Tribes

The mixing and unmixing of San Francisco

- Nathan Heller

My father’s parents met, in 1946, in San Francisco, on a blind date orchestrated as a favor to the American Communist Party. They were young and both a delicate shade of pink. Two friends of theirs, being pinker, saw an opportunity to shore up what might otherwise melt into air. They married in a living room, after an engagement announced by the columnist Herb Caen. My grandmother wore a white lace dress without a veil. My grandfather spent the time before the ceremony trying to thread a needle, to keep calm.

The marriage was an act of quiet liberation. My grandparents had come toward Communism in flight from different local pasts. Steve, my grandfather, spent his childhood, during the Depression, in a big house with a governess, a butler, and a chef. His great-grandfather had arrived in San Francisco in the eighteen-fifties, with brothers, after leaving Bavaria, where Jewish property owners were being persecuted. The gold rush, plus the economic demands of the Civil War, made it a fine time to be in San Francisco, and the brothers thrived in dry goods before marrying other drygoods Jews. They ultimately held a lot of property. They were builders for a while, and then philanthropists. My grandfather was trained in his family’s performance of a public social life for the benefit of columnists and others. It troubled him. “I saw the soup kitchens downtown, and the riots on the waterfront,” he recalled. In college, before enlisting in the Second World War, he joined with labor activists and anti-segregation protests starting up in Washington, D.C.