PART 3: RELIGIOUS LIBERTIES

Given the demographics of the neighborhood, it’s not surprising that most of my fellow students at P.S. 9, on West End and 82nd, were Jewish – the WASP kids went to Trinity and Collegiate, and where the Puerto Rican kids went, I’ve no idea. But there are Jews, and then there are Jews; the sects and shadings are many and varied. None of us was a Chassid or, at least of the boys, even Orthodox; no one wore a yarmulke to school. But there was a Semitic pecking order nonetheless. At the top stood Jimmy Perelman, whose father was the Chief Rabbi of Temple Emanuel, the ultra-prestigious Reform synagogue to which the rich, important Jews who lived on the East Side belonged. (Neither rich nor important, I would nonetheless be married there twenty years later.) At the bottom was me, a Jew by birth who’d never been inside a temple, whose father spoke and read Hebrew fluently but whose mother despised all organized religion and so forebade me from attending Hebrew School, where several of my classmates spent some of their afternoons. absorbing the Torah in preparation for their bar mitzvahs. I sometimes hung out at recess with a boy named Martin, whose family practiced Conservative Judaism and belonged to B’Nai Jeshurun on West 88th. He talked about his bar mitzvah a lot. “So when’s yours?” he asked me one day.

 “I don’t think I’m having one,” I answered.

 “Lucky!” he observed.

It’s a little surprising that my father gave in to my mother’s prejudice so easily, considering the fact that his uncles had been important figures in the Zionist movement back in the late nineteenth century in Chicago. But Zionism wasn’t a religious movement, and he hadn’t himself been baptized. Many New York Jews, like us, took ecumenicism very far, unwilling to let go of the past but also to be encumbered by it. We had largely assimilated. We put up a Christmas tree and sent cards out and exchanged presents on December 25; and no mezuseh was affixed outside our front door, no menorah sat on the mantelpiece. But we attended seders at friends’ apartments, at which both my parents were in great demand. My father often officiated, because he could read mellifluously from the Haggadah. My mother loved giving and going to dinner parties, including seders. I don’t know if any religious practices had existed on the Kamsack farm, but Mom knew how to cook all the good stuff that came after the bitter herbs and roasted egg: matzoh balls, gefilte fish, latkes, and -- by acclimation -- the best brisket anyone had ever tasted. Wherever the seder was held (never at our tiny apartment), Mom spent the day shopping and cooking in someone else's kitchen.

 Once, when I was over at Martin’s apartment helping him build a model airplane, his mother barged into his room and grilled me on my Jewishness. “What temple does your family belong to?” she asked me.

 “Uh, we don’t.”

 “Well, where do you celebrate the holidays? Where do you go to services?”

 “Uh, we don’t,” I said again. I was acutely uncomfortable.

 “But you are Jewish, aren’t you?” she said, in a voice that was had an edge to it.

Talk about loaded questions! Either I was an apostate or a goy, either way an interloper who had invaded her sanctified dwelling with no credentials, and certainly unfit company for her son. Was I Jewish? “Uh, yes, I guess so,” I said indifferently.

 “You guess so?” she said shrilly. In her world, Jews were either loved or hated, but no one was simply indifferent to them; hadn’t the Germans thought enough of Jews to wipe out every one of us they could get their hands on? Yet indifferent was exactly what I was; I had never gaven being Jewish a thought. I didn’t know that Yom Kippur was a solemn day of atonement or that Purim was a festive celebration of one of the Jews’ many escapes from tyranny. I couldn’t have told her a single one of the ten commandments that Moses brought down the mountain, or what he and the Jews were doing wandering in the desert for forty years in the first place. Pharaoh? Esther? Joseph? The names meant nothing to me. I had heard of Adam and Eve, barely, but I thought their story was just a fable; I didn’t know it was in the Old Testament, of which I’d read precisely nothing. This was 1949, and Israel was much in the news; I’d heard my parents talk about it, but my dad, who actually volunteered his advertising skills to publicizing the new nation, hadn’t seen fit to explain the diaspora to me. Once, at a seder to which we were invited, my father realized  I’d be the youngest person there, and he wrote out a transliteration of the Four Questions for me to memorize: “Mah-nish-tah-na ha-loy-la hah-zay. . . .”

 “Where are your grandparents from?” Martin’s mother asked me.

That I knew the answer to. “My mother’s parents came from Russia, and my father’s parents came from Lithuania,” I said. I was on more solid ground now, for my great-uncle Bernard had self-published an autobiography that he had hubristically titled My First Eighty Years (he had nine left to him) in which he recounted the story of his and his four brothers’ emigration to America, an adventure tale that would certainly have captured her interest. But four of them (Harris, my grandfather was the exception) were entrepreneurs, and it was the business opportunities that drew them, during the tidal wave of immigration in the late 19th century, to Ellis Island -- at different times, from different cities and occupations.  They all ended up living in a family enclave in Chicago. Harris was the intellectual of the family, revered by his brothers and children for his scholarship, his deep understanding of history, and the quickness of his wit. Shortly after he arrived in Chicago he met Chaim Weizmann, and was captivated by Weizmann’s idea that Jews should have their own country and government. So he spent the rest of his life proselytizing for Zionism, trying to persuade Socialists to trade in their dream of a Socialist America for that of a Socialist Palestine. The grainy black-and-white photograph that is the only extant image of him portrays him as exactly the serious man his family thought him to be: a reader and a thinker:

                                                                        Temple Emanu-El

My grandfather, Harris Horwich

But I wasn’t prepared to deliver a colloquy on my family’s history to Martin’s mother. Instead, I said, “I have to go home now.” No one stopped me. After that, she must have warned Martin to stay clear of me, lest he be infected by the taint of my Godlessness, and we drifted apart.

Not surprisingly, I didn’t attend Martin’s bar mitzvah – or anyone else’s. By the time I was thirteen, I was away at a boarding school where there were compulsory Christian services every Sunday night, and I sang hymns to Jesus along with everyone else. For much of my five years there, I was the only Jew at the school, and even though it was very small, that demographic seems remarkable, as does the fact that I was totally unaware of it until my junior year, when a new day student, a girl named Sarah, homed in on whatever subliminal religious ßsignals I was sending out. “How is it here for us?” she asked me.

I was puzzled by her question. “Us what?” I asked.

“You know!” she said. “Oh, wait, did I make a mistake?  Aren’t you . . . ?”

Now I was mystified. “Aren’t I what? From New York?”

“No! Well, yes. I thought you were from New York. And your last name sounds. . . .”

At last I got it. “You mean am I Jewish?”

“I’m sorry if I . . . oh, forget it,” she said.

“No, that’s OK. Yes, I’m Jewish. On my parents’ side,” I added, trying to make a joke, though of course “on my father’s side” would have been more accurate. “But we never went to temple or celebrated Passover or anything like that.”

“We do,” she said. “But what I was asking was, since hardly anyone else around here seems to be Jewish, is there . . . prejudice?”

“No, not that I’ve ever noticed,” I assured her. And I began to reflect on that fact – that given the wide variety of ethnicities that made up the student body, and given the school’s location one of the WASPiest towns on the Eastern Seaboard, how is it that my religion had never attracted attention? I’m sure if I’d asked to be exempted from attending services, my request would have been granted, but it never occurred to me to do so; I didn’t want to single myself out, and so little did I think of myself as a Jew that raising my voice in praise of Jesus didn’t seem hypocritical. Sarah was not happy to hear about all this from me; if she thought I would alleviate her longing for a landsman, or protect her from the anti-Semitic attacks she was expecting, she now knew she had made a mistake. We never became friends, and religion remained a non-issue in my life until college.

At Cornell, the question of who was Jewish and who was not was in the air from Day One. Cornell has historically been attended by a higher percentage of Jews than any of the other Ivies, though we were still, of course, a minority. I went on to do graduate work at Columbia, whose anti-Semitic admissions policies in the earlier in the 20th century have been exhaustively documented, but at Cornell, they were institutionalized not by the administration or faculty but by the student body itself. Cornell was then very Greek, and every fraternity and sorority was identifiable as either Jewish or – not Christian, in a meaningful sense, but simply non-Jewish. Jews referred to these as the “white” houses, which could be seen as an example of Jewish self-loathing, but which I think was simply a rueful joke about the status of minorities.

On the second day of freshman orientation, our corridor of the boys’ freshman dorm was sent on a blind date with its corresponding corridor of the girls’ dorm. Happily, I discovered that Susan Tonkonogy, a friend of mine from New York, was a member of the girls’ cohort, and we paired off for the evening, walking around the campus and seeing its sights – there are spectacular gorges criss-crossing it, and Lake Cayuga is visible from almost everywhere. Afterwards, back in my dorm, I was comparing notes with the fellow in the room next to mine, who seemed friendly enough. He had an improbable Anglicized upper-crust name; I forget what it actually was but it was on a par with Benedict Cumberbatch. He too had paired off with a girl, one of Sue’s friends.ß “So how was it?” I asked him.

“Oh, great!” he replied. “We hung out all night with her Jewish friends, and then we went downtown ate Jewish food. Yours was too, wasn’t she?”

This was my first recorded contact with a truly anti-Semitic person, whom I regarded not as a foe but as a curiosity. “Well, yes,” I said. “But it didn’t bother me much, because I’m Jewish.”

Long silence. I was curious to see how he’d handle the situation. Finally, he said, “Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not prejudiced or anything.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, and walked back to my own room. We couldn’t help seeing each other five times a day for the entire year, but we never spoke again, just nodded and kept walking. Eventually I joined a Jewish fraternity that prided itself on its liberalism; there was one black member, and the president of the house was a Muslim.  During my second year there, we found among the names of incoming freshmen a kid named Marshall Jew, and we invited him over, just out of curiosity. He turned out to be Chinese. I quit the fraternity shortly after that, and hung out with the literary and theater people, among whom religion, as a practice or a topic for discussion, was non-existent.