"Gitl Purishkevitsh"—Stories of Draft Resistance from many times and places, part 2
A new piece of musical theatre based on a monologue by Sholem Aleichem, and created by Jenny Levison and Josh Waletzky is coming to life. Since the piece is about a mother getting her son out of the tzar's army, Jenny and Josh have been gathering oral histories of other draft resistors. Yesterday we printed one story. Here are more.
Sam Young
My great grandfather's name was Abis, and they lived in Russia, and this was, I believe during the time of the Russo-Japanese war. My great grandfather realized that there were a lot of Jews being drafted and very few of them coming back. And he himself was called up. There was another Jew in the village who came back as a corpse. His name was Garber. And my great grandfather took the toe tag basically off the corpse and took that as his name—and as a dead person emigrated to America. So my mother's family name ever since has been Garber.
[Name withheld by request]
Basically the story begins during the Vietnam War, and my father had seen many of his friends sent away, who were drafted into war, and many of them did not return. And my father being a man that really looks at things and wants to do the right thing, weighs out things in his mind very carefully. What the circumstances are. What is the purpose of the war. And he did not agree with the reasons why people went into Vietnam. And he did not feel that he would be comfortable taking another person's life. So he wound up going through an entire process that went through the courts and he received a conscientious objector status. And basically what this meant was that through different court appearances he had to plead his case with the courts and state that he didn't want to kill another human being. In the process he had to become a teacher, and he also had to get doctors' notes stating that his asthma would be a deterring factor (whether that was true or not, one can speculate.) And he also had to become a member of clergy. And my father is Jewish, and he was born Jewish and he still is Jewish today, but in order to become a member of clergy he subscribed to the Universal Church of Life and he became an ordained minister. He sent in his contribution and he was sent back a certificate that said that he's an ordained minister and in the process of this he had to ordain somebody else or have some sort of ceremonial procedure. His friend was also going through a similar process, so he ordained his friend and then his friend had to do something, so he married their other friend. So it was interesting what became of this. And actually recently I looked up that organization on the internet, and it's still there. So hopefully it won't come to be with the war that we're in now, but maybe somebody else could use that in the future.
Renah Wolzinger
My father's family is from Burma and India and his mother is born in India and his father in Burma, and they're Sephardic Jews. During the war they were in Burma and they got bombed out and had to go to London and got bombed out again and ended up in the United States. And his two brothers got drafted. They were in their twenties so it must have been the Korean War. My father's father got injured. He got a spinal injury and ended up in a wheelchair. My father ended up having to support his mother and the other three children from the age of 18, so they ended up not drafting him out of hardship. So he's the only one in the family who didn't get drafted. He ended up working and going to college part time and trying to make a living for everyone else.