Objecting to the Evil Overlords goes way back in my family. For instance, my great-grandfather on my mother's side was one of the original union organizers in the U.S. Like many Jews who immigrated to New York City from Eastern Europe in the early years of the last century, Grandpa Irving worked in the fur industry, in his case as a tanner. Animal-rights activists may object to his choice of employment, but if you want my very non-politically correct opinion on the matter, PETA and their naked vegan celebrities can all go gay kaken afinya, which is Yiddish for "go take a shit in the ocean." What they did to minks and raccoons is nothing compared to what they did to the employees. The work was long, hard, hot, filthy, and used chemicals that eventually gave Grandpa Irving the cancer that killed him. And it's not like you could kvetch to OSHA about workplace conditions: Everything you had back then, you got because you fought for it, and I mean that quite literally. My mother remembers Grandpa Irving carefully folding a lead pipe into a newspaper to bring to a march, since the bosses weren't above hiring goons to beat the crap out of the striking workers.

Yet, as strong-willed and fearless as my great-grandfather was, he paled next to my great-grandmother. Grandpa Irving may have deserted from the Polish army during World War I, changed his name, and skipped out to New York, but Bubbe Esther was always "The General" to him.

Bubby Esther grew up in a little village called Ratna, which was variably located in Russia, the Ukraine, or Poland, depending on what day of the week it was and how the war was going. Back in those days, you were in one of two economic classes: Either you ate dirt for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, or else you had a nice house and servants. (In neither case did you get indoor plumbing.) Bubby Esther's family was of the latter category. When World War I began, her father, knowing that such events were usually bad for the Jews, went to America to try to make a better life, but her mother—my great-great grandmother—would have none of it. Here, they were well-off. Why would she move to another country where she didn't know the language or the customs?

Great-great grandpa must have been a wise man. The War gave the Cossacks the opportunity to do what Cossacks do best: Like frat boys on Spring Break, albeit with furry hats and sabers, they came to Ratna to throw a little house party, by which I mean "loot and pillage." Rather than hanging around for the kegger, though, my great-grandmother, her brother, mother, and grandmother thought it wiser to hide in a nearby swamp. They were safe for the moment, but then her brother, my uncle Henry, started feeling sick—an understandable reaction for a six-year-old boy hiding from Cossacks in the swamp. My eight-year-old great-grandmother then performed a heroic action that shows the lengths a Jewish woman will go to in order to feed someone: She ran back INTO the house, where the Cossacks were still looting and pillaging, to get him a pickle. (In Jewish folk medicine, pickles are apparently the cure for everything.)

The way she told the story, my great-grandmother barred the kitchen door just as the Cossacks were about to break in and do horrible things to her. She heard them in the other room, gnashing their teeth and stomping their boots and preparing to break down this flimsy barrier of wood. (I suppose they wanted some of those magical pickles for themselves.) Then, all of a sudden, and she never found out why, the house grew quiet. Taking advantage of this sudden break from people trying to kill her, Bubby Esther ran back to the swamp with Uncle's goddamn pickle.

Even though this was probably the stupidest thing anyone has ever done in the history of the world, it did teach my great-grandmother her mission in life: to feed people. Not, of course, that she ever learned to cook worth a damn. In fact, her attempts to roast chicken and make meatloaf were directly responsible for my becoming a vegetarian at the age of 14. Though I no longer had to eat Sahara-dry kosher chicken or half-raw chopped meat baked in Heinz ketchup, she never forgave my mother for her failing to properly fatten me up. To the day she died, Bubby Esther would regale mom: "You're a bad mother! You should make him eat meat! Who ever heard of such a thing?!"

Anyway, those fun-loving Cossacks had such a great time the first time they came over that they returned to burn the house down. This was part of Russia's "scorched earth" war strategy, which, basically stated, was something like, "if we burn everything and kill everyone ourselves, the enemy will get bored and go home." Of course, burning my great-grandmother's house down didn't do much to defeat the Central Powers, but it did force everyone to move into the smokehouse in the middle of a Russian winter. There, her mother died of "consumption," which is known, these days, by the less poetic name of "tuberculosis."

Orphaned, my great-grandmother and her brother set off, alone, across the Atlantic Ocean to join her father in New York City. They were 11 and 13 years old, respectively, which, if I had children, would be an interesting fact to point out to them when they started bitching that my hypothetical wife and I don't give them enough responsibility.

But their ordeal wasn't over yet. You know how your mom always says, "Don't go out unless you're wearing clean underwear," as if the world would come crashing to a halt if your drawers were anything less than Downy-fresh? Well, in the past the stakes were even higher than that: Bubby was terrified the immigration officials at Ellis Island wouldn't let them into America unless they were wearing clean underwear. Therefore, Uncle would wear one pair of his underwear, and Bubby would wash the other and hang it out on the deck of the ship to dry. But then, one day, a wind came up and blew Uncle's underwear into the North Atlantic. Bubby was terrified, but guess what? Apparently, they do let you in at Ellis Island, even if you're not wearing clean underwear.

Update: My great-aunt wrote to me to say: "The underwear story is wrong. what REALLY happened is that there were lots of lice in peoples' heads and they were crowded together. So, Bubbie took off her slip and tore it and made a turban for herself and Uncle, and when they got to Ellis Island their heads were clean."

Personally, I liked the underwear story better.

I get my mistrust of authority from Bubby Esther, as well. You see, back in Russia, everyone wearing a uniform worked for the tsar, and they all had only one mission in life: To make things hard for the Jews. So, all her life, she had an innate dread of anyone wearing a uniform—police, firefighters, mail carriers, doormen, you name it. And, of course, the worst thing that they could possibly do was to deport her back to the Old Country, where the Cossacks could resume tormenting her. Both my mother and myself have vivid childhood memories of Bubby Esther warning us to "Be good, or the firemen will take you back over the ocean."

There's a coda to this story. Last winter, I was visiting my brother in Buffalo, where he works as a paramedic and volunteers at a local fire company. Since he loves toys as much as the next guy, he took great pride in showing me around his firehouse, demonstrating all the cool gadgets they get to use and clambering up and down the ladder trucks. He even let me wear his waterproof, flame-resistant firefighting jacket.

"OK, here's where we store the oxygen tanks," he said, helping me to slip one on. (Even empty, they weigh a ton.) "Here's the fire axes, and here's the Jaws of Life, like the ones my moyel used to circumcise me."

"Wow. What's that?" I asked as he opened a panel in the side of the fire truck.

"Oh, that?" he said nonchalantly. "That's where we put the old ladies when we come to take them back over the ocean."

Great-Aunt Sidelle writes, "I was brought up in my mother and fathers home for 19 years and NEVER, EVER heard her say a bad word about people in uniforms. As a matter of FACT she had the highest respect for police and firemen and mailmen. She thought that firefighters were the bravest people in the world because as she would say 'they would run into a burning building to save people.' As far as the mailman is concerned, she would bring them a cold drink on hot summer days because she felt sorry for them lugging the mailbag on their backs (there were no mail cars at that time). I never heard the story about being sent back over the ocean."

Ah, but I did. . .