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A Great City on a Cold Lake:
A Boomer’s Long-Distance Love Affair with His Hometown
I grew up on the outskirts of a once great American city, its population approaching one million people, 7th largest in the nation when I was born in 1957, and today, under 400,000, outside the top 50. In the suburb of Beachwood, I formed an instinctive love for the downtrodden, the maligned, the underdog. The suburb was full of Jewish kids like me, our parents the sons and daughters of immigrants, the first generation born in America. They, and by extension we, were the fortunate ones, descendants of our grandparents who had left Europe while the storm clouds in Europe were still distant, over the horizon.
Growing up, I absorbed the narratives of my two tribes — Clevelander and Jew — without much reflection. I spent countless hours in Hebrew school, twice a week after school and on Saturday mornings, hearing the checkered history of our people, and the familiar refrain: “They tried to kill us, we suffered and prayed for deliverance, we (barely) survived.” By the time I had my Bar-Mitzvah, at 13, I was chafing at the bit, dreaming of getting out of Beachwood and Ohio, of living in a city on the upswing.
Yet I secretly loved Cleveland. To me, the city was a place where things got made, cars and bars of steel, a whole array of stuff rolling out of the…