Springtime for Bernstein on April 20
My birthday is this Sunday, April 20. It used to be someone else's. Not no more. Sieg heil, baby!
This post, plus one more this week, are slightly retooled versions of older posts. With a personal milestone birthday coming up for me on Sunday1, plus having had a physically hard year after my leg injury, it’s time to revisit both posts.
The Club
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 inevitably 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*tler (I rarely spell out his surname). Every member of the April 20 club knows it—and so does the rest of the world, it seems. It would be nice if when people heard “April 20” they would think of other famous club members: silent film comedian Harold Lloyd, painter and sculptor Joan Miro, music greats Lionel Hampton, Tito Puente, and Luther Vandross, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, actors Bruce Cabot, Clint Howard, Jessica Lange, Ryan O’Neal, and Andy Serkis, plus “Star Trek” legend and social media sensation George Takei. Oh my.
Fine choices all. But no. Inevitiably, when people hear “April 20” they go straight to H*tler.
The Name
My shared birthday with Der Führer is what you might call destiny or accident of birth. Take your pick.
According to my parents’ lore, on the morning I was born 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 foam, 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 him 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. Attracting police attention was a good option.
No such luck on this April 20. 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 Jewish, they should have named me “Jewy Jewstein.”During my adolescence I insisted being called “Arnie” and nothing else.2 Not to offend my ancestral namesakes, but “Arnold Louis Bernstein” sounded like an old man’s name. “Arnie Bernstein” had some jaunt, with a nice ethnic bounce.
I could change my name, but not my birth date. From an early age, that H*itler’s birthday thing stuck out. In second grade, we were assigned 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. “You were born on H*tler’s birthday? No wonder you’re such a jerk.” Low hanging fruit, right? 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 regularly pounded on me, whilst using slurs every Jewish kid in America hears by a certain age. I’m convinced to this day that some of my teachers, tinged by their own antisemitism, looked the other way when this kid smacked me around. It was all so blatant. This creep wore a 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.
The Cosplayers
So April 20 was a burden to young Jewy Jewstein. As I grew older, my viewpoint changed. I went to high school in Skokie, Illinois in the late 1970s, the time when a group of neo-Nazis wanted to hold a rally on the steps of the Skokie Village Hall. Back then, 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 SS stormtroopers and more like a bunch of mopes who cosplayed Nazis on the weekends. Skokie officials refused to let the planned rally take place. But like it or not, these nincompoops still had the same First Amendment privileges as any other organization. You have the right to be obnoxious in this country. The ACLU took Skokie to court. It was no small irony that the lead attorney representing these chowderheads, David Goldberger, was Jewish.
A series of court orders and continuations delayed the proposed rally. At one point, the cosplayers proposed holding the demonstration on April 20.3 Finally a date was pinned down: June 25, 1978. A hearty group of several hundred waited at the Village Hall, ready to provide a special kind of welcome party for the Nazis. I was among them. I was not armed with a baseball bat. I know others were.
Ultimately, the demonstration was called off, with the Nazis instead rallying in downtown Chicago a few days later. They hid under plexiglass shields and behind a cordon of unhappy cops, as hecklers pitched catcalls, ice, and rocks. In the aftermath, their leader Frank Collin was discovered to be Jewish and his father a Holocaust survivor. Collin later was convicted of being a pedophile, then, after his release from prison, reinvented himself as a New Age guru, magazine editor, and author of a slew of books about the lost continent of Atlantis. You can’t make this stuff up.
The Book and The Coda
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 wrote about these celebrations, I giggled like a gleeful little kid doing something delightfully naughty. “Go ahead,” I kept saying. “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 my particular birth date. It’s something not to be embarrased about, but to embrace. I am a Jew born on April 20 in the post-WWII era. My very existence is a refutation of judenfrei and judenrein world H*itler dreamed of. Every breath I draw is a big honkin’ gob of spit in that motherfucker’s face. I’m a post-war Jew who’s here and fights Jew haters.
A friend put the April 20 Birthday Club in good perspective for me: “You weren’t born on H*tlers birthday,” she explained. “You were born on your birthday—when G-d wanted your soul to illuminate our world even more.”4
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 at H*itler’s command. 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 live for every April 20. More on this come Thursday.
Story Links:
Other members of the April 20 Club, according to Wikipedia
All things Harold Lloyd at The Harold Lloyd Website
David Goldberger, explains why he represented the Chicago Nazis and their First Amendment rights, on the ACLU website : “The Skokie Case: How I Came To Represent The Free Speech Rights Of Nazis.”
A recent battle between me, a few others, and a new bunch of Jew haters. Suffice to say, I used my gifts with to their maximum extent.
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And just because you made it this far, here’s your bonus content:
From the 1967 Mel Brooks comedy The Producers, the delightfully tasteless musical number “Springtime for Hitler.” And yes, it’s true: Brooks won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay at the 1968 Academy Awards presentations—beating Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick for 2001: A Space Odyssey and John Cassavetes for Faces.
No, I’m not telling you.
There are a limited few people in this world I allow to use the old man name. I can count them on one hand, and even then, this would entail a few finger amputations. They know who they are.
Well, you just knew that day was high on their Wish List.
Why drop the “o” in spelling G-d? According to Rabbi Victor S. Appell: “Writing "G-d" instead of God is a fairly recent custom in America. Many believe this to be a sign of respect, and the custom comes from an interpretation of the commandment in Deuteronomy 12:3-4 regarding the destruction of pagan altars. According to the medieval commentator, Rashi, we should not erase or destroy God’s name and should avoid writing it.” More info on the Reform Judaism website.
An early Mazel tov, Arnie on your birthday!! And keep up the good fight against all of the modern day Hitlers and their supporters!
Where you born on Pesach as well?
Loved the column. Cracked me up. Happy early birthday.