Roommates: the luck of the draw can work, or not - Part 2

The is the second part of a two-part column.

Now for the difficult finale of my memories of roommates: the tale of the infamous one who poisoned our friendship. I don’t remember his name, but we’ll call him Hans for the sake of this tome. He was of German descent, and as finally became clear, he had more in common with the regime in Germany at that time than I, or anyone else, would have guessed.

My roommate was one of the few students who was allowed to have a car at Michigan during our tenure there. He had a ready smile and was everybody’s friend. We got along famously. His car was a flapper’s delight, a coupe with a rumble seat. Never seen a car with a rumble seat? They don’t make them any more. The car had a typical full-sized front seat with a roof over it. The back was a curved, sloping trunk. Only it was not a trunk. You pulled it out, and voila, a seat open to the elements appeared.

Hans and I often double-dated. He and his girl would be in the front seat. I and my co-ed of choice at the moment would be in the rumble seat. It was jolly fun because everyone waved and hooted at us as we drove around the campus and we waved back. It certainly beat carrying your lady on the tension bar on your bicycle. And so a semester almost passed by during which Hans and I traveled all over the environs of Ann Arbor in his trendy Coupe de Rumble.

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Bull sessions were one of the delights of living in a co-op. Our residents were enrolled in every discipline: liberal arts, science, engineering, medicine and everything else a great university like Michigan had to offer.

One day a half-dozen of us were in the big living room of our Victorian co-operative house engaged in a rollicking discussion. The Holocaust killing camps of the Nazis had not yet been discovered by the Allies but it was well known that Hitler was persecuting the Jews of Europe. This was the basis of our discussion that day, and it sadly turned into a diatribe by one person: my roommate.

Hans spoke up, saying: “The Jews own everything. They make it hard for other people to make a living. They work to 9 or 10 p.m. in their little stores. My father wants to quit at 6 and come home. Look at Woodward Avenue in Detroit. The Jews own the huge J.L.Hudson’s department store, and all the little stores on the street.�

When he finished the boys fell silent.

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I, as all my friends in the room knew, am of the Jewish faith. I was paralyzed for a moment; then I took the floor. “Yes, the Jews own little stores and work until 9 or 10 p.m. because they want to send their children to college so they can become professionals. But how can Jews own everything? We’re a fraction of the population. But yes, Jews own Hudson’s department store. And they own small haberdasheries and little mom and pop grocery stores.

“But most of them arrived in this country with only the clothes they had on their backs. And they became peddlers, and then started stores. But how many huge automobile manufacturing companies do they own, General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Packard, DeSoto and all the rest? And how many Jews are even officers or engineers in the auto companies?�

But Hans was on a roll. He wasn’t even listening to me, just winding up for his next and most hurtful pitch. “And one thing you Jews don’t seem to know,� he barked. “As soon as you leave the room we all start to talk about all the Jewish things about you we don’t like.�

The silence was palpable. We had a couple of other Jews in the house, one a medical student, the other a psychologist. No one thought it profitable to answer Hans. One by one the room emptied. Hans hurriedly gathered his clothes and books and moved out of our room and out of the co-op house and I never again waved at the co-eds from a rumble seat.

Freelance writer Barnett D. Laschever was among the Goshen World War II veterans who was honored recently by Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz. He doesn’t think his frigid village has the suitable climate for a rumble seat.