Sunrise, Sunset

There’s an old joke: A priest, a minister, and a rabbi are debating when life begins. The priest says at conception. The minister says at birth. And the rabbi says, “Are you two crazy? Everyone knows life begins when the kids go off to college.”

I used to find it funny. Now, not so much.

Lately my thoughts have drifted more toward another Jewish touchstone, the “Sunrise, Sunset” duet from Fiddler on the Roof. It perfectly captures my people’s habit of adorning celebration with lamentation.

Is this the little girl I carried...
I don’t remember growing older...
When did she get to be a beauty...
Swiftly fly the years,
one season following another,
laden with happiness and tears.

Our eldest daughter Eva was born in the early morning hours of June 4, 2008, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the first in our line of Kirschners to be born in New York City since my grandfather Ed entered the world 102 years earlier. He was born in a tenement apartment on the Lower East Side, just a few miles south of the modern hospital room where my wife’s labor was long and ultimately complicated.

As the hours ticked on, I paced. I tried to picture my coming obligations as a father, but my thoughts kept drifting to the past and the inexorable sweep of successive generations.

I thought of my grandfather, who had died just before my high school graduation, and my grandmother, who was ailing but would live to meet her first great-grandchild. I thought of my grandparents on my mom’s side: my Zadie, as we called him in Yiddish, who died not long before my college graduation, and my Baubie, who lived long enough for Eva to remember her.

When I was growing up, gatherings with extended family were frequent. The only component more overabundant than the food was talk of the past. I was captivated by stories of pushcarts and world wars, immigration and mass protests. I heard about what it was like to see Babe Ruth play in person, to vote for FDR, and to be inspired by Dr. King. I learned about the struggles of finding work during the Great Depression, the elation of moving from a small apartment into a first house, and the pride of seeing your child become the first in the family to go to college.

My Baubie loved to play a game where she would marvel at the world-changing events and inventions she had witnessed during her lifetime, from passenger airplanes to television. When I was young, my brothers and I would line up by the phone for a few minutes to talk to our grandparents because long-distance calls were so expensive. By her later years, she had a cell phone and could talk to family across the country for hours.

History has a way of accelerating.

On the eve of my daughter’s birth, there was another pending event that even my parents said they never expected to see in their lifetime. The night of June 3, 2008 was when Senator Barack Obama secured enough delegates to become the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party. I watched his victory speech from St. Paul, Minnesota on the little television mounted in our hospital room.

Four years later, I was back in a hospital room for the birth of my second daughter, Helena. Candidate Obama was now President Obama, on his way to re-election. I remember feeling grateful that my daughters would grow up in a country that seemed more just and equal than the one I had known, to say nothing of the America my parents and grandparents inherited.

Do you remember what that era felt like? As if the sins of America’s past might finally be confronted? As if government could work? As if you could believe in hope and not feel foolish or naive?

Of course, the America in which my children grew up turned out to be very different from the one I, or perhaps almost anyone, expected.

Earlier this month, my parents and in-laws came to San Francisco for a week of celebrations: Eva’s high school graduation and 18th birthday, and Helena’s promotion ceremony from eighth grade. I could not have been more proud of the young women they have become.

They are both kind, curious, intelligent, resourceful, creative, and empathetic. In short, they are everything that the current regime running the country is not. I wish our age were less cruel, divisive, and corrupt. The country they are inheriting bears little resemblance to the optimistic era into which they were born, but I have come to accept the limits of my ability as a father to protect them from forces far beyond my control.

My daughters both love history as I do. But whereas when I was growing up, I could believe in a general path of progress, they have seen reversals on issues ranging from reproductive rights to civil rights. When they hear adults use phrases like “norms” and “guardrails” to talk about American democracy, they have no lived frame of reference for what those words are supposed to mean.

I mourn a lost world they never knew, but perhaps that will also be the power their generation brings to mending what is broken. They see more clearly than I once did the profound inequities embedded in American life and the precariousness of our democracy.

Seeing both my children walk across the stage with their classmates, I was filled with optimism. Going to public schools in San Francisco, they see firsthand many of the threats of our time. Speakers at both ceremonies alluded to fears of ICE raids and the challenges of growing up amid such hatred and division. Yet the communities of parents, grandparents, siblings, friends, and loved ones who showed up in support were full of joy. Talk was of the future these children would build. Each ceremony included a speech in Spanish. No one was hiding. No one was cowering.

Looking out at the graduates, I found myself thinking again about Fiddler on the Roof. It is a story about another age of violence and disruption, migration, and uncertain futures. Its main lesson is that we may be sentimental about the past, but we cannot hold on to it. The little girls we once carried, now all grown up, will have no choice but to build the future.

Eva dedicated a great deal of time in high school to registering voters, phone banking, and mentoring others to do the same. She is interested in studying public affairs, international relations, and public health in college. She is determined to be an engaged citizen of this country and the broader world. She knows the challenges but is undaunted.

When my grandparents were young, they had no idea their generation would be called upon to triumph over hate and help rebuild American democracy. But they did. And I am pretty sure my daughters’ generation will as well.