Home is never the same

No wonder Cherry Hill was the base for America's most recent foiled terror attack -- the world's first shopping mall was built there.

May 14, 2007

I think of Cherry Hill, New Jersey as home even though I left in 1976 and rarely returned. My mom moved out in ’81, and I lost contact with friends still in town. But this week I’m thinking about Cherry Hill because several of the men caught in the Fort Dix terror plot lived there.

It’s difficult to imagine seeing your father killed by a dictator, or having your friends blown to bits in a car bombing; not that it excuses terrorist acts, but you can see how a kid sours under such circumstances. And yet these young men grew up in New Jersey. Granted, things have changed in my home town, and these men are of a different generation. Pockets of immigrant conclaves did not exist when I was growing up there, but it’s still difficult to imagine Islamist Extremists blossoming in the same place where I lost my virginity.

One of the families moved to Cherry Hill from Turkey in 1992. Mr. Tartar experienced the American Dream -- he started out as a dishwasher and ended up owning a pizzeria near Fort Dix. Unfortunately, his business is on the brink of bankruptcy because of a boycott, despite being estranged from his 23 year-old son. The kid had left home at 18 and got in with the wrong crowd. What happened in Cherry Hill to make this young man susceptible to such extreme influences?

I can’t imagine anything happening there that could have turned this kid into a potential terrorist. But I’m not Muslim. I’m not Turkish. My father wasn’t a dishwasher. How could I know of anything that this kid experienced? And yet thinking back to my youth, I realized even in my day, there was an underbelly to what was considered a great place to live, home to America’s first enclosed shopping mall; even Muhammad Ali lived there at the apex of his career.

I graduated high school in 1976 in a haze of pot smoke. In my junior year, the son of a high ranking, law-enforcement officer threatened to kill me because I pressed charges against him for throwing a brick through my folk’s living room window – my step-sister had a party and she knew better than to let him in. We were lucky that's all he threw.

A few years after I graduated, one of my high school teachers hacked his girl friend to bits with a pen knife. In the late 80’s, the rabbi that had led our services, got caught for having his wife murdered.

The Cherry Hill underbelly.

Last year my mom and I returned to see the old neighborhood. The blue spruce we’d planted all those years ago towered over the house; the nearby farm was now a shopping center; but for the most part, things looked the same, much like any other solid, middle-class, suburban American town.Although that kid got away with throwing the brick through my folks window, Rabbi Nuelander is behind bars, Otto Krupp, the teacher, also got caught, and these young men will pay the price too, if found guilty for this terror plot.

You just never figure this to happen so close to home; and yet if you think about it, it has to happen in somebody’s home town; this time it was mine…