The structured absence found in One More Victim is the silence of Dan Burros' parents. In 1965, the rules of journalism were obviously different and reporters did not pursue grieving parents for an interview. The great family drama under the surface of the text is that Burros's parents knew about their son's involvement with the neo-Nazi movement. And despite a hatred of Jews that even his fellow Nazis found extreme and a daily cycle of activities which included rubber-stamping swastikas onto his outgoing mail and handing out fliers with titles such as "There's Nothing Wrong with America That a Pogrom Wouldn't Cure", he still maintained contact with his parents.
Gelb and Rosenthal only surmise that Burros parents thought their son was "sick" — but we have no idea what really went on in that household after the Nazi fixation took hold of their once-promising son. And we also have no idea of how Burros reconciled his ideology with his ongoing involvement with his parents.
Some of his Nazi buddies suspected he was Jewish. I guess you raise some doubts when you bring a bag of knishes to the Arlington barracks and announce, "Let's eat some good Jew food!" He would also take his pals around his old Queens neighborhood in their Nazi outfit, risking the possibility that he might run into some neighbors or relatives that might expose his secret. Unlike other self-hating Jews, Burros seemed to have done little to erase his past. Reporters & FBI agents had no trouble finding Burros' parents — he listed their address on numerous official documents.
When a government investigator visited his parents, they confirmed that they were aware of their son's involvement with Rockwell's Nazi group, but vaguely ascribed it to having to do with "politics". When asked about the family's ethnic origins, the mother calmly replied she had been born Erika Schroeder — in Germany.
When the investigator researched a bit further & later produced evidence that their marriage was performed by a rabbi in the Bronx & that there was no evidence of the existence of an Erika Schroeder, the mother became nearly hysterical. "Forget it! Don't tell anyone. People will die. Don't put it in your report," she told the government agent. And when she realized that the report would indeed be made, she had one final plea: "Please tell my son that I didn't tell you this." Burros's parents were actively colluding to keep his secret — they obviously feared what his fellow Nazis would do to him if they discovered he was a Jew. There also seems some evidence that they got their son out of jams that his Nazi activities created. After being arrested in a counter-demonstration to a civil rights action at a Bronx White Castle, it was an uncle of Burros, a brother of his mother, who paid the $7,500 bail to spring him.
Burros's political activities had a Beer Hall Putsch quality about them. There were attention-seeking stunts like protesting at Eleanor Roosevelt's funeral & picketing the movie Exodus. There was a lot of demonstrating, some attempted rallies and the occasional fistfights with counter-demonstrators at their events or demonstrators attacking their counter-demonstration. Mostly, as is the case of highly ideological groups of all political persuasions, a lot of time was spent bickering and feuding with other neo-Nazi & KKK groups. Burros, in particular, had little patience with groups who appeared too "soft" on the Jewish Question.
Burros seems to have found a better fit with the United Klans of America than with the various Nazi groups he ran with. Grand Wizard Robert Shelton, whose organization claimed 30,000 members at its peak & was responsible for the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., that killed four black girls, made Burros Grand Dragon of New York State. He got a distinctive scarlet gown to wear and even got a girlfriend as a result of becoming a Klansman — most his previous female encounters were with prostitutes. Although the Klan organization was generally wary of former Nazis, they made an exception with Burros because it was felt he was an "idea man", in addition to being a hard worker.
Unfortunately for Burros, joining the Klan really put him on the radar of the FBI and local police units investigating far right hate groups. Neo-Nazis were considered the fringe of a fringe; the Klan had a long history of violence, had a significant membership and were feeding off the mid-60s Civil Rights turmoil. On October 19, 1965, the Journal American listed Burros as a prominent Klan member as part of an article about a HUAC investigation of Klan activities. The next day he was fired from his printing job. On October 29, he agreed to meet with a reporter from the New York Times in a Queens coffee shop despite his public exposure and the very real possibility of a Congressional subpoena. At the end of the interview, the reporter revealed that the paper had proof of his Jewish background. "If you publish that I will be ruined! All my friends, all my associations, everything I've lived for the last seven years will be gone," Burros said in a state of near-hysteria. He soon fled to Reading, Pennsylvania to hide out at the home of a fellow Klan member.
He spent the next couple of days in Reading in a state of high agitation. On Sunday, October 31, the Sunday New York Times came out with its exposure of Burros ‘s Jewish background on the front page. When he told a Klan buddy about the expose', the response was remarkably compassionate: "That's not important; we can talk about it." Burros did not want to talk about it. After an unsuccessful attempt to kick open a locked gun cabinet, he grabbed a .32 caliber gun he spied lying atop of a bureau. While a Wagner opera played on the stereo, he announced to his friends, "Long live the white race. I‘ve got nothing left to live for" and shot himself twice.
His parents took the bus from Manhattan to identify the body at the Reading hospital. They arrived in Philadelphia too late to make the connection to Reading & spent the night sitting up in the bus station until the morning. The Reading police assigned a Jewish detective to take them to the hospital. As they drove there, the mother said over and over: "He was such a good boy. He never got into trouble. All the trouble started when he got into the army." They declined his personal effects, but were given the $47.73 found in his wallet. They had their son cremated in Reading. There was no religious service.
I wonder if Dan Burros was really a self-hating Jew, if such a category really exists in the classic understanding of the term. By the time he got out of the Army, he seems to no longer identify as Jew or even consider himself Jewish. To him, Jewishness seemed to be something one can cease to be, just as he was able to go from Nazi to Klansman. The modern self-hating Jew is despised because they use to their Jewish identity to qualify and validate their critique of Israel and the Jewish community. Burros was more like one of the numerous Red State Republicans & evangelical Christians who are exposed as being gay —it is their actual orientation that is interfering with their avocation.
Is it crazy to speculate that Burros had nowhere to go as a Jewish far right-winger in the mid-50s? Even in the early 60s, when a group of Jewish conservatives announced the formation of a Jewish—centered conservative organization, many commentators had a field day with the concept of a Jewish conservative group. One wag dubbed the group B'nai Birch, melding the Jewish fraternal lodge with the then-prominent rightwing conspiracy group The John Birch Society.
Imagine young Burros, surrounded by Roosevelt-loving liberal Jews probably laughing at his crazy ideas and the shame he must have felt knowing that our A-bomb secrets had been given away by the very Jewish Ethel & Julius Rosenberg. And up at Columbia, despite being at a far remove from Burros's working-class milieu, the elegant Columbia professor Lionel Trilling summed up the Jewish political mindset of the period when he declared in his best-selling The Liberal Imagination: "In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation... the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not... express themselves in ideas but only... in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."
Burros' emergence as a wing-nut right-winger was unfortunately a tad premature. If he were born a decade later, he would have found a happy match as a member of the Jewish Defense League. Their leader, Rabbi Meir Kahane, shared with George Lincoln Rockwell a disconcertingly similar racialist worldview, except he aimed his beams towards Arabs and secular Jews. Yossi Klein Halevi's Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist is the only book I've come across that offers a window into the world of the JDL & even that profile is a bit toned down from the original article that Halevi wrote for the Village Voice.
And perhaps Burros, following the pattern of his life, might have grown tired of Kahane and joined one of the many JDL-like organizations that sprung up when Kahane immigrated to Israel in 1971, where he formed the Kach party & spun even further to the right. Or he might, at this moment, be maintaining a blog much like the Kahanist Masada2000 site where he would list left-leaning critics of current Israeli policies, denouncing each and everyone as "self-hating Jews".
Dan Burros' last bit of his pintele yid — that little flame of Jewishness that the Lubavitch Hasids attempt to spark via their Mitzvah Tanks & handing out Shabbes candles & installing mezuzahs—was ye olde Jewish guilt & shame. Guilty for making his Mom cry, the shame of his big dark secret and the terror of just being out there on his own with visible or invisible means of support. A big shot to nobody.
When the Dan Burros story hit the papers and went national, the Middletown Times Herald of Orange County, New York decided to investigate its own local Nazi. His name was Robert Burros. And although no family connection between the two men could be found, the paper uncovered solid evidence that Robert Burros dad was Jewish.
After the story, the officer of the neo-Nazi National Renaissance Party voted to retain Robert Burros as a member because their head of their Orange County Branch had "abandoned all mental and spiritual ties with the Jewish community at the age of thirteen." Burros, obviously quite pleased by the NRP's actions, proclaimed that he was "twenty times" more anti-Semitic than ever. He also told the Times-Herald that if only Dan Burros had told his comrades the truth he would have been assured that he would not have been ostracized, that he knew of quite a number of Jews who were loyal fascists. That Robert Burros, now there's a real self-hating Jew for you. Go figure.
Joel Lewis is the author of Learning From New Jersey (2007), Tasks Of The Youth Leagues (2006), Vertical's Currency (1999) and House Rent Boogie (1992). He edited Bluestones and Salt Hay, an anthology of contemporary New Jersey poets, as well as editing The Reality Prime, the selected poems of Walter Lowenfels and On The Level Everyday, the selected talks of Ted Berrigan. He has also written hundreds of articles, reviews, essays and profiles and currently is a staff writer at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, New Jersey. A social worker by day, he has taught creative writing at the Poetry Project, The Writer's Voice and Rutgers University.
Comments (closed)
deb
2010-05-16 20:41:21
hi, this section of my memoir just went on line
Terry
2010-05-25 10:48:04
Joel, Good for you!!!! Fasinating and important reading!
Bill
2010-06-17 17:38:50
A much more faithful version of Burros' story than "The Believer" was an episode of "Lou Grant" called "Nazi". It was on Hulu the last time I checked.
amy
2010-07-06 11:09:50
Does anyone know if Robert J. Burros from Middletown is still alive? I read many articles on Robert from the nineteen sixties. They too, never mentioned Robert's parents. Robert and Danny Burros were difinitely related, they just didn't know it. The Burros family was from the Vilna area. All these BurrosBurris from the greater NY area were related. I am a Burros.