Letter from Los Angeles

I was born one year after Hitler’s master race was pronounced dead. Still, antisemitism was alive and well in Los Angeles. In our tradition, a son is named after his paternal grandfather. I should have been named “Noach.” My mother named me “Noel.” I remember her gripping my shoulders and saying, “You have olive skin. If anyone calls you a Jew, you tell them, you’re Italian.” I was still called a “kike.”

1946: Los Angeles was an Anglo-sea with Negro, Mexican, Japanese, Chinese, Italian and Jewish islands in its stream. Was there equality? No, but the food, the music and the high-life were out of this world.

2026: Los Angeles is a Latino-sea. The islanders are Afro-American, Korean, Filipino, Persian, the LGBTQ+++ Pride juggernaut, and the ever-present homeless, a cash cow for the city’s coffers. White, married heterosexuals with a front lawn, a mortgage, two kids, a dog and two Teslas backed into their driveways were kept in a special purgatory of lax law enforcement, strident building and safety enforcement and higher taxes, utilities and fees to pay for ever-expanding restorative justice programs.

We lived on the Eastside in Boyle Heights. Originally inhabited by Mexicans dispossessed from El Pueblo, “The Heights” welcomed citizens of all races, religions, and creeds who lived, fleetingly, in harmony. We Jews maintained prosperous businesses on Brooklyn Avenue, where Canter’s Delicatessen, the Peter Luger of Los Angeles delicatessens, kept barrels of briny pickles on the sidewalk. They made my mouth water. The harmony was lost when two Mexican gangs, White Fence and Evergreen Street, battled for Boyle Heights with motorcycle chains and jagged beer bottles. The Jews left for the West Side. Brooklyn Avenue became Cesar Chavez Boulevard.

The gabardine scene of the Forties fox-trotted into the Fifties. My divorced mother was a dead ringer for Eva Gabor and a pariah in a time when miserable couples stayed together and fought like normal people. She was a cocktail waitress and a courtesan whose clients included car dealers, chippies looking for a thrill, dentists, ophthalmologists, high rollers, heavy drinkers and a sprinkling of mobsters with manicures and rolled collars. She may not have been a Harriet Nelson, but she came through for me.

I accompanied her on dates when she was unable to find a babysitter. We dined at Ciro’s and the Mocambo, nightclubs on the Sunset Strip where Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Ella Fitzgerald entertained Sidney Poitier, Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart. No “colored” were allowed. I became a nine-year-old lounge lizard and her personal bartender who knew how to mix a jazzy whiskey sour. I kept a secret, naïve hope that the john of the moment was a candidate for father. We went to Beatnik poetry readings in Venice and attended an Elvis Presley concert at the Pan Pacific Auditorium. Elegant “colored” ladies dressed in perky white maids’ uniforms, black aprons and red bow ties served customers in red leather booths at The Hamburger Hamlet. No one blinked an eye. The turbulence of race relations had not yet come to a boil. Life was our make-believe bowl of cherries, while most poor suckers were stuck with the pits.

Sixties Flower Power bloomed, then wilted. The Rolling Stones debuted on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964, the year I barely graduated from high school. They played “Time Is on My Side.” I was off the hook.

I tried college and bilged out. I was just 17 with no money and no prospects. I enlisted in the United States Navy and reported for boot camp on my 18th birthday. I was separated from active duty after a 55,000-mile around-the-world cruise with complimentary river patrols in Viet Nam, gunfire support missions for the Marines, and chasing aircraft carriers at 35 knots to pick up pilots who missed postage-stamp-sized carrier decks in roiling seas. There were two Jews on our ship. While enjoying R&R in Da Nang Harbor, my peroxide blond surfer girlfriend sent a Dear John letter: “Noel, I’m going to Laguna to drop acid in the woods.”

Separated from active duty in 1968, I used the GI bill to pay $1,800 for tuition and classes at USC. But there was a rub. I was required to report for Navy Reserve meetings. That meant I had to keep a regulation (high and tight) haircut, and that meant the anti-war crowd treated me like a child killer while they used the liberty I’d fought for them to have, to protest. I was thrown into a hat with Charlie Manson.

My social life on campus was as robust as an astronaut stranded on Pluto. I was asked to rush a fraternity. After the saloons of Bangkok, I felt they were still in diapers. Students for a Democratic Society had commandeered useful idiotic students to join arms to protest the war and eradicate the Four Olds: Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits and Old Ideas. Chairman Mao was doing the same thing in Beijing.

I met a cute USC coed with a red bandana around her arm. I let my hair grow out and became a useful idiot, a Veteran Against the War, for about three weeks until I realized the peace movement was a Marxist sham. (“Don’t trust anyone over 30.” “You’re either oppressed or an oppressor.”) I did not want any part of their “peace” movement. I kept my hair long, but the girl stopped seeing me on political grounds. She ate with her mouth open, anyway.

The Sixties rocked. Led Zeppelin, Creedence Clearwater, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, The Allman Brothers, Traffic and The Stones, were far out, man. Rock ‘n’ roll was pure testosterone. Boys were boys, girls were girls, no one wanted you to be proud of what they did in bed, and the birth rate was high enough to provide a future generation that somehow lost its way. All you can do is try.

Snowflakes fall silently to cover mountains, then melt away. I woke up the other day and thought, “I’m 79! How the hell did this happen to me?”

Los Angeles today is a different city. Deserted downtown skyscrapers, monuments to Babel, are covered in graffiti written in an alien tongue, “DEEK, JONZ, GROP.” Every other person looks unhinged, and everyone else is afraid to hurt somebody’s feelings. Gangbangers are freer. You can’t say “Mexican,” but you can say “Canadian.” Blacks, Latinos, and the Pride crowd enjoy special dispensation. If you’re a rabbi pushed into an alley by a maniac and strangled to within an inch of your life, your perp may be released with no money bail. Now, that is what some call social justice.

Democratic Socialists like mayoral candidate Nithya Raman treat the landed gentry with quiet disdain while championing renters and counting the homeless (many of them addicts and with mental health issues) as constituents. Progressive Jews blame Bibi Netanyahu (not Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and the U.N.) for the rise in antisemitism. Civic incompetence resulted in Pacific Palisades, the beachside houses of South Malibu and sweet ol’ Alta Dena looking like little war zones. Too many people talk about leaving, and too many leave. Our leaders seem to make it easier and easier. Whether or not LA Jews ever had a golden age, this certainly ain’t it.

Me? I’m thinking of paying Ugarte for the letters of transit he’s stashed in Sam’s piano at Rick’s Café Americain in Casablanca.

Noel Anenberg is the author of “The Dog Boy,” about life in Boyle Heights after WWII.