Atheists & Agnostics

Jews controlled all the banks. I am sure in Kaunas, in the time before the Russian revolution, the commoners, my grandmother was a peasant, did not get much more than scuttlebutt for education.
Interestingly, her English never advanced more than rudimentarily.
When I taught reading to high schoolers, I could tell the difference in the foreign students who had advanced vocabularies in their own languages, picked up English much faster than did those who had only social language skills.
My grandmother was afraid of hospitals, because you never came out of a hospital alive.
She was a stubborn survivalist who kept a small garden in our back yard and at 88, weeded like a peasant, bent over for each row.
Her antisemitism, seemed rooted in her education and she wasn't giving it up even though we implored.
She, even stuck in a house with six children on their way to college, never really expanded her language skills.
We did hear some wonderful stories of her life, but when I read about Lithuanian atrocities in WWII, I knew from whence they came.
Not proud of that side of my heritage.
Perhaps Americans should look a little more closely at our own sins.