The United States is Still the Greatest Country and there is Nowhere Else to Go
(c) 2020 by Barry Zalma
I was brought to tears listening last night to Maximo Alvarez and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina.
My parents escaped the tyranny of the Ottoman Empire when they were only five. They grew up in Brooklyn, New York as immigrants speaking only French, Turkish and Ladino (a version of Spanish used by those Jews who left Spain during the inquisition). They learned English and left school after the third grade to work to support their families. My mother sewed in a sweat shop making ladies garments. My father worked odd jobs, in restaurants and eventually became a short order cook. He met mother in Brooklyn, both Sephardic Jews, who had escaped from a different part of the Ottoman Empire – my father from Istambul in Turkey and my mother from a small town called Monastir in what is now Macedonia. My father, as a small child, watched Turks riding through the Jewish quarter cutting off the heads of Jews as they rode by. I don’t want my children or grandchildren to ever see such horrors. My mother’s small town was bombed by Germans and Turks during World War I. My grandmother hid German soldiers in her attic to protect them from the Turks. They returned 30 years later and drove all the Jews in her town to concentration camps and none returned when World War II ended.
They both worked hard and were proud to be naturalized as U.S. Citizens. They moved to California and Mom became a full time housewife and mother while my father worked as a cab driver, built Liberty ships during World War II, drove a delivery van for dry cleaners and eventually started his own dry cleaning shop and plant. He worked 18 hours a day to provide support for our small family. We only traveled in his panel truck. He bought his first car in 1955 and we were the last family in the neighborhood to get a television. I grew up listening to radio dramas and would go to the local movie theater to see a movie, 40 cartoons and a serial for a nine cent admission. We would give the theater a dime and receive a one cent AbaZaba candy bar as change. The dry cleaning business grew successful in an area just north of the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Eventually my older brother joined the establishment and made it his career until he passed away.
I was the first member of my family to graduate from college. After I graduated, with the Vietnam War waging viciously, I joined the U.S. Army and got the experience that gave me a career in the law. Instead of being drafted and becoming an infantryman I became an Army Intelligence Agent and conducted background investigations in Southern Illinois. I was never in combat although I was involved with local police during the few riots that took place in Southern Illinois between 1964 and 1967. I became, as an investigator, interested in the law and when my enlistment was up, I returned home to Los Angeles, got a job as an insurance adjuster trainee, enrolled in a night law school, got married and had my first child while studying to be a lawyer at night.
I was admitted to the California Bar in 1972 and began my career in the law making less than I made as an adjuster.
I practiced law actively from 1972 to 2015 when I retired from practice and now work as a consultant and expert witness. Although I am now 78-years-old I still work eight hours a day as a consultant and author of insurance texts and materials. My father taught me, by example, that a person who only worked eight hours a day is lazy. I’m old enough now to be lazy.
I have lived, and continue to live, the American dream. I know that had my parents not immigrated to the U.S. and become citizens I would have been born in Monastir or Istanbul in 1942 only to be dragged off to a Nazi concentration camp and killed or have my head cut off by a Turk on a white horse, if I was born at all. All of the Jews left in the town where my mother was born were hauled off by the Nazi’s and none returned.
Mr. Alvarez had me in tears last night because his life, escaping Communist Cuba, is the same story as my father leaving the terror of the Ottoman Empire. Mr. Scott also had me tearing up because I was a terrible student in high school and was lucky to be allowed to enter a great college. The GI Bill allowed me to go to law school at night and my job as an adjuster, although the pay was small, was enough to support my wife and child until I could start work as a lawyer.
I’ve had a great life. I have a lovely, loving wife of 52 years and three wonderful children grown into great people who gave us two wonderful grandchildren aged three and 19.
I don’t want my children and grand-children to ever experience what their grand parents and great grandparents went through in the home countries or the struggles they went through as young immigrants. No one should suffer the life brought about by a totalitarian regime like the Ottoman Empire my parents escaped or the Communist Cuba that Mr. Alvarez escaped. Socialism always results in totalitarianism. The United States led by Donald J. Trump, in my humble opinion, will never fall into socialism if I, and my family have anything to say about it.
I, like Mr. Scott, came from a poor family – although I was lucky to have both parents – and became the first person to go from poverty to college and the practice of law in my family.
I will never vote for a person who wishes to remove the protections of the U.S. Constitution and each and every amendment to the Constitution. Mr. Scott and Mr. Alvarez strengthened my opinion and I am honored to even come close to being as strong, dedicated and partriotic of they are. Everyone should, if they did not watch them live, check out the internet and listen to what they have to say carefully.
Barry Zalma, Esq., CFE
310-390-4455
zalma@zalma.com