped out into an unseasonably pleasant fall day in Cincinnati. I scanned the front entranceway on Summit Road: there was my mother in her gray Dodge Lancer with the push-button transmission. The breeze picked up and seemed to start howling and the skies turned dark as I hopped in the seat next to her and realized that she was sobbing. The radio wasn’t playing music. What came through was news piped in from NBC spoken by hushed, urgent-sounding men about confusion and blood and crushed flowers and a young widow in Dallas, Texas. My mother was weeping quietly as I began to understand what had just transpired there.
Nonetheless, we made our way, as we did every Friday afternoon, to pick up a twisted Sabbath challah at the Avon Bakery on Reading Road. There, the narrow-waisted, kindly older ladies, clad in pink service dresses, were working dutifully and silently behind the counter, running poppy seed and regular loaves through the single slicing machine, handing over waxy bags to their customers while openly crying—as the radio on the shelf above the fruit pastry blasted the shocking dispatches from Dallas and Washington.
Next to us stood Dr. Jakub Glanzberg, the sinewy orthodontist who had survived Treblinka and Dachau only eighteen years earlier, and who worked on my braces while vigorously humming along with the Puccini operas piped into the office via Public Radio. Now he held onto his rye bread as if someone terrible was coming back again to take it away from him. He smiled at me in a crooked, forced way and I saw trepidation in his eyes that told me something had been shaken from its foundations. Dr. Glanzberg, normally given to mouthing arias, was trembling with reflexive European terror.
That was the beginning of everything as we came to know the 1960s and it’s hard to remember anything clearly before November 22, 1963. A wispy, eerie man named Lee Harvey Oswald, ex-Marine, alleged commie, Russian expatriate, came through the cathode ray of the black and white television set with the pronged antennae and click-click channel setter. We had real demons to fear and young men to bury, starting with the chestnut-haired president and hemorrhaging into thousands and thousands of peach-fuzz soldiers who began to die for us in the jungles and rice-paddies and fires of Vietnam.
Broadcast live on my luckless living room Zenith, a stocky, gangster-type named Jack Ruby thrust himself out of the grainy crowd in the Dallas police garage and fired a pistol into the sweater of Lee Harvey Oswald that very Sunday afternoon, November 24, 1963.
Suddenly, the government and policemen were no longer sacrosanct as we assumed they were and nothing seemed as safe as we took for granted it would be. There was now “A Threat” out there. Violent death was abruptly an unwelcome companion in our thoughts. Who could have imagined 2019?
Over the next few years, race riots scorched everything from Newark to Watts. Japanese cars and lavish bar/bat mitzvah parties and Afros and bell-bottoms and condoms came through like the tide and my schoolmates went on to their lives.
And yet: I am unable to forget what happened the following Thursday—which was a grim Thanksgiving yet still a national table set for peace. My father and I took a post-turkey walk in the chilly afternoon in the old Roselawn neighborhood and we stumbled upon Dr. Glanzberg and his wife, Lena. Dr. Glanzberg, now only clutching his wife, smiled at me said: “It’s okay, boychik, this is America. It will never fall apart.”
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Rabbi Ben Kamin is an author and freelance writer who may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com