If my grandfather were alive today, I can’t image what he would have made of my recent breakfast meeting with His Excellency Zhou Wenzhong, Chinese Ambassador to the United States.

Hersz Rotbart was born in Kolo, Poland and spent most of his adult life making hats by hand and selling them in the weekly open-air market of Klodawa, a small village about one-hour’s drive west of Warsaw.

Zaydie, as I suspect I would have called him had I ever had the privilege of knowing Hersz, had no formal education to speak of and no doubt only knew China as a distant world inhabited by a great number of people of very foreign culture.

Indeed, from Klodawa to Beijing was a distance not counted in miles, but in millennia, for that is how long each culture had marched along its own unique path.

Zaydie died in Auschwitz in 1940, long before I was born and five years before Ambassador Zhou’s parents gave birth to him in China’s Jiangsu Province.  As Ambassador, Zhou Wenzhong today represents his country’s 1.3 billion citizens in all of China’s political and business affairs with the United States of America.

During my breakfast meeting with the Chinese Ambassador, I couldn’t help but wonder if today, in “modern” China, the children of hatmakers and butchers can expect to grow up and confer with the U.S. Ambassador to China over breakfast?


By what quirk of fate, I found myself asking in August 2007, am I speaking to this man and his wife and joking with him as if we were old chums?  How did our two worlds enter each others’ orbit, when only 67 years ago, they were light years apart?

As a journalist and entrepreneur, I’ve met and worked with many renowned people.  I attended the Democratic National convention at Madison Square Garden in 1992 where Bill Clinton was first nominated.  As a television news intern in Denver, I met then-Vice President Gerald R. Ford.  I’ve dined privately with former Vice President Al Gore and shared a private lunch with Bibi Netanyahu. I’ve interviewed dozens of Fortune 500 CEOs, Hollywood celebrities, rock stars and even some Nobel laureates.  For a year, I worked directly with Michael R. Milken, the billionaire financier turned mega-philanthropist.

But never in my professional career was I more struck by the incongruity of Hersz Rotbart’s grandson breaking bread with such an unlikely meal companion. 

And for that, I must give all credit to the United States of America, which is truly the land of opportunity.

If the Nazis hadn’t invaded Poland in September 1939 and my grandfather hadn’t been killed at Auschwitz and my father, Max Rotbart, hadn’t survived Auschwitz to emigrate to the United States, chances are that right now, instead of writing this reminiscence, I’d be fitting head forms with cloth to help produce High Holiday hats for the family business.

Pre-war Klodawa, like the rest of Poland, was no haven of opportunity for the Jews.  Sure, after eight centuries or so in the country, some Jews were university-educated and a small group of Jews actually rose to positions of prominence and power. 

But mostly, Jews were relegated to Poland’s underclass, allowed to eek out a meager living and left alone to study their prayer books and religious texts, just so long as they minded their place.

No thanks to the Nazis, whose goal was not to help any Jews, just extinguish them as a people, World War II turned the world topsy turvy.
 
The hatmakers and fruit peddlers and tailors and butchers who survived the Holocaust fled their native Poland and scattered around the world – wherever host governments were willing to take them in.

Outside of Israel, no nation in the world was more receptive to the poor huddled outcasts of Nazi-occupied Europe than was America.

There are those who complain that America didn’t do enough for the Jews.  Those who point out that conditions for Jewish immigrants in the sweatshops of New York and other American Jewish ghettos were deplorable.

To which I always respond, compared to what?

However slow the process by which Jewish immigrants in the United States planted new roots, they did so in vast numbers and those seedlings took and grew: if not during the first generation, then in the second generation and certainly by the third.  The daughters and sons of Polish tailors and fruit peddlers grew up to be surgeons and judges and senators and generals, and, of course, journalists.

America is a great, great country.  Was back in 1945, still is.  But I don’t know that Ambassador Zhou, for all his formal education and worldliness, can really grasp just how wonderful our country is.

During my breakfast meeting with the Ambassador, I couldn’t help but wonder if today, in “modern” China, the children of hatmakers and butchers can expect to grow up and confer with the U.S. Ambassador to China over breakfast?

Does China offer its people the golden opportunities provided by America, or is power and influence in China still the exclusive domain of the party elite?

Ambassador Zhou and I shared breakfast.  But with the taste of eggs and toast still on my tongue, I left wondering if we truly shared an understanding for just how amazing it was that the Ambassador spent the morning with Hersz Rotbart’s grandson.

My ancestors in Klodawa would never have believed it possible.