Photo by Peggy Sue Zinn

I grew up in small-town America. Specifically, in a place where my family was a tiny minority. Agree with the stereotype or not, Jews in that town were primarily occupied running small retail shops of one kind or another. These shops ran the gamut from a small retail store with pretty much empty shelves to very successful clothing stores. Our small community within a town that had depended on textiles to provide jobs for workers had already seen an exodus of a few of its second-generation children leaving for more prosperous settings and occupations that required advanced educations of different kinds. The textile industry left for the US South and then for Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Far East.

My mother, Sylvia (Tales of an American Shtetl, 2011), who was a very political person, was the cochair of two presidential campaigns at the state-wide level. There was a card-playing group that met in a round robin kind of setting at bridge players members’ homes. One of my first recollections of any hostility and the clash of values within that group, made up entirely of women, was a next-door neighbor, whose son was a psychologist, and went on to become an advisor to a national daytime television show that had a segment on which children appeared.

I don’t know the exact year of the clash, but I recall that it was over the Vietnam War. Our neighbor and bridge player defended the war and my mother was vehemently opposed to it. Looking........

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