Dear Grandpa . . .

That’s Grandpa, with my older brother, Don, in 1946, five years before I was born. Grandpa was 64 at the time, nine years younger than I am now.

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Hey, Grandpa. How are things in heaven?

Oh.

Well, how are things there, then?

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This is an open letter to my grandfather, Isaac Shorr, who died in 1964, when I was 12.

I need to tell him something, and then I need to ask him one question — which, if everything goes right, he will answer via Ouija board. The rest of this will be background, mostly for you. Grandpa knows it, but I think he’d like to hear it, too.

Isaac Shorr was a firebrand lawyer in New York City, a man who was reviled in his time by many important people, not the least of whom was J. Edgar Hoover.

He was my maternal grandfather. I never knew him well. He was something of a mystery to me, because, having walked out on a loveless marriage to the woman who then lived with my family, he was something of a pariah in my home. My grandma casually referred to him as the “alte mashugganah” which meant “the crazy old man.” The crazy old man was allowed visits from time to time, usually on neutral ground.

I remember just a few things about him. He smelled of pipe tobacco. He called me “Jinky,” a term that was apparently an affectionate diminutive for “Gene” in Yiddish and/or his native language, Russian. What most impressed me was that he had some juice: If he didn’t like you, or what you were doing, he would instruct you to “go shit on a stick.” I didn’t understand the logic or mechanics of that, but I knew it was cool. There were uncool aspects to him, too — he called our family car “the machine” — but that stick thing was definitely cool.

I didn’t really learn who my grandpa really was until long after his death when the internet rolled around. It turns out Isaac Shorr was a principal mouthpiece for foreign-born anarchists in America. Placard carriers. Epithet flingers. Bomb throwers. Sometimes, fanatic murderers. He was their guy.

Isaac Shorr was an immigration lawyer. An immigrant himself — he escaped from Czarist Russia around the age of 20 — he devoted his professional life to trying to prevent politically unpopular people from being deported.

You probably know where this letter is going, but I suspect Grandpa, if he is listening, does not. He has not been around his adopted country for a while.

My grandpa worked his way through college by rolling cigars in a sweat shop, and got his law degree in 1913 from NYU, even though his English was not yet quite lawyerly. He joined a very, very, very lefty law firm, where he soon became a partner. I repeat this for the benefit of people familiar with me and my political persuasions: I knew none of this until relatively recently. The only personal thing Grandpa directly passed on to me was genetic (along with a gold pocket watch).

Being an immigration lawyer in the United States in the 1910s, ‘20s and ‘30s meant you were not a wealthy person, and Grandpa was not. Your clients were poor. Grandpa had oodles of business but only driblets of money. As children, my mother, Ruth, and her sister, Ethel, did have fur coats but they were sewn together out of scraps of animal hide smuggled out of the tailor shop in which my grandma worked as a seamstress. The Shorrs of the Bronx didn’t have much.

What my grandpa did have, in abundance, was a fierce outrage over social injustice and a law degree with which to attack it. He had seen firsthand in Russia what damage an illiberal, bigoted authoritarian government could do to the vulnerable — particularly Jews. Above all, my grandpa saw how little actual power the little guy had. I do not know if Grandpa himself was an anarchist, but he did have a sympathy for their fuck-’em-all cause.

In 1919 and 1920, right after World War I, the United States was engulfed by a so-called Red Scare — a paranoid reaction to the threat of global Communist domination — which was a particularly vicious precursor to the McCarthyism of the 1950s. The Red Scare was epitomized by the “Palmer Raids,” a series of indiscriminate anti-immigrant sweeps led by A. Mitchell Palmer, Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general. The Palmer Raids — which are seen today as an archetype of government power gone mad — targeted and arrested suspected anarchists, socialists, and communists, often on flimsy evidence, and without warrants or strict legal basis; conventional civil liberties were ignored. Get rid of the polluting foreign-born scum was the unspoken pretext. The Palmer raids were planned and coordinated by a rising young FBI exec, J. Edgar Hoover.

My grandpa was a principal attorney for many of the victims of the raids. It put him on a government enemies list, and right in Hoover’s crosshairs. The FBI had a file on him. The House Un-American Activities Committee —Joe McCarthy’s favorite government entity — followed his career with interest.

In 1920, my Grandpa was called to defend or at least explain himself before Congress — it is not clear why. In the end, he was adjudged guilty of nothing but being a lawyer. During the proceedings, he testified that that he was representing more than 60 people involved in the Palmer deportations. The U.S. government officially responded:

“Mr. Shorr is well known to the department because of his activities as attorney for these people. He many times has appeared as attorney for salients who have never seen him until the hearing and disclaimed any knowledge of his retainer. Mr. Shorr is one of the most active leaders of these people in the United States, and at the present time his office is the address at which persons in this country receive incendiary correspondence from persons deported on the Buford.”

There’s a lot to unpack in that dense paragraph. It is no doubt true that many of his clients were unaware they were his clients; many if not all had been held in solitary since their arrest. The government seems to be insinuating that my grandpa was probably paid by nefarious foreign powers intent on harming the United States — more likely, he was unpaid, or paid in pennies by friends or relatives of the detained, or by politically sympathetic but largely impoverished groups who could not risk being identified as partisans here.

More important: The paragraph makes one thing crystal clear: Isaac Shorr was being surveilled. How else would the government know what sort of letters his law office received? And how arrogant were they to unabashedly disclose this?

Most important: The Buford.

The Buford was a ship that was conscripted for a mass deportation of political dissidents, mostly Russians, who would be shipped to the Soviet Union, where they would be persecuted for their perceived treachery.

From The New Yorker:

Before dawn on December 21, 1919, the prisoners were roused from their bunks to be packed onto a barge and transported to a waiting vessel, the Buford, which was berthed in Brooklyn. The Buford was an elderly, decrepit troopship, known by sailors as a heavy “roller” in rough seas. One of the two hundred and forty-nine people who were deported that day, Ivan Novikov, described the scene in the island prison: “It was noisy and the room was full of smoke. Everybody knew already that we are going to be sent out. . . . Many with tears in their eyes were writing telegrams and letters.” Many “were in the literal sense of the word without clothes or shoes,” he went on. “There was no laughter.” Then, as now, deportations severed families: “One left a mother, the other a wife and son, one a sweetheart.”

At 4 A.M., with the temperature in the twenties, shouting guards ordered the captives outside, where a gangplank led to the barge and an attached tugboat. “Deep snow lay on the ground; the air was cut by a biting wind,” wrote that day’s most famous victim of what she called “deportation mania,” the Russian-born anarchist and feminist firebrand Emma Goldman. “A row of armed civilians and soldiers stood along the road. . . . One by one the deportees marched, flanked on each side by the uniformed men, curses and threats accompanying the thud of their feet on the frozen ground.”

Hoover had met Goldman some weeks earlier, in the courtroom where he made the case for her deportation. Now one of the great American radicals of her day and the man who would become the country’s premier hunter of such dissidents encountered each other one last time, in the galley of the tugboat. She was fifty, more than twice his age, but they were of similar stature, and would have stood nearly eye to eye, with Goldman looking at Hoover through her pince-nez. One admirer described her as having “a stocky figure like a peasant woman, a face of fierce strength like a female pugilist.” Hoover had won this particular match, but, according to a congressman who witnessed the exchange, she got in one last jab.

“Haven’t I given you a square deal, Miss Goldman?” Hoover asked, as they steamed toward Brooklyn in the darkness.

“Oh, I suppose you’ve given me as square a deal as you could,” she replied, two hours away from being ejected from the country where she had lived for thirty-four years and found the voice that had won her admirers around the world. “We shouldn’t expect from any person something beyond his capacity.”

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So, these were the people on whose behalf my grandpa was suing the government. The lawsuits were fruitless.

My grandfather also represented Carlo Tresca, a prominent figure among Italian-Americans for his opposition to fascism. Benito Mussolini hated Tresca. Tresca loved my grandfather, writing in his memoir that Isaac Shorr was one of the few lawyers in the United States he could trust.

Tresca was eventually assassinated on the street in New York, likely by the Mafia on contract from Mussolini. Grandpa had interesting friends.

He also had interesting cases. In the mid-1920s, because he was a lefty immigration lawyer, he was the first attorney to be contacted when two Italian immigrants, Calogaro Greco and Donato Carillo, were charged with murder of two American fascists who were marching, in uniform, in the streets. My Grandpa didn’t do murder cases, but he knew someone who did, and that is how he became co-counsel to Clarence Darrow, who argued the case before a jury.

I am going to write a play about the night, during the trial, which Grandpa spent in a hotel room with a prostitute, to keep her under wraps, as it were, so she could not be found by the prosecution. She’d evidently had interesting information. But that’s a story for a different day.

Greco and Carillo were acquitted. I am pretty sure they were guilty.

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As I said, I didn’t really know my grandpa. I remember once visiting him in his divorced-guy home, a room in a residential hotel on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. It was basically a bedroom with a bathroom and a kitchenette. Mostly I remember that there were soiled socks on the floor.

My brother, Don, who is six years older, knew him pretty well.

Was Grandpa in the thrall of foreign powers? It is highly unlikely.

Don remembers one day, very late in Isaac’s professional life, when Grandpa pulled out a huge tin of beluga caviar and treated the family to it. He’d evidently been saving it for a special occasion. It had been given to him, as a retainer, by a Russian sailor who had grabbed it from the pantry and then jumped into the harbor in New York City and swam for shore, holding the only thing of value he could put in a pocket, because he knew he’d have to pay a lawyer to seek asylum and avoid deportation.

That was the sort of fee Grandpa generally got.

My mother spent years as her father’s law clerk. He asked her to burn all his papers after his death, to preserve the secrets of his clients. She did, she swore, without looking at them. I kinda wish she hadn’t.

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So, Grandpa. I need to tell you about the current president of the United States. He campaigned on a promise to deport a million people. He has been sending masked stormtroopers to kidnap legal residents and send them to a Salvadoran hellhole. One attempted deportee was a kidney transplant surgeon. Others are foreign-born college students whose crimes appear to have been advocating justice for Palestinians, who are fighting for freedom against Israel, which is occupying their land. His administration is currently arguing in court that it should not be required to arrange for the return of a legal U.S. resident — married to, and father to, a U.S. citizen — whom they had mistakenly deported to that Salvadoran hellhole, where his life is now in jeopardy.

My question to you, Grandpa, is: What do you think of Donald Trump? My hands are on the Ouija.

Getting something here!

H-e S-h-o-u-l-d G-o S-h-i-t O-n a ….

Got it, Grandpa.

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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll is a deviation from the norm. I never write one that is basically just a joke; I want the results to have some meaning, even if the meaning is about trivial matters, such as your preference in chewing gums. Today, I am going to ask a silly question. But … I am going to ask you to take it seriously! Answer from the heart, and gut, and groin.

Okay, a second Gene Pool Gene Poll:

Finally:

Maybe you liked this Gene Pool. Maybe you think it was good. Was it worth 19 cents? That is the key question to ask yourself right now as you contemplate the choice below. You can contract to pay me $1 for five of these a week, OR you can send me a huge tin of beluga caviar.

And, my grandparents’ wedding picture: