(This is one of my favorite posts, every year.  Slightly abbreviated, with a somber coda, for 2025.)

My Zaydeh was a paperhanger. So was his son, my uncle. They belonged to the Paperhanger's Union. When he retired, my Zaydeh got a lapel pin and a photograph of himself and the also-retiring Union Rep. The Union Rep got a pension and health insurance. No one knows if he got a copy of the photograph, too.

It was that kind of complicated relationship to Labor, with a capital L, that dominated my growing up years. Daddooooo's father owned a business. G'ma's father was a worker. That dynamic influenced their relationship in the same way that her parents' accented speech and his parents' religious devotion were there, bruising the edges of what must once have been love but wasn't anymore.

I sat on my Zaydeh's shoulders as he bounced me around the living room, singing Zum Gali Gali, a Zionist work song with one line, repeated over and over: the pioneer is meant for work; work is meant for the pioneer. When I needed a biography for a book report in second grade, G'ma suggested Eugene Debs. I was the only one in the class who wrote about the Wobblies, who knew that a Socialist ran for President from prison, who understood the plight of the working man.  

In my house, there was a sense that Zaydeh was on the right side of an argument I didn't know we were having.

Daddooooo inherited his parents' wedding dress business, working alongside his brother and the cutters and pressers and seamstresses he'd known his entire life. He took care of the girls, the worker bees, the ones who created what he tried to sell. He struggled to make a success, and failed, and among those to blame were surely the Union Guys.

We needed unions - the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire proved that protections were necessary and that management had no interest in protecting the welfare of the worker. He knew that.  He showed me the location in NYC, decrying the entire incident.

I didn't understand his anger. I'm not sure that he did, either.

G'ma told me stories of her parents marching in Solidarity Parades, though never when Daddooooo was around to hear.  It wasn't worth giving him the chance to trash her parents' politics.

The battle between labor and management, waged over my kitchen table.

*****

I'm not sure why FFOTUS decided to share the facade with TR (a true champion of workers' rights), but draping his big, beautiful face over the Department of Labor right before Labor Day feels like something right out of Orwell's 1984.

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