Sing This at My Funeral: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons by David Slucki

Author:David Slucki [Slucki, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 2019-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

6

Coming of Age

I went to my first political rally when I was thirteen years old, or at least, my first without my dad. I’m not sure if he took me to any when I was a kid, but it certainly seems possible. I like to think he did. That breezy autumn day—it seems like it was autumn, I remember wearing my school jumper—was my first taste of real political participation. It was a demonstration against a government plan to hike up university fees. Or something like that. Something that didn’t directly affect me yet, and certainly not the reason I skipped school to go march that day in 1997. I do remember the chant that went as though on a loop as we made our way to the steps of Parliament House: “Hey hey, ho ho, uni fees have got to go!” I didn’t go because of the issue at hand or the politics of higher education, or even to be part of something bigger. I was in year eight; I hadn’t even thought about university. I was more concerned about how to get a girlfriend, how to get a kick at my weekend football match, and if I would get into the selective Melbourne High School the next year. I went, more than anything, to impress the year nine kids I’d recently befriended in the school musical. It seemed a cool thing to do, and certainly bought me some street cred. I went because of my dad, and his stories of marches in the 1960s, and teacher strikes in the 1970s and 1980s. I don’t know, then, if I was trying to fulfill that legacy, or if it was just that I found Dad’s stories exhilarating, intoxicating. I wanted that kind of excitement, the kind of danger that saw Dad nearly get kicked in the head by a police horse.

For both of us, I think, our political commitments can be traced to those early years of the twentieth century, when Zaida found his own calling. We wanted to carry on his commitments to the Bund, to a grand history of democratic socialist thought; we wanted to feel part of something that stretched back in time, particularly in the absence of a Jewishness premised on adherence to religious practices and texts. But more than that, it was the legacy of the Holocaust that pushed us toward those moral and political allegiances. Sluggo and I both framed our worldviews as responses to the suffering of Jews during World War II, recognizing as we did the suffering of others on that basis. The injustices and the brutality carried out against our own families were things we saw going on in the world around us. Even more than that, the guilt we felt at the relative ease with which we moved through life conferred on us a responsibility to speak out against injustice. Our response to our own survivor guilt, transmitted through the generations, was to grab a plaque and march in the streets, to write letters to newspapers, and to never shy away from the struggle for what is right.

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