Dream Catcher: A Memoir

by Salinger, Margaret A.

  “People talked like that in those days, you know.” In fact, I didn’t know. What people? I had always associated outspoken anti-Semitism in this country with the lunatic fringe, familiar TV news images of fat, unemployed guys with more guns than teeth ranting about how it’s the Jews’ fault he has no job and no teeth, a few disturbed adolescents vandalizing Jewish cemeteries, and the occasional neo-Nazi weirdos, heiling Hitler in their pine-paneled basement rec rooms. How I managed to reach the age of forty with such a mix of ignorance and snobbery is something I’m not proud of. It is truly frightening what you miss when you don’t ask the right questions and when whole subjects, such as your family history, are taboo. Never mind the ancient Greeks and Romans I learned about as a history major at Brandeis; better late than never, I set out to learn something about my own family’s story, and especially that off-limits subject: what life was like when my father was growing up. With my mother, I found out in middle age, rather like Dorothy and her ruby slippers, that all I had to do was ask and she’d take me to her childhood home, she’d bring to light all those things she’d been silent about that had come to me in nightmares for so long. With my father, I first turned to written stories rather than spoken ones for answers.

  Oh, what a breath of fresh air a good library is! I know, musty is the usual adjective that is attached to libraries, but not for me. In a free country, one does not have to just “shut up and take it,” as my aunt was told by her mother, remaining in ignorance. All that information there, just for the asking! No one slaps your hand at the card catalogue, or tells you to shut up about your questions as you browse the stacks. I spent several glorious months in the library, finding answers to questions I’d never have dared ask a family member. What I found was that my experience of a conspiracy of silence, an unspoken agreement not to talk about vital parts of our history, the feeling, like the Lady of Shalott, that a curse will fall upon you should you look out from your island to the mainland from whence you came, and connect your story to the web of community, is an experience I share with many of my generation. As I read more and looked more deeply into the history of this country during the early to mid part of the twentieth century, I kept asking friends of mine, well educated, both Jew and Gentile, “Did you know about this? Did your parents tell you about these things?” The silence was deafening. For me, as one who grew up in a world where fiction and dreams held sway, facts, things that really happened, are more than a breath of fresh air; they saved me from suffocating from those “tendrils strong as flesh and blood.”

  I HAD ASSUMED THAT THE touchiness about background was an idiosyncrasy of Salingers (and Caulfields). A few facts were particularly helpful to me in changing this mistaken assumption. When I began looking at Jewish American life in the early part of the twentieth century, around the time my grandparents met and married, I found that many Americans were very much occupied with the vicissitudes of anti-Semitism at that time, and as my aunt said, “talked that way” shamelessly. Prior to 1890, only 2 percent of the approximately 16 million immigrants to America were Jews, the majority of whom were from the more prosperous northern, central, and western parts of Europe. The turn of the century saw a huge increase in immigration, especially of poorer southern and eastern Europeans, including over a million and a half Jews—about 10 percent of the new immigrants.11 Not unlike today, there was much talk at the time about the “problem” of immigrants, whether America could absorb such “barbarian hordes” and retain its values (not to mention preserve the status quo social and economic structure). While New York and New England patricians “generalized about the negative worth of most of the newcomers from Europe and Asia, their most severe racial animus was directed toward the Jews.”12

  In mainstream magazines, such as those in which my father published his first stories, as well as in daily newspapers and other forms of mass entertainment, anti-Semitism ran rampant. That bastion of the mythical “good old days” Americana, The Saturday Evening Post (which would later publish several of my father’s early stories), published a series of articles from 1920 to 1921 alleging that the Jews of Poland (such as my grandfather) were, among other things, “human parasites . . . mongoloids not fit to govern themselves.”13

  In the interwar years, being identifiably Jewish—having a Jewish name, for example—was generally a great economic and social disadvantage in dealing with wider Gentile America. Many Jewish college students changed their names before they were graduated. One study of name changes in the 1930s in Los Angeles, where Jews were 6 percent of the population but 46 percent of name changes, found that most applicants were married, prosperous Jewish males who lived in mixed Jewish and Christian neighborhoods. Even in the entertainment business, an area in which Jews could find work, Jewish names were often changed for business reasons.

  Jews were alleged, by their detractors, to control not only Hollywood but the media in general, and newspapers in particular. At the New York Times, many writers believed that publishers Adolph Ochs and Arthur Hays Sulzberger were so sensitive to such anti-Semitic accusations that they encouraged writers with identifiably Jewish names to use initials instead of their given names in bylines. Thus we read stories by A. (Abraham) H. Raskin, A. H. Weiler, A. M. Rosenthal.14

  My father’s first byline in a published work, “The Young Folks” in Story magazine, was Jerome Salinger. By the next piece, a short story called “The Hang of It,” in Collier’s, he was J. D. Salinger. This was something I wondered about growing up, since all his friends called him Jerry as a nickname, not J.D. I knew he thought Jerome was an ugly name, but I thought it was just a matter of personal taste. Jerome is not on my list of top ten beautiful names for boys either, but I chose his middle name, David, for my son’s middle name. “Terrible name,” my father said, scowling, when he heard the news. He often said how much he hated giving his beloved characters “terrible” (“Jewish-sounding” remained unsaid) names, such as Seymour, but that’s just what Seymour’s parents would have done, he said, so he had to do it even though it “nearly killed him.”

  The self-esteem of many Jews, most especially those in mixed neighborhoods of middle-to-upper incomes, not surprisingly, suffered.15 One such man, speaking for many, wrote how “embarrassed he had been by other Jews who spoke English badly, who used gestures to emphasize their points, and who interspersed Yiddish words or expressions in their speech.”16 Which brings me back to my great-grandfather Salinger calling out street names on the Madison Avenue bus, “Forty-feef Street, Forty-seex,” and likewise, to Holden’s grandfather from Detroit, “that keeps calling out the numbers of the streets when you ride on the goddam bus with him.”

  As my aunt Doris said, “It wasn’t nice to be half-Jewish in those days. It was no asset to be Jewish either, but at least you belonged somewhere.” My great-grandfather could have been on dozens of bus lines throughout greater New York and fit right in. He might have been joined in his joyful recitation by busloads of landsmen who talked the same way. On the Madison Avenue bus, however, he was met with icy or embarrassed stares. There were places a Jew was at home in New York and places he was not.

  When my father was growing up, many buildings and even whole areas such as Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights were restricted, as the infamous signs in windows read: “No Catholics, Jews, or dogs allowed.” The courts upheld the right of landlords to restrict until 1948 in Shelly v. Kraemer, when such exclusions were held unenforceable in courts of law. However, the informal effect of being unwelcome, or as my aunt said, “how people talked in those days,” is often, in reality, indistinguishable from legal banning in outcome.17

  Kurt Lewin, the psychologist, advised American Jews of that time how and when to inform their children of the situations they might encounter:

  The basic fact is that child is going to be a member of a less privileged minority group, and he will have to face this fact. Do not try to avoid a discussion of the subject of anti-Semitism because the problem is bound to arise at some time. The chi
ld might not be called a “dirty Jew” until about the fourth grade [later than my father’s unlucky character Lionel, who heard the dirty word kike at age four] . . . he or she could expect to be invited to parties of their Gentile peers until adolescence when the invitations would cease, and both boys and girls, after their high school years, will face discrimination in colleges and in the work place.18

  Most Jewish young people in New York during the 1920s and 1930s, however, would experience the rise of anti-Semitism, discrimination, and the Depression from within the closely woven fabric of Jewish community. Such neighborhoods provided a buffer zone from the impact of wider Gentile society. One woman, reflecting on her childhood in a New York neighborhood that was well over 80 percent Jewish, said she didn’t even know she was a member of a minority group until she left high school and tried to find work outside the community. She grew up thinking the whole world was Jewish.19

  My father’s childhood Upper West Side neighborhood, for example, was over 50 percent Jewish at the time and, by 1929, was a thriving community with scores of kosher butchers and bakers and restaurants, and ten synagogues. I knew that my father did not attend Jewish religious services as a child and that his family, in fact, celebrated Christmas, so I assumed, even after I had learned that he had grown up thinking he was Jewish, that their sense of belonging to the Jewish community was limited. In fact, I found out that the Salinger family’s lack of religious attendance was not unusual. In 1929, approximately 80 percent of Jewish youth in New York City were found to have had no religious training at all.20

  My father attended Upper West Side public schools until the end of eighth grade, where well over half of his classmates were Jewish. The following school year, 1932–33, the family moved to a Park Avenue neighborhood that was less than 4 percent Jewish, and he started high school at McBurney, a private Young Men’s Christian Association movement school. In January he turned fourteen, and at about the same time that Hitler was sworn in as chancellor of Germany, Jerome David Salinger had his bar mitzvah. Sometime within the next year, he and Doris found out their mother was not Jewish. His records at McBurney state that Jerome “was hard hit by adolescence with us this year.” Hard hit indeed.

  At the end of tenth grade, when Jerry was fifteen, he transferred from McBurney to Valley Forge Military Academy, in Wayne, Pennsylvania. I’m sorry to say, I don’t know how the whole idea of military school arose. There is a certain poetic symmetry with the Little Indian running away with a suitcase full of toy soldiers, but I just don’t know. It seems like a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire to me. What I found out about military schools of the day certainly supports what my aunt told me, that she thought anti-Semitism at Valley Forge was “hell on Sonny.” Central Pennsylvania, where Valley Forge was located, was rated by a U.S. army war board survey as an epicenter of anti-Semitism in America.21 Regardless of location, hazing at military academies was particularly brutal for the few Jews who chose to apply.22 Admiral Hyman Rickover, one of the nine Jews to graduate from the Annapolis Naval Academy in 1922 out of an entering class of nineteen Jews, indicated that it was hell. In this “fun” class, the senior photograph of a Jewish cadet, who graduated second in his class, was printed on perforated paper so his face could be torn out of the yearbook.

  The choice of school and place is a mystery to me. But that is not how my father tells it. Once, when I complained about having been sent away to boarding school at a young age (twelve), my father said he just couldn’t understand my attitude. He was delighted, he said (at sixteen), to be away from home, out from under his parents’ wing. He almost always spoke of his mother’s overprotectiveness as he did most uncomfortable subjects, by kidding around, and not just with family. In the letter he wrote to “Papa” Hemingway from a hospital bed at the end of the war, he jokes about telling the staff psychiatrists the usual details about his normal childhood, such as how his mother walked him to school every day until he was twenty-four—you know how dangerous streets in Manhattan can be, he said.

  When we visited my grandparents in New York, Daddy’s reaction to Granny’s well-meant questions—benign things such as asking me about school—seemed to me, even as a little girl, to be way out of line. He’d snap, “Stop that now, Mother! That’s enough, leave them alone, for crying out loud!” I felt sorry for Granny and could see that these little questions gave her pleasure, and I certainly didn’t mind. But what really shocked me was the way it seemed he could do no wrong where she was concerned. I would have been “knocked into the middle of next week,” as he used to say, if I’d spoken that way to my mother or father. Near the end of Granny’s life, when I was in my teens, he was still behaving as if her small questions were giant probes. When he returned from his first visit to see his mother in over a year, he spoke of being “bombarded” with her questions, and how he narrowly escaped a few hours later, hoarse and exhausted. He indeed sounded like, and even had the haggard look of, a man who had survived a particularly grueling interrogation session. Yet he still had the energy to kid around as he reported, straight-faced, that Granny had asked him, “How tall is Peggy? Did she like the navy-blue cardigan screwdriver we sent for Christmas? How tall is Matthew [age eleven or so]? Does he need any more Play-Doh or finger paints?”

  This sense of maternal intrusion—a thing so strong it had a bodily feel to it—and the dark humor with which he typically expressed it, runs right down the middle of his fiction as well, especially in the character of Bessie, the matriarch of the Glass family.

  Re-seated, Mrs. Glass sighed, as she always sighed, in any situation, when cups of chicken broth were declined. But she had, so to speak, been cruising in a patrol boat down and up her children’s alimentary canals for so many years that the sigh was in a sense a real signal of defeat . . . she had the particular facial expression that her eldest daughter, Boo Boo, had once described as meaning one of only two things: that she had just talked with one of her sons on the telephone or that she had just had a report, on the best authority, that the bowels of every single human being in the world were scheduled to move with perfect hygienic regularity for a period of one full week.

  (Zooey, pp. 184–85)23

  In my father’s fiction, there is never any doubt of the love the Glass children feel for their mother, Bessie. Nor did I ever doubt for a moment that in real life my father loved his mother; he was quite clear about that even though she sometimes drove him crazy. He would often tell me, in a tone of voice he reserved for those whom he respected, that Granny, though uneducated, “was no dope,” his way of acknowledging someone’s intelligence. He’d tell me stories of her good sense or her good taste; often, I might add, told by way of contrast to his father, whom he considered a great big dope, and never, to my knowledge, spoke of him with any respect. The report is unanimous from my aunt to my mother, to Grandpa’s business partners and my father’s classmates interviewed for various books and myriad articles: his mother “obviously adored her only son.” “They were very close.” As my aunt told me, “It was always Sonny and Mother, Mother and Sonny. Daddy always got the short end of the stick.” Perhaps there is such a thing as too close, “too close for comfort” as the saying goes, and hence the sense of intrusion, and the “delight” he remembers of “getting out from under their wing” and going away to school.

  The one thing I know for certain about his going to military school is that it was not something that was forced on him against his will. He was not sent there. First of all, Granny wouldn’t force her son to do anything of the sort; it’s dangerous at military school—all those sabers and guns. Second of all, she wouldn’t have let Grandpa force him to go either. There was no doubt, my aunt said, about who “wore the pants” in their house.

  Once he decided he wanted to go, the mechanics of the move are less of a mystery. Hamilton, in his biography, notes that it was Mrs. Salinger and not her husband who took Doris and Sonny to look at the school, and it was she who met with the school representative when he cam
e for a home visit. He cites this as evidence of tension between father and son. Certainly there was tension; however, I think the fact that she alone met with the school officials presents evidence as to the social climate rather than the familial one. It seems far more likely that she dealt with school officials for the same reason that I, alone, dealt with real estate agents and landlords when searching for an apartment in Boston during the mid-seventies when I was, briefly, married to an African American. I’d tell them that my husband was, unfortunately, out of town on business until the end of the month, and I’d sign the necessary papers. While I share my grandmother’s propensity to control things, let’s just say I doubt Granny felt it would be a great asset to her son’s chances of getting into Valley Forge for him to wear a great big sign on his backside that said, “Kick me, I’m Jewish.”

  The stories he told me about his life at Valley Forge were about “characters” and “types” and little adventures. They were stories, in hindsight, devoid of affect. I heard about the time he, like Holden, lost the fencing team’s gear on the subway, and the time he and his friend Bill Dix sneaked out of the dorm to have breakfast in town. The pain and suffering I would later read in the story of Holden’s experience in boarding school were not mentioned in the stories my father told me (although, as I said, he told a friend at the time he was working on The Catcher in the Rye that he was writing an autobiographical story).

  In the version my father told me of his world at seventeen, he knew he wanted to be—knew he would be—a writer. His mother was the “good guy” in the story, supporting her son in his wishes, whatever they might be. His mother knew her boy to be a genius; as Doris said, from his birth, Sonny was thought “perfect” and “could do no wrong.” History proved his mother right about his talent; however, at the time he was to finish high school, her belief was a matter of faith, rather than reason. My father often told me growing up that his father pressured him to learn the business of J. S. Hoffman and Co., importing Polish meats and other high-end foods. This was always said with resentment, as well as with varying degrees of derision, further proof that Grandpa was a dope. I believed this unquestioningly.