Trump the Ganef

Ganef: Thief. Dishonest person. Scoundrel. Crook. Swindler. Con man. Unscrupulous. Untrustworthy. This Yiddish insult was the one my immigrant grandfather hurled at the wrestling villains back in the sixties. No matter how many times we told Grandpa Krut that wrestling was “fake news,” he insisted we were wrong.

Here are a few of the names of bad guys he loved to hate that I remember: Abdullah the Butcher, Jake the Snake, Gorgeous George, The Sheik, Killer Kowalski, Dick the Bruiser, and near the end of my grandfather’s life, Jesse “The Body” Ventura.

I’m sure if my grandfather were alive now and watched Trump’s ridiculous Twitter take downs on @realdonaldtrump, he would have applied that ganef label to our 45th president. He always loved to root for the underdog and shake his fist at the villains. Perhaps these fake mean wrestlers represented the real-life bullies that shaped his life and drove him from his home growing up in the small shtetl of Novo Alexandraska, Lithuania.

My grandfather, Philip Krut, was the second of four siblings. When his mother died, his father remarried and added up to eight half-siblings to the impoverished household. My grandfather was never sure of who these younger half-sibs were because he was sent away at age ten to be a tailor’s apprentice for an uncle in Riga. Fear of pogroms and a twenty-year conscription into the Russian army…