The Todd Glass Situation Read Online Free Page B

beautiful.
    But I couldn’t stand the way he just carelessly threw his tools into the back of his pickup truck. Maybe I was only eight, but I knew that professionals were supposed to store their tools on frames built out of two-by-fours. And that his truck should have the name of his company painted on it. It burned me up, until one day I couldn’t take it anymore. I stubbed out mypretzel stick, marched over, and told him everything that he was doing wrong.
    About a week later, I saw him again. “Hey, Todd!” he called out to me. “I took your suggestions.”
    The frame looked half-assed, dangerous, and unstable. He’d done the lettering on his truck with a stencil—even to a kid with a reading disability, it was clear he’d done a shitty, unprofessional job. But there he was, beaming with pride, clearly looking for my approval. “What do you think?”
    It turns out I’d learned something from the mashed potato incident with the tutor. “Looks great,” I lied.

CHAPTER 5
JEWS IN CHURCHVILLE
Todd learns that some adults really are delusional.
    Some of our new neighbors in Churchville were kind enough to welcome us to the area by throwing pennies at Michael and Spencer. “Go fetch it, Jew!” one of them yelled. A few days later, someone slashed the tires on our station wagon.
    â€œIt’s a shame,” one of our neighbors said, an elderly man who shook his head sadly. “I know Jews. Jews are good people.”
    Even then, I can remember thinking that while I appreciated what he was trying to say, he was wrong. Jews are not all good people. They’re like everybody else: Some are good, some are bad.
    It turned out the anti-Semitism was just getting started. One day we came home to find slurs written on our windows. The whole experience felt particularly weird to me because weweren’t exactly the most Jewish family in the world. We celebrated Christmas, stringing lights around the house and decorating a tree that we placed in the window. If you were going to hate us for being Jewish, you had to really hate Jews. I mean, the only way we could have been less Jewish was to actually not be Jewish, which as far as I could tell was out of our hands.
    I don’t mean to say that everyone in Churchville hated Jews. I’m sure that the majority of the people in the neighborhood were not anti-Semitic. But the majority of the people didn’t come to our defense. Some of them probably didn’t know what was going on.
    But I’m sure some of them did.
    That’s why today if I see someone being mistreated I try to find opportunities to speak up. It doesn’t have to be a major civil rights violation. If I happen to witness someone being rude or offensive to a waitress or a cashier, I say something. I think it’s important to get involved, even in situations that don’t involve you personally. Sometimes all it takes is another person saying, “Hey, you can’t talk to her that way. She’s doing her best . . .” to snap someone out of it or to make someone else’s day by coming to his or her defense.
    But none of our new neighbors spoke up as the harassment continued to escalate. My older brothers got the worst of it. They were teased all the time at school. It got so bad that—when the school administration failed to do anything about it—my parents filed a lawsuit against the district.
    My parents also brought in the big guns: the Jewish Defense League. These guys did not fuck around. “You show us a hand that threw a penny at you,” they promised, “and we’ll break it.”
    Fortunately it never came to that. My parents never went through with the lawsuit—it seemed like too much of an ordeal to put my brothers and me through. As sixth grade came to a close, we did what Jews have been doing for centuries: We moved, hoping to find a more accepting neighborhood.

CHAPTER 6
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