Roger, who prefers not to have his face photographed (I can relate!), is quite proud of his hippie days. Currently homeless, the smart, spiritual, and outgoing 80-year-old maintains the culture-questioning mindset of the '60s. Says he: “Illegal immigrants are the new slaves of this country.” He wears his heart, if not on his sleeve, on his chest.
If you squint a bit, you can see that on top of the menorah is a cross. A family heirloom, it dates back to around 1870. His grandmother, born in 1900, received it when she was six. The cross had been her mother’s, who was given it when she herself was a young girl.
Roger's mother was from Italy and his father from France—both raised Catholic—enrolled Roger in a parochial school on the Upper East Side. As a studious (yet amorous) preteen, he had a religious epiphany. In 1947, at twelve years of age, he fell in love with a beautiful girl. He describes the relationship as having been quite chaste, mostly consisting of holding hands. But there was a major problem: she was an Orthodox Jew. World War II had ended only a couple of years earlier. The sense of Jews being “others” was still quite palpable, even in New York City. The two knew that their love was forbidden, so they kept their meetings secret.
Waiting for her at one such assignation, she ran to him with tears in her eyes. She had been called something that neither had ever heard of before: a Christ killer. Roger, being ever-curious about history and religion—as well as a dutiful boyfriend intent on soothing his love—researched the possibility that Jews had indeed committed this deed.
He told me what he discovered was that:
1. Romans had been occupying Jerusalem for some 600 years by the time of Christ’s death, so that if anyone was in charge of meting out such a sentence it was they.
2. On the off chance that the Jews actually had somehow been responsible, they wouldn’t have chosen crucifixion, they would have stoned him to death; the Romans were the ones who crucified people.
The news, albeit grizzly, did eventually mollify his young friend and kept the romance aloft, but Roger himself was forever changed by what he had learned. Perhaps that act of research sowed the seeds of his rebellious spirit decades later, and ever after, as well.
If you squint a bit, you can see that on top of the menorah is a cross. A family heirloom, it dates back to around 1870. His grandmother, born in 1900, received it when she was six. The cross had been her mother’s, who was given it when she herself was a young girl.
Roger's mother was from Italy and his father from France—both raised Catholic—enrolled Roger in a parochial school on the Upper East Side. As a studious (yet amorous) preteen, he had a religious epiphany. In 1947, at twelve years of age, he fell in love with a beautiful girl. He describes the relationship as having been quite chaste, mostly consisting of holding hands. But there was a major problem: she was an Orthodox Jew. World War II had ended only a couple of years earlier. The sense of Jews being “others” was still quite palpable, even in New York City. The two knew that their love was forbidden, so they kept their meetings secret.
Waiting for her at one such assignation, she ran to him with tears in her eyes. She had been called something that neither had ever heard of before: a Christ killer. Roger, being ever-curious about history and religion—as well as a dutiful boyfriend intent on soothing his love—researched the possibility that Jews had indeed committed this deed.
He told me what he discovered was that:
1. Romans had been occupying Jerusalem for some 600 years by the time of Christ’s death, so that if anyone was in charge of meting out such a sentence it was they.
2. On the off chance that the Jews actually had somehow been responsible, they wouldn’t have chosen crucifixion, they would have stoned him to death; the Romans were the ones who crucified people.
The news, albeit grizzly, did eventually mollify his young friend and kept the romance aloft, but Roger himself was forever changed by what he had learned. Perhaps that act of research sowed the seeds of his rebellious spirit decades later, and ever after, as well.
