Happy May Day, Beltane and International Workers Day

And a beautiful day it is!

my father's cousins and their father  were  active in the Bund labor movement. Just received an  email from my father's first cousin  providing some more family history. We (American cousins) lost contact with that  side of the family who remained in Poland/France.  My father's three cousins were raised in an orphanage after losing practically all their family in the Shoah. It's been so incredible  to get to know the family  elders (now in their 80's) and their progeny, one email and zoom call at a time. 

...My father and mother were not religious, they were activists in the Bund, a socialist labor movement, created to protect Jewish workers in Russia, Poland, Lithuania, which had tens of thousands of members. Bund was anti-Zionist, they thought that the Jews should live in the country where they lived, with their culture, the Yiddish, it was also a secular and anti-religious movement The thousands of Jewish emigrants who lived like us in the district of Belleville, like all central European Jews, their mother tongue was Yiddish All correspondence between my mother and my father with the family who had remained in Poland was in Yiddish, and after the war...

..my danger-conscious mother made contact with Catholic sisters who sent children from big cities to the countryside. We found ourselves by chance with my brother Louis, in a small village in Normandy, hidden in the middle of a very pious Christian population. At that time, all village life revolved around religion, our education in school was also religious, we had to do the prayers on our knees at least 5 times a day. Louis was a particularly gifted student who knew everything about the church and the apostles and was the pride of Monsieur le Curé. When we returned to Paris at the end of the war, we had become real little Catholics. We realized when we returned to Paris that many people we loved were absent. The thousands of orphans were taken care of by the many associations helping Jewish families, and with my brother Louis, we joined a children's home 200 km from Paris, with 40 other orphans, which was managed by the Bund, and funded by the Joint of America, and for 4 years we received an education that was in line with the Bund doctrine, living in the country where we live with its culture, Yiddish.

No more Christian teaching in the church and in our religious school, our education was now taken care of by our new educators, all very competent people, attached to the education of children, in particular our director who was the son of 'a teacher who ran a pre-war Jewish high school in Vilna, Lithuania, taught in Yiddish. All of our education was secular and religion was totally absent, what linked us to Judaism was Yiddish, which we were taught two or three times a week, and the 3-part choir in Yiddish, where we sang songs from proletarians who promised better days to all mankind, and also ancient songs from Yiddish folklore. Jewish holidays, non-religious like Purim, were real plays, with children disguising themselves as heroes, like Queen Esther who saved the Jews in the time of King Ahasuerus, and the traitor Aman, The Time has passed, it is a long time since we left this children's home, but it still remains deep in our hearts, this language which was spoken by our ancestors and which rocked our childhood. With my brother Louis, we go for our greatest pleasure once a week to a Yiddisch course. In our lifetime, the humor of this language has always helped us in difficult times, and my greatest emotion is listening to the ancient songs of this wonderful folklore...

I was in Europe on May 1st a couple of times and saw great parades and festivities in celebration of International Workers' day. I was in Orvieto one year and there was deep commitment to the cause and to the old people who'd been organizing for so long. I didn't understand any of the speeches but it was beautiful.

I saw graffiti of "Hey Hey, first of May, outdoor fucking starts today!" for the first time in Amsterdam, 1978. I can't remember where I was on the 1st.

I am a service worker.