Poor Zelenskyy. He got sent to the PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE, and once there, he got crushed and humiliated.
Trump and Marco Rubio reduced him to a BOY…and I know what that’s like. You misbehaved, and you got sent to the firing squad.
Can anything be worse than that?
Yes.
Being sent to the principal’s office…for no man on earth is more powerful, more terrifying than the principal.
(Even so today, I would imagine.)
Only the mention of his name sent shivers down your spine, and a look from him, a glance, through those glances, turned you to jelly.
Even your parents, who survived Hitler and the entire Third Reich, even the Gestapo, were afraid of him.
I remember him as Mr. Webster, over there in Fairmount School in Montreal, as it was when I was just a kid, a new arrival.
From the Holocaust.
Don’t ask me too many questions, because even I don’t know what language I spoke as the new kid in class. Had I picked up English that fast?
Probably so, thanks to my sister, Sarah.
I was raised on a mix of Yiddish, French and Spanish…en route to our escape.
No wonder I stuttered.
The rest of the kids were here, in the New World, a generation before me. Like Mordecai Richler and his class, who were already established citizens.
The Holocaust was something far away, and they should not be blamed for any failure to grasp the fullness of the situation.
People didn’t know the extent of the horror as it was happening. The story was eked out slowly, and only decades later was the term Holocaust widely used.
We came over in 1944 via the Ship of Hope, the Serpa Pinto…and landed on the second night of Passover.
I don’t know exactly what day or year it was when I was required to sign in and attend Fairmount School.
But something happened there, the first two days, that taught me a lesson about life, how it was, and how it was going to be.
I was taken to Mr. Webster’s office. He asked me where I came from. I did not know where to begin. “So which is it,” he said. “France? Spain? Portugal?”
“All of them, and in that order.”
He wrote something and handed me the note that I was to present to Miss Fletcher at her class in room 314, and there I stood by the open door with my note, waiting.
The students were already seated, staring at me. Miss Fletcher came over, read my note, smiled, turned to the class, and said…
“Boys and girls, let’s all welcome Jacques, this darling boy who comes to us all the way from France.”
I had not expected this, and thought, for the first time, how warm and wonderful life can be with people like Miss Fletcher.
She asked me to remain standing while she finds me a proper seat.
That was day one.
Day two, and I forgot which desk I’d been assigned, so I waited by the door, assuming this was the routine, and expecting her to remember me as her darling boy.
“You there,” she yelled. “Take your seat and behave, or I’ll send you to the principal’s office.”
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhardwrites regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal.” His novel, “Compulsive,” motivated John W. Cassell to declare “Jack Engelhard is a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Contact here
NOW AVAILABLE: The collection of Jack Engelhard’s op-eds, Writings, here
Plus, a free sample chapter of his noir gambling thriller, Compulsive, is available from his website, here.