When I became an adult, however, and began to delve into our family history on my own, I found out that Grandpa wasn’t quite the big dope my father always said he was. There was a plethora of good reasons for his concern. I certainly understand that when you’re a teenager who wants to devote himself to writing, and your father doesn’t understand and hassles you to spend a little time learning the family business, you think your father is a big dope. And it is really galling that you have to live at home because you can’t support yourself yet, and that makes him an even bigger dope and a “policeman,” as my father described to me his feelings, as a boy, about his own father, especially when it came to money. But most of us gain some perspective. I’m sure my grandfather asked him some really “dopey” questions such as how a young man, half-Jewish, during the depths of the Depression and heights of anti-Semitism,24 with no college degree, no training, no trade, would support himself, let alone a family.
Economically, this was a particularly bad time to be what my aunt called “neither fish nor fowl.” Contrary to the myth of America’s history of continual progress toward greater opportunities for its citizens, for Jews the clock was running backward in the twenties and thirties. In the 1920s, although Jews made up 26 percent of the population of New York City and were also by far the best-educated group in the community, 90 percent of white-collar openings went to non-Jews.25 As opportunities for employment narrowed for Jews in the Gentile world, Jewish professionals opened Jewish offices, with largely Jewish staff, serving primarily Jewish clientele. Large loans for businesses were obtained through Jewish sources, such as the Jewish “Bank of the United States” and the Hebrew Loan Society. For the vast majority of Jewish immigrant working classes, however, the main source of assistance were societies called landsmanshaftn (hometown societies). These grassroots associations were organized according to immigrants’ European towns of origin, and provided a wide variety of religious, social, and cultural activities along with a range of relief services, financial assistance, and sick benefits. In their heyday, more than three thousand such hometown societies existed (the vast majority still recorded their committee minutes in Yiddish throughout the 1930s). Landsmanshaftn offered their members a source of community on American soil and an economic lifeline—the difference between hunger and food on the table, rags and clothing, homelessness and shelter—during hard times.26
My grandfather had ample reason to be concerned that his son go to a good college and train to be a professional (e.g., a doctor, lawyer, accountant) with real career opportunities or go straight into the family business.27 I knew how my father felt about the family business; he’d occasionally tell me stories about it. His reaction to the entire subject of higher education was something else again—no half-joking stories here—and the whole notion of “getting into a good college” has always been a minefield. He would, indeed, as he once said, “break out with a strange and hideous rash” at the mere mention of anything Ivy League. Truth be told, I thought he was a big bore on the subject, which struck me, as a child and as a teenager, as a weird thing to get all het up about—like raving about state capitals or something—especially since it wasn’t so much about colleges in general as it was focused on the “good” ones or “prestigious” ones, most especially the Ivy League. He spoke of Ursinus, for example (a small college he attended for a year or so), with affection. I dismissed his “thing” about the Ivies as one of Daddy’s idiosyncratic hot spots, just one more in a man with quite his share of them. Common sense made me avoid the subject around him the same way you don’t wave a red flag at a bull.
When I finally read my father’s stories, there it was again: those villainous Ivy Leaguers, bastions of phonydom, one-dimensional, successful, cocksure, anti-landsmen; goyim like Lane Coutell, boyfriend of Franny Glass, or Tupper, her contemptible English professor, both of whom undermined her sense of place in the world and, ultimately, threatened her sanity. I was fascinated to find out that there were some real roots to this reaction of his. History doesn’t necessarily excuse, but it certainly provides a context and explanation. It turns out that when my father was growing up and coming of an age to consider college, some of the most outspoken, eloquent, egregious examples of people who, as my aunt said, “talked that way” about Jews were positively bedecked with Ivy. Dean Frederick Paul Keppel28 of Columbia University, for example, wrote of his concern that too many Jewish immigrants make Columbia “socially uninviting to students who come from homes of refinement.” Dartmouth president Ernest Hopkins29 said, “Any college which is going to base its admissions wholly on scholastic standing will find itself with an infinitesimal proportion of anything else than Jews eventually.”30 It was Harvard, however, whose Jewish population had grown from 6 percent of the student body in 1908 to 22 percent in 1922, that took the lead in proposing a solution to the “Jewish problem.” A. Lawrence Lowell,31 President of Harvard, announced the establishment of numerical quotas to lower the numbers of Jews at the university. Once Harvard took the lead, many of the nation’s most prestigious colleges and universities followed and established their own limits of no more than 3 to 16 percent Jews admitted to the entering class.32
Sarah Lawrence College, in Bronxville, New York—a town that kept Jews out until after the New York State Commission for Human Rights intervened in 1962—asked on its application, “Has your daughter been brought up to strict Sunday observance?” Columbia asked the applicant’s religious affiliation, if he or his parents had ever been known by another name, parents’ place of birth, mother’s full maiden name, and father’s occupation.
How one takes for granted today the precious words “without regard for race, creed, color, or national origin.” In my father’s day, it was equally taken for granted that these things were to be major factors in deciding an applicant’s suitability for housing, jobs, colleges, clubs, loans, and so on. Even when a Jew made it over the quota hurdle and gained admission to these colleges, he or she was confronted with a row of additional hurdles and barriers stretching to the vanishing point. Max Lerner (Yale, BA, 1923) said he and other Jewish classmates were basically “kept out of everything.”33 A contemporary wrote that at social gatherings such as the prom or the class-day tea, “the presence of Jews and their relatives ruins the tone which must be maintained if social standing is not to collapse.”
Myriad examples of anti-Jewish sentiments abound in statistics, articles, speeches, and conversations of the day. Yet what I found to be the most revealing and affecting when I read them were not the statistics nor the diatribes, but rather, the way people talked when they tried to say something nice about a Jew. We have on record, for example, professors’ letters of recommendation for historians Oscar Handlin, Bert Lowenberg, and Daniel Boorstin, then students, for jobs in higher education. They contain phrases like “has none of the offensive traits which people associate with his race,” “by temperament and spirit . . . measures up to the whitest gentile I know,” and “He is a Jew, though not the kind to which one takes exception.” A professor at the University of Chicago wrote of his student, “He is one of the few men of Jewish descent who does not get on your nerves and really behaves like a gentile to a satisfactory degree.”34
English departments, for which my father reserves his most caustic vitriol, in both his real life and in his fiction, considered themselves to be bastions of Anglo-Saxon culture and, as such, were the least welcoming to Jews. When, for example, Max Lerner informed a college instructor with whom he was on good terms that he’d like to teach English at a university, the instructor replied, “Max, you can’t do this. You can’t teach literature. You have no chance of getting a position at any good college. You’re a Jew.” In 1939, when my father was taking a writing course in the evenings at Columbia, Lionel Trilling became the first Jew appointed to a tenure-tract position in English there. His wife, Diana Trilling, later wrote, “It is highly questionable whether the offer would have been made” had her husband borne the surname of his maternal
grandfather, Cohen. When Trilling became assistant professor, a colleague stopped by to chat and expressed the department’s hope that the new appointee would not use this opportunity “as a wedge to open the English department to more Jews.”35
Such was the atmosphere when my father was graduated from military school. Ian Hamilton writes blithely of that time in my father’s life as if there were no constraints, only matters of choice and taste:
At this point, Salinger’s conception of a writing career was focused on these two key citadels: New York and Hollywood. It was a conception that had more to do with the world of mass entertainment (movies, plays, big-circulation weeklies, even radio) than with the world of Letters as this would have been perceived by, say, the editors of Partisan Review or by most university English departments. Partly by accident, partly by inclination, Salinger’s literary route was from the outset established as metropolitan, not academic. And this separation had mattered quite a lot. To grasp how much, we need only wonder what Salinger’s writing life would have been like if he had gone to Harvard or Yale. So maybe the arithmetic report [a bad grade in high school] does matter after all. Certainly, his career might have been very different if his first stories had been aimed not at Collier’s but at Partisan Review. (Hamilton, Salinger, p. 37)
Jerome David Salinger, Regis Professor of Literature at Sarah Lawrence. We need only wonder. He could have changed his name, but there was still the little problem with the nose and that darkness. In 1936, my father began his freshman year at NYU. That spring, regardless of his father’s objections and of the economic realities of the day, he dropped out of college and took a job on a cruise ship. In the fall, however, Grandpa’s wishes prevailed and my father went to Vienna, ostensibly to learn the family business, and to polish up his high school German and French by doing some translating for one of Hoffman’s partners. I heard little, growing up, about the family business other than as a joke his dopey father got him into. The Jewish family he stayed with in Vienna, however, was another story. He loved this family.36 And from all accounts the feeling was mutual. He often told me the mother used to call him Jerrila and explained that this was a Yiddish way of expressing affection. I’d have been called Peggila, he told me. I wish I had met them, but they all were killed in concentration camps before I was born.
AUSTRIA FELL TO HITLER ON March 12, 1938. My father was probably out of Vienna by February, but there is no way he could have been unaware of the Nazi gangs that raided the Jewish quarter where he lived that winter. He only told me about the loving family, not the horror.
I don’t know how he was occupied that summer, but in the fall of ’38 he attended Ursinus College, in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. The college was founded in 1869 by the German Reformed Church and served the Christian, middle-class Pennsylvania Dutch from nearby suburban areas. Go figure. My father had only good things to say about Ursinus and its lack of pretension. I never thought to ask why he left after one semester.
In the spring of 1939, he enrolled in a Friday-evening writing class at Columbia taught by Whit Burnett, the editor of Story magazine. Burnett supported the young writer’s aspirations and gave him his first break. His story “The Young Folks,” a piece about some debutante “types” home from college for the holidays, attending a house party, appeared in the March-April 1940 issue of Story. Making a living as a short-story writer in those days was a long shot, but by no means an impossible dream. Even during the Depression, entertainment sold, and magazines were paying what Brendan Gill called a “king’s ransom” for stories. He said, “It’s hard for writers nowadays to realize how many magazines were vying for short stories in the thirties and forties; hard too to realize how much they paid.” Collier’s, Liberty, and The Saturday Evening Post were paying around $2,000 (about $26,500 in today’s dollars) for a short story.
In the summer of 1940, my father was out of town and spent time on the Cape and in Canada. He wrote to a friend, Elizabeth Murray, the sister of a boy he had gone to school with, that he had started work on an autobiographical novel. The following summer he sold a one-page story called “The Hang of It” about an army brat coming of age and following in his father’s footsteps, which appeared in the July 12 issue of Collier’s. Esquire followed with “The Heart of a Broken Story.” The New Yorker bought his short story introducing Holden Caulfield, “A Slight Incident off Madison,” then changed their minds about publishing it, holding the story until 1945.
The next story to appear in print was a shot aimed directly at the heart of New York WASP “Society” with its exclusive, exclusionary clubs, charity balls, colleges, and social life. “The Long Debut of Lois Taggett” appeared in the September-October 1942 issue of Story magazine, Whit Burnett’s domain. It follows almost as a sequel to “The Young Folks” in tone and character, but it is many shades darker. A New York debutante-type phony is put through purgatory, a hazing as it were, by the author of the story, who at story’s end allows Lois, cleansed and purged, to join the elite club of non-phonies, Salinger’s landsmanshaftn. It seems a reversal, or inverse reflection of the true facts of anti-Semitic culture of the day, where Jewish academics, such as Boorstin and Lerner, were deemed acceptable only if “purged” of their Jewishness. It begins:
Lois Taggett was graduated from Miss Hascomb’s School . . . and the following autumn her parents thought it was time for her to come out, charge out, into what they called Society. So they gave her a five-figure, la-de-da Hotel Pierre affair, and save for a few horrible colds and Fred-hasn’t-been-well-lately’s, most of the preferred trade attended. . . . That winter Lois did her best to swish around Manhattan with the most photogenic of the young men who drank scotch-and-sodas in the God-and–Walter Winchell section of the Stork Club. . . . In the spring, Lois’ Uncle Roger agreed to give her a job as a receptionist in one of his offices. It was the first big year for debutantes to Do Something.
Lois Taggett breaks one of my father’s personal “ten commandments,” which I grew up hearing about in many an emotional hellfire-and-brimstone lecture from him: Thou shalt not “dabble” in the arts. I cringed as I read about Lois’s amateur foray into a course or two at Columbia. My father, in real life, could be brought to the point of almost foaming incoherency when confronted with anyone, but most especially an Ivy League “type,” usually a woman, amusing herself by taking a course in literature or art. It is sacrilege, defiling, to approach this sacred domain with other than a monk’s dedication.37
Quite unexpectedly, Lois falls in love with a man outside her own circle, “tall handsome Bill Tedderton, a press agent.” They marry, she for love, he for her money.
The Taggetts didn’t do very much about it. It wasn’t fashionable any longer to make a row if your daughter preferred the iceman to that nice Astorbilt boy. Everybody knew, of course, that press agents [or writers] were icemen. Same thing.
Several months into the marriage, Bill Tedderton discovers to his astonishment that he has fallen in love with Lois. After a short interlude of marital bliss, he finds himself burning her with a cigarette, loving her deeply; and a few weeks later, never loving her more, smashing his golf club down on her foot.38 He pleads passionately with her to take him back, he’ll see a psychiatrist, he didn’t know what he was doing. Lois divorces him.
She eventually marries a dull, unattractive guy with all the right society credentials. Once again, a year or so later, danger arises in the form of emotional attachment, when she finds herself head over heels in love with her baby. We are treated to a scene of baby and mommy bliss, broken suddenly by the voice of the narrator, who, like the voice of God’s judgment, pronounces: “Then finally she made it.” Her long debut has come to an end, she has come out of it and is no longer a phony. “Everybody seemed to know about it,” the narrator tells us. “Women in general began to look more closely at Lois’ face than at her clothes. . . . It happened about six months after young Thomas Taggett Curfman tossed peculiarly in his sleep and a fuzzy woolen blanket snuffed out his li
ttle life.”
THE PRICE OF ENTRY into this writer’s chosen elect, the elite landsmanshaftn of non-phonies, involves neither money nor background nor education: he requires the sacrifice of her firstborn son. Something about this story gave me the creeps as I read it, as though a cold hand had somehow reached across the boundary of fiction into our life as a family. It was with a vague sense of foreboding that I continued to search out our family stories. I was beginning to feel like one combing the woods for missing persons, dreading lifeless, forensic success as much as the failure of continued unknowing.
* * *
1. In her old age, she suffers from macular degeneration.
2. My father’s nickname, Sonny, was given to him at birth by his parents. Ian Hamilton, in his book In Search of J. D. Salinger, claimed that it was at the McBurney School, which my father attended in ninth grade, that “he was nicknamed ‘Sonny’ by his chums, perhaps with a hint of sarcasm.” Please, chums? On the West Side of Manhattan, perhaps? Several of my dad’s army buddies in the foxholes and bloody battlefields of World War II were referred to, by the same scholar, as his colleagues. “Let me confer with my colleague, Rocco,” Jerry said. “Oh, Rocco, would you be so kind as to pass me the ammo?” “Right-o, Sonny old chum,” Rocco expostulated laconically. . . . I can’t stand it.
3. My aunt would later send my son an Indian costume, complete with suede leggings and feathered warbonnet, for his fourth birthday.
4. In the early twenties, when Lionel and Sonny were young, many of the notices by maids seeking employment in the newspapers specified Gentile households only. “Colored woman wants week work; neat; with references; no Jewish people” (Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America, Oxford University Press, 1944, p. 205). One maid interviewed said, “If the Jews killed the Lord and Master, what won’t they do with a poor nigger like me” (Dinnerstein, p. 198).
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