Springtime for Bernstein on April 20
Or "Taking Back My Birthday"
When it comes to birthdays, I’m in an exclusive club. Several of my friends as well my accountant also belong to this private coterie. When anyone in this birthday club meets for the first time, we ask each other the same membership question.
April 20? Okay, who else was born that day?
The answer is almost instantaneous: Adolf Schicklgruber, better known as Adolf H*tler.
Yup, H*tiler (I never spell out his surname). Every member of the April 20 club knows it—and so does everyone else, it seems. It would be nice if when people heard “April 20” they would think of other famous club members, like silent film comedian Harold Lloyd, painter and sculptor Joan Miro, jazz great Lionel Hampton, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, “Star Trek” legend and social media sensation George Takei, film actors Ryan O’Neal, Jessica Lange, Clint Howard, and Andy Serkis, or singer and music producer Luther Vandross.
But no. They go straight to H*tler.
My shared birthday with Der Führer is what you might call destiny. According to my parents’ lore, on the morning of April 20, 1960 my mom woke up around 4:00 AM, realizing she was heavy in labor. She roused my dad, yelling “it’s coming!” Dad started shaving. When Mom saw him in the bathroom, his face filled with shaving cream, she screamed “Gene! Don’t shave!” They jumped into the car, and Dad drove like hellfire to the hospital. He later said he was hoping a cop would pull them over for speeding. Dad was an Army vet who knew how to handle emergencies, but delivering babies solo in the front of a car was not in his skill set.
Somehow, they got to the hospital in time. Mom was close to the finish line. Emergency room nurses threw her on a gurney, then whisked her away. In those days fathers weren’t allowed in the delivery room. Instead, Dad went to register Mom as a patient.
When he got to the counter, they asked him “Are you Mr. Bernstein? Congratulations, you have a son.” For the rest of my parents’ lives, the story never failed to get a laugh.
They named me “Arnold Louis Bernstein” in honor of my maternal and paternal great-grandfathers. It’s a hearty Jewish name. I often teased my parents that if they wanted my name to sound even more ethnic, they should have named me “Jewy Jewstein.” I later changed my first name to “Arnie” and dropped the Louis. Not to offend any ancestral predecessors, but “Arnold Louis Bernstein” sounded like an old man’s name, which I didn’t like. Besides, “Arnie” suits me better
But from an early age, that H*itler thing stuck out. In second grade, we were given an assignment to write about a famous person we shared a birthday with. Mercifully, my teacher let me write about Harold Lloyd rather than You Know Who.
Still, everyone knew. It was a goldmine for other kids to make fun of me. “H*tler’s birthday?” No wonder you’re such a jerk.” There were plenty of other insults along those lines, plus the stock putdown, “Ha, ha! You were born on H*tler’s birthday!” It was demoralizing.
There was a kid in my class who used to regularly pound on me, while using the slurs every Jewish kid in America hears by a certain age. I’m convinced to this day that some of our teachers, tinged by their own antisemitism, looked the other way when this kid smacked me around; it was all so blatant. This creep wore black leather jacket and boots, even in the sixth grade. His last name was—I kid you not—Himmler. I won’t use his first name. He knew who I shared a birthday with, but that didn’t help me any.
So April 20 was initially a burden to Jewy Jewstein. As I grew older, things started to change. I went to high school in Skokie, Illinois in the late 1970s. It was the time of that infamous proposed demonstration by a group of neo-Nazis who wanted to hold a rally on the steps of the Skokie Village Hall. At the time Skokie had the highest population of Holocaust survivors in the United States outside of New York City. The very idea of brown shirted men wearing swastikas and marching through the streets brought back unspeakable memories.
But really, these guys were less than Nazis and more like a bunch of mopes who liked to cosplay Nazis on the weekends. Skokie officials refused to let the planned rally take place. Still, this group still had the same constitutional rights as any other organization allowed to speak on the village hall steps. The ACLU agreed to represent these mopes. It was no small irony that their lead attorney was Jewish.
The case went back and forth in the courts, pushing the First Amendment to its limits. The final ruling was in their favor. The march was set for June 24, 1978. But on that day, these so-called Nazis decided to call it off. They realized that a welcoming committee of some 2,000+ was waiting for them at Skokie Village Hall—and eager to greet them. I know. I was there.
Had there not been a series of court orders and continuations, the proposed rally was actually supposed to have been held two months earlier. And you know what day they wanted to march.
When I was writing Swastika Nation: Fritz Kuhn and the Rise and Fall of the German-American Bund, my book about 1930s American pro-H*tler group, there were periodic scenes where these wannabe stormtroopers gathered together in birthday celebrations for Der Führer. Every time I came to one of these moments, I giggled like a gleeful little kid doing something delightfully naughty and for good reason. “This is great,” I would tell myself. “Party away, you schmucks. Guess who’s coming along in a few years to tell your story?”
With each passing year, I have come to understand the importance of sharing a birthday with H*tler. It’s something to embrace. I am a Jew born on April 20 in the post-WWII era. My very existence is a refutation of the H*tler’s dream of a judenfrei and judenrein world. Every breath I draw is a spit in that motherfucker’s face.
My April 20 birthday is not just for me or other members of the club, but in memory of all the six million who perished. My birthday honors all the victims of the Shoah. I am here. I live for them.
But those who perished in the Holocaust are not the only victims that I must live for every April 20. More on that next week.
What are your birthday stories? Share your thoughts in the comment section or on Twitter @RealArnieB. And be sure to check out my webpage: www.arniebernstein.com.