Half-Jew

by Susan Jacoby

  That my mother turned over the disciplinarian’s role to my father on that occasion was a measure of her emotional astuteness as a parent. Because she was usually the one who set the limits, and because she had a more clear-eyed view of my character than my soft touch of a father did, she knew that his disapproval would leave a deeper imprint than hers.

  The years between 1948, when Dad lost his job, and the summer of 1953, when he got his second chance and we moved to Lansing, were the most difficult time in my parents’ marriage. But I didn’t know—or, at any rate, I didn’t know much. Sometimes at night I could hear them fighting about money, mainly because my father could never keep his voice down in an argument, but when morning came, I would tell myself it had just been a bad dream. I didn’t know anything about my father’s struggles with gambling, or about his futile search for another job (it seemed perfectly natural to me that he would work for my grandfather Broderick). During this period, I am sure that my dad’s lingering shame about his Jewish origins took second place to his remorse for his own behavior (though his conversion to Catholicism addressed both issues).

  I have only one memory of my father saying anything about Jews during these years. In the spring and early summer of 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were tried, convicted, sentenced to death, and executed as atomic spies. Nearing age eight, I was very much aware of the case, not only because my parents and grandparents talked about it frequently but because I was already a newspaper reader. My father was extremely upset about the Rosenbergs, and I’m quite sure this was the first time I ever heard him single out anyone as “Jewish.” He would tell my mother that he was afraid Americans would blame “all of the Jewish people” for the treason of those two (like everyone in my world, he took it for granted that both Rosenbergs were guilty). My mother would try to calm him down by telling him that America wasn’t Europe, that it wasn’t “the American way” to blame all of the people in a group for what one person had done. This may not have been the most persuasive argument in a country only a decade away from the wartime internment of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, but it seemed to satisfy my father—until the next news break in the Rosenberg story, when he would erupt again. When the Rosenbergs were executed that June, Dad was relieved, commenting that “maybe now we won’t be hearing the names Rosenberg, Greenglass every night on the news.” My grandmother Broderick, characteristically, could think only about the two boys who had been orphaned by the executions. “I don’t know whether she [Ethel] was guilty or not, I don’t know about these things,” Granny would say, “but I think the judge should have been thinking about those two children before he sent their mother to the electric chair.” When other members of the family would say that the judge had no choice if the Rosenbergs had really “helped give Russia the bomb,” Granny would reply, “Well, I’m not so sure it’s so terrible if they do have the bomb. If both countries have the bomb, then it would be stupid for either of them to drop it.”

  My grandmother’s belief that no country would be stupid enough to deliberately use atomic weapons was shared by all of the adults in my family. Many of my classmates at the Ascension School, where I attended first and second grades, were very scared of being killed by “the bomb,” but my parents’ and grandparents’ convictions had insulated me from what was then a widely held childhood fear. Like all school authorities at the time, the nuns at Ascension had a plan for what to do in the event of an atomic attack. If fire broke out, we were, of course, to file outside as quickly as possible—but if an air raid alarm sounded, we were to head for the school basement. The nuns advised us to make sure that our basements at home were stocked with canned goods so that we could survive until the radiation had “gone away.” Radiation, we were told, could kill us even if we couldn’t see it or smell it. This did worry me, because our house in Hazel Crest had no basement. If the bomb was on its way, I wasn’t sure we would have time to make it to my grandparents’ house in Harvey, which did have a basement but was a ten-minute drive away. When I brought the nuns’ advice home to my parents, they told me, in no uncertain terms, that the Russians were not going to drop the bomb because they didn’t want the Americans to drop the bomb on them. “The Russians don’t want their people to be hurt any more than we want our people to be hurt” was the gist of what Mom and Dad had to say—and that made perfect sense to me. Russians had families just like ours, I was told, and Russian parents didn’t want to see their children suffer any more than American parents did. Because we said a prayer every day in school for “the conversion of Russia,” I had a vague idea that Russians didn’t believe in God and might therefore be more likely to start a war. My parents skipped over the whole issue of godlessness and told me that regardless of what religion the Russians practiced, it didn’t mean they weren’t good people. (My parents never suggested that the Russian leaders might not be as good as the Russian people. By the time I started thinking about such matters, Stalin was dead—and I had never really pictured him in my mind. Adolf Hitler, whose image still appeared in countless newsreels, was the bogeyman of my childhood.)

  Looking back, I see that the tenor of these discussions about the bomb set my family apart from our neighbors. They also marked the beginning of my parents’ (especially my mother’s) sabotage of the Catholic education they insisted I receive. Yes, the Church was the final authority on faith and morals. But a lot of what the nuns and priests said wasn’t really concerned with “faith and morals”—even though they might suggest otherwise—but was merely a matter of opinion. The godlessness and perfidy of the Russians was one of those matters of opinion. On such subjects, I was told, one’s own conscience and brain were more reliable guides than the pronouncements of the Church. There could hardly have been a more subversive message in the Catholic world of the fifties.

  —

  MY MEMORIES of this early period of my childhood, before we left for Lansing, are almost entirely happy, and they remain much more vivid than my recollections of the first few years after our move to Michigan. I am certain that I would be a very different person today had I spent my entire childhood in Lansing and Okemos—not only because I would have been separated from my Broderick grandparents at a younger age but because I would not have been so thoroughly exposed to Chicago itself. The city, epitomizing excitement, achievement, and glamour, became a potent presence in my imagination during those formative years.

  The relationship between cities and suburbs was very different during my early childhood from what it would become by the time I was a teenager. My parents had moved to suburban Hazel Crest in pursuit of a backyard and better schools, but we still looked to Chicago for shopping, restaurants, culture, and baseball. It was understood that only the city could supply such amenities, and we would have been incredulous had we been told that in only ten years, people like us would take our business to suburban shopping malls (the term mall didn’t even exist during my early childhood) instead of downtown.

  To me, baseball meant Comiskey Park, where my beloved White Sox played; culture meant the Museum of Science and Industry; and “going shopping” meant only one thing—a trip to Marshall Field’s (whose founder coined the slogan “The customer is always right”) on State Street in Chicago’s Loop. My grandmother, mother, and I would all dress up in the good clothes (including gloves and, for the adults, hats) that all women wore to go downtown in those days. We nearly always took the elevated train into the city, which was part of the fun. As the familiar skyline came into view, I would become so excited that my stomach started to hurt. The greatest treat of all was just ahead—disembarking a block from Field’s into an artificial darkness created by the network of overhead tracks and the tall, densely packed buildings in the heart of the Loop. As many times as we made the trip, I never ceased to be enchanted by the way the bright lights of the stores dispelled the gloom; this quintessential city image, of lights fighting the darkness, appeared in my dreams and helped form my dreams of the future.

  I had already
decided that I wanted to become a newspaper reporter when I grew up, and that was another dream generated during the Chicago phase of my childhood. The city still had many competing papers when I was small. I started reading the ultraconservative Tribune for the baseball box scores and wound up reading the Sun-Times and the Daily News as well, for my grandfather pointed out that these papers provided different interpretations of the news of the day. Gramps took me on a tour of Tribune Tower, where I stared wide-eyed at the huge presses and carefully wrote down one of the slogans engraved on the building, Thomas Jefferson’s: “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press that can not be limited without being lost.”

  —

  CLOSER TO home, there was a neigborhood institution that was as enticing to me as anything in the city. Bowl Center, my grandfather’s bar and bowling alley in Harvey, was the most enjoyable spot in my universe. My mother did not consider Bowl Center an appropriate environment for her children, but she usually yielded to my pleas that I be allowed to watch the ball game there on Saturday afternoons during the stifling Chicago summers. The bar didn’t have air-conditioning—only movie theaters had air-conditioning in those days—but it was cooler than anywhere else because it was dark, illuminated only by neon beer signs (Schlitz: The Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous) and the flickering light from the television. Gramps had seen the possibilities of television early on, and each year, the newest model appeared over the bar. Bowl Center had the first TV, the first large-screen TV (large meaning larger than nine inches), and, finally, the first color TV in the neighborhood. By game time at 1:30 on Saturdays, there would be standing room only around the bar. The crowd would remain until the last out, when wives would drift in to tell their husbands, with commanding rather than neutral inflections, that there was still time to wash cars or mow lawns before dinner was ready. It was a family bar, even though the drinking crowd consisted almost entirely of men. They always made a big fuss over me, as the bartender (often Gramps himself, who tended bar only on Saturdays now that his real estate business was flourishing) made me one Shirley Temple after another. I became a true baseball fan during those long, somnolent afternoons, tutored by men who were old enough to remember the Black Sox scandal of 1919 and the legendary Yankee teams of the 1920s. Most of them, like Gramps, were of Irish descent and were gifted storytellers who never tired of talking. They argued endlessly about which team was better, the “Murderers’ Row” Yankees of Ruth and Gehrig, or the fifties’ Yankees of Mantle and Berra. To me, there was only one important point: the arrogant Yankees almost always won. They beat us (“us” being the White Sox rather than the Cubs, because Harvey adjoined the South Side of Chicago) year after year. When the World Series came around, the Yanks proceeded to beat the Brooklyn Dodgers. During the Series, the Bowl Center crowd always rooted for the Dodgers on “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” principle, and we sympathized with the perennially disappointed fans of Dem Bums. My father, of course, had been a Dodger fan as a child, something that surprised the men in the bar, who didn’t know that Dad had grown up in Brooklyn because he didn’t have a Brooklyn accent. (The popular television series titled The Goldbergs fostered a widespread identification of Brooklyn with “Jewish” accents in the fifties—just as the movie Saturday Night Fever would produce an equally stereotypical equation of Brooklyn and working-class Italian-American accents in the seventies.)

  One of my mother’s main objections to my presence at Bowl Center was that I was bound to be exposed to bad grammar and vulgar language—what she called “lower-class” speech. In spite of (or perhaps because of) his having been raised in a much better-educated home than my mother’s, Dad had no such objections. Robbie and I would imitate what we heard at home, he told my mother firmly (one of the few times he overruled her on a child-rearing issue), and, in any case, the men in the bar hardly ever cursed when I was around. This was so. Whenever one of them started to use “Jesus…” as a prelude to a curse in my presence, he would quickly turn the curse into a pious utterance by adding the Catholic formula “…Mary, and Joseph.” Once, as my grandfather let out a “Goddammit,” it came out, “Goddammit, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” The strongest epithet I ever heard in that bar was “horseshit,” a word I did use quite frequently on the playground when the nuns weren’t listening (contrary to my father’s prediction).

  Those Saturday afternoons were, I now realize, a running history lesson of a particular kind—history from the vantage point of working-class men, then in their forties, fifties, and early sixties, who had grown up in near-poverty, survived the Depression, and lived into an era of prosperity they could never have envisaged when they were young. Nearly all of the men had been born at home (as, indeed, my mother was in 1921), because their parents would never have considered spending hard-earned money on a hospital birth. I heard of mothers who died giving birth because, by the time the family realized something was wrong and a doctor was called, it was too late to do anything. I heard of children who had suffered from scurvy and rickets during the Depression, of frantic efforts to borrow the money for a new drug—sulfa—that was said to save people in danger of death from pneumonia. These men revered Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom they gave full credit for bringing the country through the Depression and the war. None of my grandfather’s customers had been out of a job since 1940, when the economy began gearing up for war. They owned homes and cars, and many of them (like my grandfather himself) could point with pride by the early fifties to the first child in their families ever to get a college education. Although they venerated the memory of FDR, nearly all of them voted for Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952. Adlai Stevenson, they said, knew nothing about “the common man.” He was no FDR. He was not even Harry Truman. He was also divorced, and these men subscribed to the notion that “a man who can’t run his own family can’t run the country.” Gramps had known many of his customers since childhood, and he was the most successful among them. Though he and my grandmother had lost their house after the stock market crash, he had enough resources in 1932, when real estate prices hit rock bottom, to borrow money from a bank in order to buy Bowl Center. When Prohibition was repealed, the profits from the ever-reliable bar would enable Gramps to start his own real estate firm. By the early fifties, he didn’t really need Bowl Center (which he eventually sold), but he liked being there, and he enjoyed his position as the most enterprising among a group of men who had all done better than they ever imagined they could. I would often see Gramps take a twenty-dollar bill out of the cash register and slip it to one of his cronies, “to tide you over till payday.”

  What I remember most about those years is spending a great deal of time with adults. They were all interesting to me, and they were all interested in me. My granny, the most purely decent person I have ever known, was the tender heart of the Broderick family. My grammar school was about eight blocks from my grandparents’ house, and, although I was strictly forbidden to walk over there from school by myself, I ignored the prohibition one day when I got into a fight with two boys on the playground. There was a lone Negro girl in my second-grade class, and I had punched one of the boys in the face when I heard him calling her “tar baby” and “nigger.” He responded by knocking me to the ground, and I ran off howling toward Granny’s, without asking anyone for permission to leave. My frantic grandmother met me about a block from her house: the boys had tattled to the nun in charge of the second grade, and she had phoned ahead. By then I was as scared (because I wasn’t quite sure whether I had taken the right street to get to Granny’s house) as I was furious at the boys. I was unable to repeat the terrible word; it came out “nig…” when I tried to say it to Granny. I had already heard that word at Comiskey Park when my favorite player, Orestes (“Minnie”) Minoso, befuddled yet another opposing pitcher with his aggressive baserunning. Minoso, a coal black Dominican who eventually became one of the most popular players in the history of the White Sox franchise, was a provocative baserunner very much in the style of the young Jackie Robin
son. Although the home fans generally called out “nigger” to praise Minoso (as in “Look at that nigger fly!”), my father and grandfather instantly informed me that the word was used only by ignorant and uneducated people, and that it was an insult to Negroes (or, as Gramps called them, “the colored”—the polite term for Negroes during his childhood). That was why, I explained to my grandmother, I had pushed the boy in the face. There had been no doubt that the word nigger, used on the playground, was intended to wound and insult the only Negro girl in our class. Granny took me into her backyard, which was filled with vivid tulips of every hue. Granny pointed to her garden and said, “It would be plain silly to say that red tulips are good and yellow tulips are bad. They’re just different colors, that’s all, both of them beautiful. That’s the way it is with colored people and white people. Humans come in different colors, just like flowers. The color of their skin doesn’t tell you anything about what’s inside.” Instead of fighting the next time, Granny suggested, I should explain why the boys were wrong by telling them about the tulips. My mother, when she learned what had happened on the playground, also thought the tulip analogy was a fine way to convince bullies that they shouldn’t use racial slurs. My father, however, declared that “people like that only understand a punch in the face.” “Bob,” my mother said sharply, “she was the one who got hurt and knocked down.” I didn’t know then that my father had been victimized during his boyhood by the same kind of apprentice bigots. Looking back on this incident, I am struck most forcefully by the realization that none of the adults in my life told me that I should have minded my own business and done nothing.