gambling boat, one that was fitted up as a nightclub and anchored off Long Beach just past U.S. territorial waters, and a coworker offered him a room in an apartment in San Pedro. Mama fretted that she hadn’t made her nephew feel at home, and what would her brothers and sisters say? On the other hand, wasn’t the point of sponsoring Ivan that he should become able to make his own way, and who would have believed it would happen so quickly? That was America! Mama made him promise to come for every holiday, and he departed with kisses all around—even one from Barbara, who was thrilled to get rid of him and regain our two-sister bedroom, a sentiment I shared.
BY NOVEMBER, EVERYTHING HAD settled down, except that Danny still avoided me.
Herschel Grynszpan changed that.
Herschel Grynszpan was exactly my age, seventeen. If his parents had moved to Los Angeles when they left their native Poland, he might have gone to Roosevelt High with me. Instead, his family settled in Hanover, Germany, and when conditions there got bad, they sent him to live with relatives in Paris. In late October, the Germans expelled his family, along with seventeen thousand other Polish-born Jews. But the Poles refused to admit them, and they were stranded in a village on the border.
On November 7, 1938, Herschel bought a gun, went to the German embassy in Paris, and shot and wounded a Nazi official. Two days later, the official died. And the Germans took revenge. Unlike the scratchy, brutal word Reich, Kristallnacht sounded like something out of a fairy tale. Kristallnacht shimmered; it carried the hush of snow mounded on pine boughs that I’d seen in movies. Kristallnacht did shimmer, I suppose, the “night of broken glass” hurling glittering shards all over Germany and Austria as vandals attacked more than two hundred synagogues and thousands of Jewish shops.
In Boyle Heights, dozens of organizations joined forces and planned a rally to take place that Sunday. I heard that Danny was asked to speak at the rally as a representative of the youth groups, and two days later—I suppose after wrestling with the task on his own—he asked me to help write his speech. Of course I said yes; this was far more important than any petty hurt I felt because he’d barely spoken to me for weeks.
On Friday, we met after school in Eddie Chafkin’s small office in the rear of the store; files for Eddie’s and Danny’s Zionist activities occupied a quarter of the pristinely organized shelves. Both of us were so upset about Kristallnacht that there was no constraint between us, no sign of the months-long break in our friendship. We quickly fell back into our usual wrangling over words and ideas. Danny, fists clenched as if he couldn’t wait to pick up a gun himself, called Herschel Grynszpan a hero. I admired Herschel’s bravery; still, he was an assassin. And since Danny would be speaking in a public forum, I wanted him to speak for the rule of law.
“What rule of law, when the laws are made by Nazis?” he demanded.
“Herschel took a life.”
“What if he’d assassinated Hitler? Would you be against that?”
“Don’t you think your speech should be about what the Germans did on Kristallnacht? And the need to help people emigrate?”
We fought for half an hour, forcing ourselves to a consensus only because Danny couldn’t stay away from work any longer.
A week later, we returned to Eddie’s office because Germany had retaliated further, banning all Jewish students from German schools, and we wanted to write a letter to the Los Angeles newspapers. But the urgency immediately following Kristallnacht had passed; this time it felt as if we were meeting for the first time since I’d witnessed his argument with Barbara, and we were ill at ease. We drafted the letter with little of our usual bickering. In fifteen minutes, Danny stood up to return to work.
“Thanks, Elaine,” he said.
“Sure.” I turned to Eddie’s typewriter and rolled in a sheet of Habonim letterhead.
Danny cleared his throat. “Really, thank you. I don’t always say … that is, I hope you know how much I appreciate …”
This was a Danny I hadn’t seen before, bashful and tongue-tied.
“I’m happy to do it. Not happy, that’s not the right word,” I said, afflicted with my own self-consciousness. “But this is important.”
“See, that’s what I mean. You’re a … a good person.” He started out the door, but turned back.
“What?”
“Well, I guess …” His eyes flicking away