Dear People,
I’m just a little older than you, though not much. I’ll be turning 153 years old next week – and that century-plus can be very important. Just like you, I moved to New York in my 20’s, looking to make my mark, but I was also set on pursuing my dreams of avoiding the roving bands of murderers who wandered my Eastern European country looking for people to kill.
I was lucky enough to have a distant cousin living here – I wrote to him asking for help, and three months later he replied, offering me 20 hours a week as a pickle-delivery-man AND a mattress in the corner of the home/office he shared with forty-seven other people in a 5-floor-walkup in the Tenth Ward. My parents were long dead – one from cholera, the other from the pogrom the week before – but I understood my white privilege was the only thing allowing me to leave. Others in my village weren’t so lucky.
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