I am in denial of my aging process. I have been blessed with enviable family genes which include my still having all my hair, thick and dark. Expanding on that good fortune, I look younger than the years I’ve accrued. I’m 65. Not that I do this, but I can get away with saying I’m 50 without having anyone doubt me. But 50 isn’t considered “young” by young people. I know men who, at age 40, look older than I. Yes, it’s subjective, but it’s not misplaced ego. I am aware and grateful.
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Several years ago, while on vacation at a picket fenced-in guest house in Key West, Florida, I met a man named Walter Stern. At the time, I was somewhere in my early 30’s. Walter was 71 years old which, if I remember correctly, was the same age as my mother. He looked quite weathered to me. Tall and thin, sparse grey hair with a ghostly pale white body and deep lines on his face. He thought he looked young for his years. Though I was happy that he believed that to be true, he was wrong. And in my opinion, Walter was not a handsome 71. Arguably dignified, there was nothing physically attractive about him and no signs of his having once been a catch. Obviously, I could be off about his appearance in his younger days.
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Walter was a German Jew. As a boy during Hitler’s reign, he was wheelchair bound, afflicted with bone cancer. People spit at him. For so many reasons, I can’t stand visualizing that.
His family owned a farm in the Bavarian area of Germany. All their land, buildings and goods were confiscated and sanctioned as “government property” by the Nazis. I don’t know the history of his relatives: who survived and why. Who didn’t and how. Perhaps their not living in a city made it less difficult to hide, or not be hunted like rabid animals.
I can’t remember Walter telling me when he came to the United States. He didn’t speak with a German accent. By the time we met in the 1990’s, he was a retired textile worker, living well in an apartment in Forest Hills, a lovely, Tudor strewn area of Queens, NY. I believe he worked his way up to ownership of the Seventh Avenue company in New York City’s Garment District for which he was employed his entire adult life. His lover of many years had been an African American man, living in Harlem, uptown on the west side of Manhattan. He had passed away some time before Walter and I met.
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After returning home to New York, the following month I invited Walter to join me for an early dinner and drinks in Soho. I had landed a job at a large, grey walled gallery on West Broadway, across from a high-end clothing store called the Gallery of Wearable Art. They featured a beautiful, living mannequin in their display window — a woman — who posed for hours at a time. I loved watching her stay absolutely still: making small, strategic movements every once in a while. If you stood directly in front of the window for a few moments, she might wink at you. How she stayed motionless and emotionless is a rare skill and must have been something she was schooled to do. Reminiscent of the frozen stance and expressionless face held by British guards outside of Buckingham Palace. Men dressed in their uniform finery, as if they had stepped out of “The Nutcracker” ballet.
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Walter and I dined at a trendy restaurant a few doors down from the gallery. When the weather was clear and warm, which in this case it was, there were tables placed outside on a serrated iron platform the width of the building. The floor-to-ceiling windows folded into themselves and seemed to vanish, exposing the cavernous space and opening the front wall for guests to view the theatrical street scene. This was during Soho’s hey day, before the elite galleries moved north to an undeveloped piece of Chelsea.
One memorable restaurant in that desolate far westside area was Florent, named for it’s French born owner. Years before Chelsea embarked on her evolution, Florent was open 24 hours a day, hidden in plain sight among warehouses as well as gay bars that, decades earlier, had been strategically placed at the edge of the city’s foreboding fringe. On a cobble stone street across from a bagel factory and beneath a decaying trestle, lived this diner/bistro where truck drivers, club kids (of which I was one), celebrities and drag queens congregated to capacity during the black hours after midnight.
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In Soho, as we casually dined, Walter and I talked about his business and his late boyfriend. I remember feeling an affection for him that I still cannot categorize. What I mean by that is he didn’t feel like a father figure to me, nor a friend who happened to be twice my age. I was attentive to his story-telling as he relayed the details of his life when he was young, during a period of time that was now chronicled in history books. As genuinely interested as I was, I had no agenda as far as forming some lasting friendship with him.
I have a fascination with what occurred in Germany in the 1930s and 40s. I find it incredible, the depths of hate and cruelty humans can unleash when permission is encouraged in society. Walter was more than an historical witness.
As a Jew, I’ve never had to suffer the ripple or overt affects of anti-semitism. Less than 2.5 percent of Americans are Jewish, yet there is a significant population in New York City: the largest in the world, outside of the country of Israel. Though I was not bar mitzvahed, a ritual considered a right-of-passage for a Jewish teenage boy, I am a Jew by culture on all sides. I’ve become militantly proud of my heritage as I’ve gotten older. When I was in high school, I didn’t think it was “sexy.” That may seem like an odd adjective. To strangers, I sometimes pretended to be Italian. I now see that self denial as self-hatred. And frankly, my last name reveals my background, even after having been Americanized at Ellis Island, when my grandfather emigrated from Russia.
I can’t say I celebrate my culture with any religious fervor, but for me, it is part of my identity. And I owe it not just to my family, but to people like Walter, on whose shoulders I proudly rest, without thinking on the privileges I am able to take for granted. Walter Stern. A Jewish man who survived 20th Century European horrors, to embrace a new life in a world an ocean away. A country he chose to call home.