Half-Jew

by Susan Jacoby

  Had I gone to public elementary school, I might have accepted the less obtrusive role Catholicism played in the lives of children who received religious instruction only once a week in the evening. My parents told me to think for myself but at the same time turned me over to an institution that insisted it had all the answers. When we moved to Okemos, which had a small but excellent library, Mom and Dad were among the rare parents who readily signed a permission slip enabling me to take out any adult book I chose—yet they sent me to a school where I was taught that it was a mortal sin to read any books on the Vatican Index.

  I was not avid to crack the Index, in spite of the lure of the forbidden, because it included a wide range of works, from the writings of Voltaire to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, that sounded boring to me at the time. Like most children who become omnivorous readers, my reading as I entered adolescence was a hodgepodge of classics and trash, including comic books, contemporary best-sellers, historical novels, children’s books I had already reread dozens of times, and serious novels that did appeal to me even though they were way over my head. On any given day, the array of books under my bed (a mess that infuriated my mom, because it often led to library fines) might include Gone with the Wind, Howard Fast’s Spartacus, Lloyd Douglas’s Magnificent Obsession (a treacly tale of a dissolute young man who blinds a woman in a car accident and is redeemed by faith in God), Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (which scared me to death with its scenario of total atomic destruction brought about by human error), Jane Eyre, A Tale of Two Cities, The Red and the Black, Emma, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the short stories of John O’Hara, and the preteen novels of Maud Hart Lovelace, who chronicled the childhood and adolescence of three turn-of-the-century Minneapolis girls named Betsy, Tacy, and Tib. My parents almost never interfered with my reading; the only time I remember my father posing an objection was when I brought The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit home from the library. The best-selling novel by Sloan Wilson (later made into a movie starring Gregory Peck) has as its main character a married veteran who fathers an illegitimate child with an Italian woman during the war. My father wasn’t sure that this was an appropriate theme for a twelve-year-old, but, after a brief discussion, he agreed with my mother that it was too late for them to start trying to censor my reading. My mother and father set different standards from the ones preached in school, and this dichotomy set me apart from my Catholic friends in ways my parents surely did not intend. Or did they?

  Catholic school, in addition to engendering a lifelong interest in religion (albeit in a form quite different from what the nuns envisaged), gave me a secular education far more rigorous than the one I would have received in the public schools of our area and era. Most of the Dominican sisters at St. Thomas, which I attended from the sixth through the eighth grades, were great and dedicated teachers. Beginning in the seventh grade, we took Latin, which the public schools were already beginning to jettison in a reaction against stuffy, old-fashioned academic requirements. I can still hear Sister Aurelia speaking eloquently on the value of Latin and its relationship to all modern languages, including English. “If you learn Latin,” she would tell us, “you will not only understand your own language better but you will find it much easier to learn any other language.” (Twelve years later, when I found myself in Moscow and was able to make rapid progress in Russian, I understood how right she had been. A number of the American journalists in Russia, never having been exposed to declensions, were defeated by case endings and found it nearly impossible to make themselves understood, or to profit from the expensive lessons financed by their respective newspapers and magazines.) The nuns, like my father (and unlike most of the teachers I encountered in more “progressive” public schools), believed in memorization, and not only of prayers, hymns, and catechism answers. You simply did not get out of the eighth grade at St. Thomas without having your brain permanently imprinted with large chunks of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the entire Gettysburg Address, and nineteenth-century lyric poems (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, and, surprisingly, Edgar Allan Poe, were among the nuns’ favorites). Most of my teachers had a deep feeling for language; I remember Sister Aurelia, who taught seventh- and eighth-grade English as well as Latin, pointing out that the Gettysburg Address was profoundly moving not only because of its ideas but because of the way in which those ideas were expressed. She gave us an exercise—to translate Lincoln’s speech into what she called “less elevated” language, and to see whether it would have had the same effect. It was a wonderful assignment by a genius of a teacher, and I could never understand how the chastity-obsessed sweater monitors could also be such gifted educators. Only when the feminist movement engendered a reevaluation of all women’s lives did I consider the possibility that the convent might have been seen as the only real alternative to marriage by devout Catholic women born, as my teachers were, between 1900 and 1930. While there were many aging Irish Catholic bachelors in the early decades of the century, there were few aging spinsters, and those few were viewed by their families as pitiable burdens. The honorable maiden aunt, a staple in old New England Protestant families, did not have a respectable place in American Irish Catholic society; if a woman did not wish to marry, for whatever reason, she could find security and community only in the convent. And it was easy, even for children, to tell the difference between the warped, sour women who had probably entered the convent because no man would have them and the vibrant and unforgettable nuns, like Sister Aurelia, who had chosen to pursue their genuine vocation for teaching instead of taking on the responsibilities of Catholic wifehood and motherhood. For anyone who benefited from the work of such dedicated women in the Catholic schools of the fifties and early sixties, it came as no surprise when, in the mid-seventies, the good female soldiers began to push for more recognition, responsibility, and equality in the running of the Church to which they had devoted their lives.

  To these women, it was always a sin not to do your best. We were frequently assigned compositions, and I usually got A’s, so I was shocked to receive a C on one assignment. Sister Aurelia asked me to stay after class, and she wanted to know how long it had taken me to write the composition. I confessed that I had completed the work by flashlight in fifteen minutes, after lights-out, because I had stayed up late to listen to a night baseball game on the radio. (My White Sox were in contention that fall.) “It showed,” she said. “You didn’t develop your ideas logically. I gave you a C because for you, this wasn’t an effort at all. Without trying, you can do C work. To get an A, it has to be an A for you—the best you’re capable of doing. What you did is like cheating, but it’s worse than copying someone else’s paper because you’re cheating yourself.” This was a teaching I could accept, and if the nuns failed to make a Catholic out of me, they succeeded in turning me into a person who regarded learning as an ethical imperative. In that sense, I have never stopped being Sister Aurelia’s student.

  In 1959, when I entered public school, I also began reading the Bible from cover to cover. No one familiar with the history of the Reformation will be surprised to hear that reading and interpreting the Bible on one’s own were definitely not activities encouraged by parochial schools. In public school, we were assigned Romeo and Juliet for ninth-grade English (with its dangerous emphasis on teenage passion, the play would never have passed muster with the nuns), and I soon realized that it was impossible to fully appreciate and understand Shakespeare without having read the Bible. I had never really looked at the Old Testament, although I was more or less familiar with the New Testament because so many passages from the Gospels and the apostolic epistles were included in the liturgy of the Mass (which we were required to attend every day at St. Thomas). I soon fell under the spell of the King James Bible. The Douay version, used in the Catholic liturgy of that era, was all but identical in content (with the exception of a few hairsplitting changes), but the majestic language of the King James version made the “Catholic Bible” sound, at t
imes, like a tin-eared imitation.

  As I became familiar with the Bible, I began to suspect that my father, who did not know even the most famous psalms by heart, could not possibly have had any religious education as a child. He knew only the Catholic prayers he had learned in religious instruction as an adult. With his prodigious memory for verse, it was inconceivable that he would have failed to memorize passages like the Twenty-third Psalm if he had really gone to Episcopal Sunday school (as he claimed at the time of his conversion). This was yet another piece of my father’s official version of his life that didn’t make sense.

  I half hoped that through reading the Bible, I would discover a set of religious beliefs that I could substitute for the Catholic teachings that seemed so illogical to me. But as far as I could see (and my ideas about the differences among Protestant denominations were hazy), the Bible conferred no more—or less—legitimacy on Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, and Episcopalians than it did on Catholics. Moreover, after reading the Old Testament, I found the God of the Jews just as irrational as (and even more intractable than) the God of the Christians. When I came to the slaying of the Egyptian firstborn, I shuddered as I had when I first heard of Herod’s Slaughter of the Innocents, a story that has started more than one “fallen-away” Catholic on the road to agnosticism or atheism. The Catholic educators of my youth (and the sixteenth-century Church hierarchy) were quite right in their assumption that independent Bible reading posed a danger to faith. As a child, I told myself—and, with what I am certain was insufferable frequency, my parents—that even if God existed, I wanted no part of a Supreme Being who would slaughter innocent babies. My mother would usually ignore my professions of agnosticism (I wasn’t quite prepared to go so far as to declare myself an atheist), saying that was all very well, but I was still going to Mass on Sunday with the rest of the family.

  My father, however, would go wild. “Honor student!” he would say contemptuously. “You look at the intricate design of each leaf—of each and every leaf—and you say it ‘just happened.’ Just came out of nowhere. The millions of brain cells in your head came out of nowhere. Well, maybe yours did. That’s brilliant. The universe came out of nowhere. An A student! Where do those A’s come from?” “Bob, there’s no need to get overwrought,” my mother would say. “She’s just going through a phase. You’re egging her on by rising to the bait.” Eight years later, I laughed out loud, thinking of my dad, when I came across a diatribe by the furious father of young Alex Portnoy in Portnoy’s Complaint: “Do you know men study their whole lives in the Jewish religion, and when they die they still haven’t finished? Tell me, now that you are all finished at fourteen being a Jew, do you know a single thing about the wonderful history and heritage and saga of your people?…A’s in school, but in life he’s as ignorant as the day he was born.”

  By the standards of most of the people around me, my dad’s style of communication was as overwrought as that of Portnoy père. Dad’s contentiousness, my mother would explain, had been nurtured not only by his chronically argumentative family but by his having been born and raised in New York, where people were in the habit of shouting at one another instead of speaking politely. I knew this was true from our summer visits to the city. Furthermore, most New Yorkers (like my dad) “talked with their hands”—another habit my mother was always trying to break me of. That my father’s style of communication was not only typical of New Yorkers but also stereotypically associated with Jews was something I didn’t know.

  IX

  Out of Somewhere

  AS I ENTERED MY teens, the subject of Jews—who they were, why so many of them had been murdered in the camps, what they believed, and what they represented to non-Jews—began to impinge more and more on my consciousness. At fourteen, in a 1959 issue of The New Yorker, I came across a story that led me to consider what it might mean to be a Jew in an America I could recognize, just as Anne Frank’s diary had once forced me to think about what it meant to have been a Jew threatened by the Nazis in a Europe I could not recognize. I began reading Philip Roth’s “Defender of the Faith” under the amusing misapprehension, engendered by the title, that this must have something to do with Catholics. I soon became involved in the story (it seems that I started growing up as a reader as Roth came of age as a writer), set during the last summer of World War II, between the end of combat in Europe and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which finally ended the fighting in Asia.

  The hero of the story, Sergeant Nathan Marx, is a Jewish veteran forced into a complicated conflict of loyalties as a result of his relationship with Sheldon Grossbart, a draftee in his stateside training platoon and a smarmy operator who attempts to gain special favors from his sergeant by appealing to their bond as Jews. Marx goes along for a time, asking his commanding officer to release the Jewish soldiers who want to go to shul on Friday night; sympathizing with their distaste for the treyf in the army mess hall; giving Grossbart the benefit of the doubt whenever he asks to be excused from army duties on religious grounds. But when Marx learns that all of the other draftees in the platoon are being shipped to the Pacific—all but Grossbart, who has somehow managed to pull strings to get sent to New Jersey—he goes out of his way to obtain a reversal of the order. The story ends:

  I stood outside the orderly room, and I heard Grossbart weeping behind me. Over in the barracks, in the lighted windows, I could see the boys in their T shirts sitting on their bunks talking about their orders, as they’d been doing for the past two days. With a kind of quiet nervousness, they polished shoes, shined belt buckles, squared away their underwear, trying as best they could to accept their fate. Behind me, Grossbart swallowed hard, accepting his. And then, resisting with all my will an impulse to turn and seek pardon for my vindictiveness, I accepted my own.

  At fourteen, I certainly did not understand all (or even most) of the nuances of this story. The Jewish critics who attacked Roth at the time—mainly because they regarded the character of Grossbart as an anti-Semite’s dream—would have been utterly bewildered by my Catholic schoolgirl’s analysis. Grossbart, in my interpretation, became all of the prissy, hypocritically pious girls who curried favor with the nuns by spending extra time in church, who informed on less pious classmates, who went around proclaiming “I am a Catholic” at every conceivable opportunity. And Marx—well, who else would Marx be but me? Wouldn’t I just love to get even with the girls who went around trading “holy cards” with pictures of saints instead of baseball cards? If I were their drill sergeant, I’d cheerfully make them eat meat on Friday if that was the will of the U.S. Army. I did not understand what kind of Jew Nathan Marx considered himself to be (as opposed to what kind of Jew Sheldon Grossbart was), but I did grasp the pull of competing loyalties at the heart of the story. Marx, after all, had not been insensible to the pull of group loyalty. What Jewish veteran of the war in Europe, only months after the liberation of the death camps, could have dismissed the claims of loyalty made by another Jew? The character of Nathan Marx struck me deeply and forcefully, and the sorting out of loyalties seemed to me all the more impressive because I understood by then—Anne Frank’s diary had helped me to understand—that being a Jew wasn’t a choice in the same way that being a Catholic was. To be a Jew meant more than to be a member of a church. My father, I knew, had become a Catholic by an act of will, and I was beginning to believe that for me, religion could be undone by an act of will. But I understood that Nathan Marx was a Jew whether he ate pork sausage or not, whether he observed the Sabbath or not.

  I did not talk about “Defender of the Faith,” or my reaction to it, with either of my parents. By then I knew what I had not known when I read Anne’s diary at the age of eleven—that the subject of Jews was definitely not something my father wished to discuss. Only a year later, though, we heard news of import for Jews that even my dad could not ignore: on May 23, 1960, the Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, announced that Adolf Eichmann, the man in charge of the practical strategy for
implementing the Final Solution, had been captured by Israeli agents in Argentina. Eichmann had been living there since 1950 under the name Ricardo Klement, an identity he assumed with the help of one of the underground organizations dedicated to helping prominent Nazis escape punishment.