Informant38

In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attack, people tell me over and over that they don�t feel safe. One friend buys a gas mask, several buy guns. One stocks up on toilet paper. These people live thousands of miles from NYC. I was born there. As a child, I dreamed obsessively of Manhattan bombed from the air. The Cuban Missile crisis found my third grade class hiding beneath our desks. I was raised in a household where the words "Hiroshima" and "Auschwitz" were as common as "salt� and "potato." My grandmother had been in a pogrom. The little girl next to her had been killed by horsemen. The town I grew up in New Jersey had the third highest property damage from riots in the nation. We could hear gunshot from our front porch�this in a gracious upper middle class neighborhood. My friend Sandy was locked in the house during the riots�her dog had escaped, she was very worried. I went to her Black Baptist church with her. The house next door to mine burned to the foundation. My parents were away. I sat up with my Russian grandfather, watching to see the trees didn�t burn. I was 13 years old. Our phone was tapped�a legal tap�click click click. My father was arrested because of his anti-war activities. His taxes were audited every year. He was on Nixon�s enemies list. Safe is not a word I would apply to my sense of reality. I was raised to believe that history would kill me, it was best to try and stay out of the way. During the war in Bosnia I looked every day at my neighbors�a different class, religion, and ethnicity than I. Our mutual walls supported many apricot trees. They were the pleasantest of people. Every day I was glad they weren�t trying to rape and kill me, or cut down my fruit trees. An odd way to live, perhaps, but my frame of reference. When I heard the news on September 11 I did say aloud: this is the worst thing that has happened in my life time in America. I cried for hours�after all, a New York accent means something to me. I won�t put a hierarchy on suffering�this was the suffering of the day, enough to buckle our knees, weep us dry. But I felt no less safe the next day than the day before. I grew up with hurricanes and blizzards. I had enough toilet paper.

Miriam Sagan in Big Bridge