Like many of you, I watched “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” the newest Ken Burns’ documentary on PBS. The storyline is familiar, but the film series illuminates some lesser-known facts about antisemitism, immigration and race in America. The first episode was painful to watch, knowing how the saga will end. And it only got worse as the series continued and the horror slowly unfolded. While Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong each murdered more people than did Adolf Hitler (six million Jews, three million others), the Holocaust, as the mass murder of European Jews has come to be known, resonates with us like no other historical tragedy. It named and defined genocide.

Burns, who co-directed the series with Lynn Novick and Sara Botstein, told a Time magazine interviewer that “… I won’t work on a more important film than this one.” And “… this is the first time in a script in which I’ve ever just broken down and cried after reading draft one.”

Strong and moving words by the creator of heart-rendering, gut-punching documentaries on the Civil War, World War II and the Vietnam War.

I write this piece with little authority, but I grew up in a Jewish household of sorts. My step-uncle was the original Maytag repairman of TV ad fame. He had a stellar career as a comedian and character actor on Broadway and in TV shows and movies. His stage name was Jesse White. His real name was Weidenfeld. He was a Jew. His younger brother, Reve, was my stepfather. He also took the stage name of White.

Reve White was a self-taught musician who left home as a teenager and became a successful nightclub owner and performer on the Las Vegas Strip.

My stepfather wasn’t an observant Jew; he didn’t attend synagogue or honor the Jewish holidays. We celebrated Christmas, not Hanukkah. And family Saturdays revolved around grilling steaks, not breaking matzo.

But Reve spoke Yiddish, loved to make latkes (potato pancakes) and wore around his neck a piece of parchment inscribed with Hebrew verses from the Torah, known as a mezuzah. When I turned 16, he gave me a gold necklace with a chai pendant. Chai is the Hebrew symbol for “life.”

By that age I knew something about the vile history of Jewish hatred. I certainly knew about the Holocaust, and I had read “The Source,” James Mitchener’s novel about Jewish history. But in my young, still unformed mind, I simply didn’t get it. The hatred, I mean. And the fear and suspicion. My childhood experience and observations told me that Jews were some of the smartest, most talented, best educated, ambitious, funny and successful people on Earth. They even had their own country!

And who are these amazing people, unfathomably (to me) oppressed and despised for millennia? Blamed for the death of Jesus and suspected of ludicrous global conspiracies aimed at world domination? They are 0.2 percent of the human population, some 14 million men, women and children. Fewer people than the population of New York state. They would have to be damn clever people to take over the world with so bloody few of them.

Admittedly, I’m being deliberately naïve here, writing from a child’s perspective. As an educated and informed adult, I’ve learned a great deal more about the dark roots of antisemitism. In the resort town where I live, many hotels would not accept Jewish guests as recently as the late-1960s. This fact shocks me but doesn’t surprise me; racism, in its many forms, is so deeply ingrained in our culture. We see it again today, promulgated openly, brazenly, politically. History rhyming.

A friend once told me there are many ways to be Jewish. I know that’s true because I experienced some of those ways growing up, and they helped shape the person I am today. I’m more worldly now, but children sometimes see the world more clearly than adults. Hopefully we can learn from them. Like Anne Frank: “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”

Steven Price is a Kennebunkport resident. He can be reached at sprice1953@gmail.com.

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