ART PERSYKO’S REFLECTION

Art (middle) in action.

I am new to the Workers Circle. A few years ago, a fellow San Francisco activist friend of mine invited me to a local Workers Circle forum she organized and that was my introduction to its focus on Jewish culture and politics. A few months ago, after hearing about First Fridays from that same friend, I began to participate in the monthly Zooms, because they were on a compelling topic for me, the threat to democracy in our country, and I found them to be really well organized, informative, inspiring and participatory! And when they introduced the idea of Democracy Circles, I was very excited to hear about that!

I am the son of Holocaust survivors. My parents and my brother were living in Warsaw in September of 1939 when the Nazi’s invaded Poland. They fled east and survived the war in Russia doing forced labor: my father (who was a doctor) as a medic in a Polish contingent of the Russian Army and my mother was assigned to feeding the animals on a Russian circus train. My brother, who was two years old in ’39, helped our mother on that circus train. They survived and after the war emigrated to Sweden where I was born in 1950. Three months later, we sailed past the Statue of Liberty.

So, I was the only member of my nuclear family who did not directly experience WW2. We lost family members and property. But I was lucky my family and I found refuge in the US, a country which gave my family and so many others sanctuary, and which seemed to uphold human rights of all kinds, including the right to vote in a democracy.

That’s why I agreed to start a Workers Circle Democracy Circle in the Bay Area. We recently held our first meeting and it was great to gather in this special support group with other Bay Area Jewish activists!

Being in a Democracy Circle with other Jews fits in my Jewish family and community experiences as I was growing up. As a child with working parents, I went to daycare at a Jewish Community Center in Southern California, attended Jewish reform synagogues and Sunday school in Southern and Northern California, became a Bar Mitzvah, and went to UAHC (Union of American Hebrew Congregations) Camp Saratoga (which later became Camp Swig) for several summers. Social justice was always a theme in what we learned and sang about throughout all of that. My parents had close friends who were fellow Jewish Polish and Russian Holocaust survivors with whom they gathered once a month in our homes on a rotating basis to speak in Polish, Russian (and Yiddish) while their kids and I entertained ourselves. I never learned nor understood any of their foreign languages and did not pick up any of the details of their experiences during WW2 or before, but I was well aware at least in general of what they had in common, both the tragedy (which they did not want to impose on me so did not talk about); as well as the joy of being Jewish i.e. Eastern European Jewish music and food; and American Jewish culture and humor on television, radio, film and in literature.

My parents and my brother never talked about the Holocaust with me but were politically aware and engaged and a influential. My father was a Zionist. During my teenage years, my brother with his great intelligence and insatiable curiosity, shared observations about the US and its role in the world, warts and all (whether I was ready to listen to it or not). My sister in law (my brother’s first wife) was a SNCC civil rights activist in the South during the 1960s who helped shape my political outlook.

I graduated from UC Davis with a bachelor’s in Social Psychology.

I joined VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America, a domestic version of the Peace Corps) and was trained to be (and became) a Legal Services poverty law paralegal in a La Colonia of Oxnard, California.

My summer cannery work during summers in high school and college gave me the opportunity to continue into adulthood as a Teamsters union (IBT) member and I was active in it, as well as in the Teamsters for a Democratic Union which was committed to democracy, and rank and file power. As a volunteer political coordinator for my IBT local and delegate to the SF Labor Council, I participated in the fair trade movement, and lobbied for labor rights and environmental standards to be at the core of trade agreements, not just easily dismissed side agreements.

After retiring, I was active in numerous causes and organizations and am currently active in the San Francisco Gray Panthers, which has afforded me the opportunity to help raise awareness via forums on Zoom on many pressing issues implicating human rights, including the threat to voting — and consequently to democracy — that we are now experiencing in this country.

As we draw closer to the midterm elections, I am putting as much energy as I can into efforts to save democracy in the US. As if we do not have enough evidence to see with our own eyes the imminent danger that we may be facing, the current PBS series on the Holocaust is a very sobering warning that the same kind of political scapegoating and lies that led to tragedy in Eastern Europe during my parents’ lifetime are happening here and now in the US during my lifetime. Please join me in taking action to avert another tragedy on our watch, as the stewards of our democracy we are, whether we realize it or admit it, or not.

I want to thank the Workers Circle for initiating the Democracy Circle project! I think such support groups are a great idea and can not only be helpful for promoting our activism but also is good for our mental health by allowing us to share our ideas and feelings with other activists, be heard and hear others, get and give support, and have agency — so we do not feel as helpless as we might otherwise, in the face of rising fascism in this country.