climate change

What a planet! I only wish I could tell my grandfather about it. He arrived in this country, an immigrant from what’s now Ukraine, in March 1888—or so his daughter, my Aunt Hilda, wrote me once upon a distant time. Here’s how she began that long-ago message to me: “Your grandfather, Moore Engelhardt, a boy of 16, arrived in New York from Europe in March 1888. It was during the famous blizzard, and after a sea voyage of about 30 days. He had no money. He often said that he had a German 50-cent piece in his pocket when he landed. His trip had to be in the cheapest part of the ship—way down below steerage. Poor boy, I’m sure he was seasick a good deal of the time. Since he was alone, he sort of attached himself to a family of a lot of children and, for the first few months in America, I imagine he slept behind the stove in somebody’s kitchen.”

As a boy of 14, he had, my aunt reported, challenged the local rabbi where he lived to give him back some of the money his father had donated to the rabbi—money his mother had made and that they needed just to live. And when the rabbi refused, he evidently hit him and then ran away from home. The rest, as they say, is history.