When she was about 12, painter Margot Bergman learned a valuable lesson for an artist: “I could be whole without other people.” She grew up in the only Jewish family in Paxton, Illinois (a town of about 3,500), in the late 1930s and 1940s. Her father started manufacturing brooms there in 1937, when she was three, and though she remembers her ten years in Paxton as mostly happy, in eighth grade something terrible happened. “I bowled well, and I guess I boasted about it,” she says, “and one of my brother’s friends called me a dirty Jew. Right after that, nobody spoke to me for a year.” Eventually her father appeared before the town’s chamber of commerce. “He said, ‘I am appalled by what is happening to my daughter. I’m not going to close my factory, but I am going to move the family to Champaign.’ Word spread so fast that the next day, most of the people in my class were talking to me.” The family left anyway, and after a year in Champaign, they moved to Wilmette.
