Half-Jew

by Susan Jacoby

  Unlike his father and uncle, Ozzie dropped out of Columbia after two years. This may have been entirely a matter of personal inclination: it is hard for me to imagine my uncle willingly consigning himself to classrooms for four years. Unless there was money to be made (or lost) at a card table, Ozzie almost never sat still or stopped talking for more than two minutes. Formal education would have been—must have been—a torture for him. But Ozzie may well have had to leave school in any case because his father’s law practice had fallen off and the family was in desperate need of money. The eldest child came to the rescue, working as an actuary at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company from 1921 to 1928, when he quit to devote himself full-time to tournament bridge and backgammon. In the 1950s, Ozzie was still remembered vividly by his old colleagues at Met Life. One of them described an occasion on which his boss handed the twenty-two-year-old Ozzie a multicolumn set of insurance figures that had already been checked separately by two teams of company actuaries. Glancing briefly at the two sets of calculations, Ozzie looked up and said, “They’re both about a hundred thousand dollars off.” Ozzie was right; he had produced a nearly accurate total straight out of his head, while the other actuaries had spent hours working on mechanical calculators and come up with numbers that were way off.

  Edith, who entered Smith College in 1924 and was old enough to join in some of her elder brother’s social activities, naturally saw much more of Ozzie than my father did throughout the twenties. “If we had known what it was like for Bobbie in public school,” she told me a few years before she died, “I’m sure Ozzie would have come up with the tuition for private school. But since money was scarce, we thought he could finish out the eighth grade in public school and transfer to a prep school the following year. By then I would be through at Smith and I could get a job and help out. The truth is that no one really paid attention to Bobbie during those years. Father was—well, God knows where he was half the time. You know about Mother. Ozzie was her favorite, and there was just no room in her heart for anyone else. I don’t think Bobbie existed for her at all. I feel guilty now that I didn’t spend more time with Bobbie, take the trouble to find out what was going on in his little head. But I wanted to be out of that house. On vacations, I’d beg Ozzie to let me stay with him in his apartment in the city. Bobbie just fell through the cracks. One night, he showed up at Ozzie’s apartment in Greenwich Village around ten o’clock at night, having run away from home because Mother and Father were fighting again. I took him back to Brooklyn the next morning; Ozzie had been out in an all-night poker game. Bobbie cried and begged me not to leave him there. I’d forgotten that little face until now: I blame myself for that. But your father turned out very well, better than either Ozzie or me in some ways. Still, I should have made more of an effort. I was Bobbie’s big sister.”

  I don’t blame my aunt for what she considered her unsisterly behavior: like my father, she had developed serious emotional problems (though of a quite different nature) as a result of being her parents’ daughter. Edith, her father’s favorite, had adored him as a child, and even though she was aware that his gambling had destroyed the standard of living the family had once enjoyed, her love for her unreliable parent survived into early adulthood. But one day in 1926, she arrived home for her summer vacation from Smith—her mother was visiting a friend on Long Island—and found her father in bed with another woman. When she told Ozzie, he said their father was in the habit of bringing prostitutes home when he thought the house would be empty. “I hardened my heart against Father after that,” Edith said. “I could hardly stand to look at him. That he would do this in his and Mother’s bedroom…it was too much for a girl to accept. Later, he tried to justify himself by telling me that he and Mother had not had marital relations since Bobbie was born—and that may very well have been true. As an adult woman, I can have some sympathy for him today. At the time, though, I was furious at him for trying to get back into my good graces by telling me about his intimate life. I thought, CI should not be hearing this. You should not be telling me this.’ I wish now that I had been more forgiving of him. Then, my reaction was just to get out of there and stay away, stay away as much as possible. It meant that I didn’t see much of Bobbie, but I didn’t think about that then.”

  If it is true, as psychologists like to say, that each child of the same parents grows up in a different family, the generalization applied to my father more than it does to most children. His older brother and sister had spent their preadolescent years in an environment of material comfort and financial security, with parents who, whatever the strains in their marriage, had not yet given up on each other. Their father still spent considerable time at home, telling his children tales from Greek mythology, reading them Shakespeare, playing the violin, and teaching them how to play bridge, poker, and pinochle. By the time my father came along, the financial security was gone and his parents were estranged at their best, openly warring at their worst. Dad was seven years younger than his sister and twelve years younger than the brother he worshiped.

  Moreover, the split between my grandfather and his brother Harold meant that my father would never know his first cousins, who had been very much a part of Ozzie’s and Edith’s childhood. Granny Jacoby discouraged my father’s friendships with public school classmates, whom she regarded as uncouth and inferior in every way (with the fortunate exception of Fred Groff). Young Bobbie tried to spend as much time as possible at Fred’s house, but Granny Jacoby usually refused permission when he asked to stay overnight or eat with the Groffs. Her younger son’s table manners, she frequently said, weren’t fit for company. After Edith went off to Smith, the lone child left behind usually had only his mother for company at the dinner table.

  For an isolated little boy, the one bright spot was the companionship of his Sondheim uncle, Simon, and the Sondheim aunts—Carrie, Mabel, and Adele. At some point during the twenties, Dad’s maternal grandmother, Sarah Sondheim, moved in with her daughter in Brooklyn. Nana Sarah, as all of the children called her—though my father didn’t remember much about her—seems to have been as gentle and encouraging a woman as her daughter was harsh and negative. “Never were a mother and daughter more different from each other,” said Aunt Edith. “Nana Sarah was a lovely woman, the kind of woman children are naturally drawn to. To her, every child was the handsomest, the prettiest, the smartest, the nicest. Everyone in the family loved her. I’m surprised your dad doesn’t remember more about her, because he was her special pet. But maybe the influence of Mother was so overwhelming, her constant criticism so harsh, that it pushed out his other memories.”

  As I would learn when I met them thirty years later, Uncle Simon and the Sondheim maiden aunts were also extremely fond of my dad. Si was the clown of the family. Well into his seventies by the time I met him, he had the playfulness and energy of a much younger man. During my dad’s childhood, Uncle Si provided some of the physical horseplay for which my grandfather, who turned fifty in 1920, was already too old. The Sondheim aunts engaged their nephew in quieter pastimes: like my grandfather, they attempted (successfully) to instill a love of English verse in the little boy. When we visited the aunts in New York, they would talk about my dad’s having had the best memory in the family for poetry, and I was thrilled when they would ask my father to recite some of the verses that had been his favorites as a child. “Jabberwocky”—which must have stuck firmly in his mind since he first heard it as a two-year-old from Ozzie—was one of Dad’s specialties, and he acted out the verses with sound effects and broad gestures. “One, two! One, two! And through and through / The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! / He left it dead, and with its head / He went galumphing back.” In their seventies, the aunts seemed as delighted by my dad’s recitation as they undoubtedly were when he was a little boy, and I saw that their love had been a bright spot in a childhood filled with too little praise and encouragement. None of this, however, made up for my dad’s isolation from friends his own age or his father’s abs
ence and his mother’s disapproving presence.

  —

  IT IS PAINFUL for me, even today, to think about the lifelong impact of this upbringing on my father. In many respects, I believe the burden of my grandfather’s absence was more permanent in its effects than the obvious negativism of my grandmother’s presence. A parent who clearly favors one child over another, and does it over a lifetime, can eventually be seen for what she is. In recent years, I have often thought that my father compensated for his deficit of motherly love by becoming more maternal in relation to his own children, and more available to other children, than most men of his generation.

  My brother’s and my friends, with fathers cast in a more rigid paternal mode, were always hanging around the house because they adored my dad. “I remember two things about your dad,” says Rose Glennon, my best friend from grade school. “He always listened to what you had to say as if it were the most important thing in the world. And if he lost his temper, he’d always apologize right away. ‘I’m sorry’ was not in the vocabulary of most of the fathers we knew.”

  I don’t believe my father ever got over his own father’s defection, in part because my grandfather, for all his character flaws, was a man who did know how to show love when he was around to do it. When my brother and I were playing outdoors, my dad would summon us with what sounded like a war cry in a foreign language but had actually been my grandfather’s favorite way of summoning the family dogs: “Berrups, Berree, Berrowowee, Har!, Fee, Rah! Battle.” Or he would recite Tennyson’s “The Eagle,” prompting an exasperated, “Oh, Daddy,” when I reached the age at which children become deeply embarrassed by any sign of eccentricity in their parents. My friends, however, were enthralled by his recitation, complete with a diving gesture at the end—“The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; / He watches from his mountain walls, / And like a thunderbolt he falls.” Everyone was especially impressed by Dad’s version of “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat.” He would twirl and prance, as he said his father had done, when he reached the final stanzas:

  They dined on mince and slices of quince,

  Which they ate with a runcible spoon;

  And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand

  They danced by the light of the moon,

  The moon,

  The moon,

  They danced by the light of the moon.

  My dad’s face would light up when he recited these poems—perhaps the only unclouded legacy from his father. And the memory of the pleasure and yearning in his face hurts more than the memory of the times he evaded my questions with the assertion that he hardly knew his father. As an adult, my dad longed, unassuagably, for what he never received as a child. For what his mother could not give and what his father might have been able to give but was rarely around to provide.

  —

  THE JACOBYS’ pervasive ambivalence, verging on shame, about being Jewish was only one strand in the fabric of this unhappy family, but the thread was woven tightly through the psyches of all three children.

  It was Ozzie who told me that Uncle Si had once been an observant Jew—observant enough, at least, to go to synagogue on most Saturdays and the High Holidays. But my grandfather, who was quite fond of his Sondheim in-laws, explicitly told Si that he did not want his children to learn anything about Judaism. When I asked Ozzie whether his father had any connection to Judaism at all—whether he had been bar mitzvahed, for instance—my uncle replied, “No, no, no. Father had about as much respect for traditional Jewish customs as he did for human sacrifice. We knew we were Jews—it wasn’t like with you kids, who grew up not knowing. But we didn’t really know what being Jewish meant. Though Si was a modern Jew, we basically thought of religious Jews as those men in long black coats with side curls. Father was adamant that we were to have nothing to do with any of this superstition, and he ruled the household on that point. At the same time, he and Mother would both talk about how Jews were envied and hated because they were smarter and better educated than other people. It was all very confusing. Not that my parents talked about this very often. But it was there, a sort of undigested lump. A lump of brisket, maybe. On holidays when other people would make ham, Mother would make brisket and sponge cake. We had brisket for Easter.”

  It is important to understand that my father grew up in an America that, in certain respects, had become “worse for the Jews” than the society in which my grandfather was raised. Even without the family’s economic comedown, my father would undoubtedly have encountered more manifestations of anti-Semitism than his parents—and even his elder brother—did in their early lives. Recent Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe—many still poor, many still sharply distinguishable, in dress, language, and religious customs, from other Americans—were a more visible presence in New York City than anywhere else in America. Before the wave of immigration that began in the 1880s, the city was already home to the largest Jewish population in the country. Established New York Jewish families like the Jacobys were fearful of being lumped with the as-yet-undigested immigrants, most of them the dreaded Ostjuden. My father’s generation would grow up with the knowledge that the fear had become a reality in many aspects of American life. Restrictive housing covenants and attempts to discourage the enrollment of more Jews in private universities became increasingly common after 1910; during the twenties, measures to discourage Jewish applicants would harden into explicit Jewish quotas in elite undergraduate institutions as well as professional schools.

  When my father entered Brooklyn’s Polytechnical Preparatory Country Day School in 1927—the beginning of what he always said were the happiest four years of his youth—the all-male student body was drawn mainly from affluent Protestant families. Although the school was officially nondenominational, students were required to attend daily chapel where Protestant hymns were sung and Christian sermons preached. This requirement was taken for granted, and accepted, by assimilated Jewish families that sent their sons to such institutions. Judging from the last names in his school yearbook—inappropriately named The Polyglot—there were eight or nine Jews in my father’s graduating class of seventy-eight. In view of the city’s large Jewish population, including a significant number of affluent second- and third-generation German-descended Jews with the means and the desire to send their children to private schools, a Jewish enrollment of just 10 percent indicates that Poly, like private universities in the area, was already taking steps to ensure that its student body would not look “too Jewish.”

  Founded in 1854, Poly Prep is situated on 25 pastoral acres of ponds, trees, and gardens, with a spectacular view of the Verrazano Narrows. Even today, the grounds convey the dignified aura of a New England landscape rather than the claustrophobia of an enclave wedged between the water and a down-at-the-heels neighborhood pockmarked by aging discos. In the more civil, optimistic New York where my father grew up, Poly’s air of dignified immunity from urban pressures, coupled with its academic excellence, already offered significant inducements for parents unwilling to entrust the education of their children to the city’s public schools. In today’s infinitely harsher city, civility remains a palpable characteristic of, and attraction for, a student body that is now a genuine polyglot mixture, including every imaginable race and ethnic group.

  My father’s schoolmates, by contrast, were all white males, most with Anglo-Saxon or Scandinavian names and pedigrees. (The Bay Ridge area surrounding Poly Prep had long attracted Norwegian immigrants, and by the 1920s, some of their descendants were affluent enough to send their sons to a private prep school that would have been out of reach a generation earlier.) Catholics were a distinct minority, perhaps a smaller minority than Jews, at Poly. Wealthy Irish Catholics of that generation were still inclined to send their children to exclusive Catholic institutions rather than Protestant prep schools; Joseph P. Kennedy, who sent his sons to Choate precisely because he wanted them to associate with well-connected, old-line WASPs, was an exception. Poly was not as old, or as socially exclusive, a
s Exeter, Choate, and Lawrenceville: a Brooklyn location—even in what was then a near-bucolic setting—was not compatible with top-drawer social status. Nevertheless, Poly was in the same academic league as the better-known boarding schools. For the most part, the school’s graduates went on to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Williams, and Dartmouth. In 1931, Poly sent thirteen members of my father’s graduating class to Dartmouth, the fourth-largest number from prep schools considered feeders for the Ivy League.