Although we are in Canada, I am sure that many of you have been keeping tabs on the upcoming U.S. election, perhaps even watching the televised national conventions. As an American citizen living abroad, I can’t help but turn some of my focus home, thinking about the future of my country and its impact on the world.
Aside from my love of the show The West Wing, I would not consider myself a politics junkie. However, I have always known the importance of voting. As a child, I remember going with my mother to the local middle school, curious what she was doing behind the voting booth curtain. When I turned 18 in February 2003, I made sure to register to vote on my birthday because there was a local election coming up that spring and I wanted my vote to be counted. And in 2012, having just moved to Boston for cantorial school, to ensure I was able to cast my ballot and make it to minyan by 7:30 AM, I was the very first person in line, arriving well before dawn, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and Biblical Hebrew flashcards in hand, while I waited for the polls to open.
The importance of voting was a family value in my house growing up, one framed and hung on the wall. My paternal grandfather, Frank Klein, was a Holocaust survivor, the lone survivor of his immediate family. In the late 1940s, as part of his English class before becoming a U.S. citizen, he wrote the following words in a brief essay:
For a newcomer in the country, becoming a citizen is a most wonderful experience. Perhaps it is a little hard for a native [born] American to understand, but I will explain.
In 1938 a dictatorship government took my home away, deprived me of my freedom, killed my family and friends and relatives. I lived five years in a labor camp, where I suffered from cold and hunger, no warm clothing, no warm food in below zero weather. Many people died as a result of starvation and brutal treatment from the guards in the camps. Those five years were a lifetime, and I thought I would never get out alive. Now, to be a citizen of the United States, to have freedom, to be able to vote, all this is something too wonderful for native [born] Americans to understand. No more fear that my family will be taken from me, or that I will have to be afraid of that the next day will bring.
It will not be hard for me to be a good citizen. To have the good life I have now is something I do not want to lose. To live in this country and have all the freedoms of a human being is too good a thing to give up. So it is natural for me to be a good and loyal citizen, to respect my government and laws. I feel very grateful for the honor of being a citizen of the United States.
I sadly never got to meet my Bapa Frank—he died when my dad was nine, having succumbed to the lasting effects of the war on his body, heart, and soul. For decades, my father has kept these words displayed in our home as a daily reminder of the horrors his father endured and his gratitude for the inalienable rights his new country would provide for him.
These recent years have been ones filled with political upheaval in the U.S., in Canada, and in Israel. And October 7th and the resulting war and extreme rise in antisemitism around the world has all of us on edge, concerned about the safety and security of our communities, trying to quiet that slight fear in the back of our minds that history might repeat itself.
Like I’ve done since moving to Toronto in 2016, I will be voting by absentee ballot in November. (If you are also a U.S. citizen, visit www.fvap.gov to get more information about voting absentee.) And God-willing, I hope to become a Canadian citizen and be able to vote in my adopted country. Because, like my Bapa Frank said, to have freedom and to be able to vote is something too wonderful to take for granted.
