Viewpoint: What my parents taught me

Editor's note: This letter has been updated to correct the last name of the author.

On Election Day, I posted a Facebook tribute to my mom, wishing she could be around to cast a vote for Hillary Clinton, whom so many of us believed would be our first woman president.

As I write this, 48 hours later, I am still thinking of my mom and of my dad as well. Nov. 9 was the 78th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, when Nazis and their sympathizers looted and torched 1,000 synagogues and 7,000 Jewish-owned businesses in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia — an event widely regarded as the beginning of the Holocaust.

My parents had marched, leafleted, written and advocated for peace and justice all through the preceding decade; now they saw storm troopers and their sympathizers in Europe, and their American supporters (of whom there were more than you might be aware) threatening everything they believed in, not to mention family members who had never made it to America and were never heard from again. My parents had experienced poverty, anti-Semitism and the Depression, but this was without doubt the scariest time they had ever lived through.

So I’m thinking of my parents today. Of how they made a decision to have a child (me) in spite of the cliche that this was “no world to bring children into.” Of how they sent money to support the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the Americans who volunteered to fight against fascism in Spain (a fight they lost, by the way). How they held fast to their beliefs during the McCarthy era, when people they knew and had marched and worked with were being fired and jailed. And how they worked for Democratic candidates in their mostly Republican suburban Long Island town long after their retirement.

A few years before her death, my mom moved to an assisted living facility in Portland, Maine, where her sister, my Aunt Ethel, visited her for a month every summer. When a couple of new workers joined the staff as house cleaners, my mom and my aunt learned that other residents did not want these two women cleaning their apartments — because they were Muslims. My mom and my aunt Ethel immediately contacted the management to request this pair as their house cleaners.  And so every week, these two refugee women in their hijabs and abayas would clean my mom’s apartment. (My clean-freak mom told me that they were they best house cleaners she had had since moving in).

On Election Day, I took my 14-year-old grandson out to lunch at Avo’s before his last phone-banking gig at the Larimer Dems.  We got to talking about politics, as we often do, and he asked me if my parents had been political. When I realized that he had never heard the story of his great-grandparents’ political lives, I shared a little of what I’ve written here with him. (How lovely to find a family member who hadn’t yet heard my endless stories about my parents’ political lives!) Today he is back in school, having learned some hard lessons about victory and defeat. I hope he takes strength from our family’s history of never giving up, and I look forward to sharing those stories with my other grandchildren when they are a bit older.

My parents lived through some scary times. But they never stopped fighting. May we all do the same.

Rita Kissen is a Fort Collins resident.