Both sets of my grandparents were immigrants to the US—coincidentally from Lithuania (grandmothers) and Romania (grandfathers) near the turn of the 20^th century. My father’s mother kept kosher. She also kept being deserted by her apparently frequently unfaithful husband who, as my father tells it, returned from time to time to get her pregnant before gadding off again[1]. I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think my mother was brought up in a kosher home. All the surviving children of the first American generation on both sides became pretty secular.

We lived in the Bronx until I was four, and then my father used money provided by the GI Bill,[2] as I always remember calling it, to buy a chicken farm (the first of two) in South Jersey (the first of two). As an adult, I have enjoyed startling people when I say I grew up on a chicken farm, and I still know how to tell whether a hen is a good layer.

From then through high school, I lived in a largely Christian culture that I think was heavily weighted towards Catholicism. When I was around 10 years old, I can remember sitting on the piano bench (supposedly focused on practicing) and mentally wrestling with whether some God existed (implicitly monotheistic—I probably knew about Greek and Roman gods, but I’m sure I accepted their treatment as out-of-date, childish beliefs), and I have the vague sense that this dilemma was really about whether there was any reason I should think such an amorphous idea (to the extent I had any idea about it) fit into the world I was experiencing. My very vague memory is that I was puzzled with why people held such a belief. Perhaps that confusion was driven in part by morning bible-readings and recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in the one-room schoolhouse I attended through third grade.

So far as I can remember, these required morning exercises (all the way through high school?) had no context for me. I can’t remember knowing anything about what was in the bible; I think my only “study” of it has been related to adult interest in history of ideas. As an undergraduate philosophy major, I encountered many Western, mostly Christian, arguments for a divine being, but I think treated them all as historical relics with value only for what they revealed about how much effort could go into making hopeless (though not therefore useless) arguments.

As a child, I was uncomfortable in the presence of various relatives, seemingly steeped in Old World Jewish culture, from my grandfather’s and step-grandmother’s generation, most of whom lived in Brooklyn. They often spoke Yiddish, which I neither understood nor (I can now regret) wanted to learn (though through my adult life I have surprised myself at knowing and even using the odd Yiddishism here and there). Other than my mother’s parents, I don’t remember meeting equivalent relatives on that side of the family (though I probably did meet my mother’s grandfather in his 100s and with little time left to live).

No doubt I felt pressure (perhaps gentle; I don’t remember) to connect with the immigrant mishpocha (I had to look up that spelling, and there are orthographic variants). I found these relatives strange, from a world with which I felt no identity. It wasn’t just that they often spoke Yiddish or that their English typically proceeded with rhythmic up-and-down cadence that tended to end sentences with a rising question mark, but that the way they addressed me, the way they talked about things, the way they dressed, the narrowness of what they seemed to care about—probably other features, too—all felt…foreign? Unacceptable? Embarrassing? Definitely embarrassing. I wanted no part of this strange culture, and while I loved visiting New York City to get away from the chicken farm, I couldn’t wait to leave the presence of these relatives. Though 2^nd-generation American, I probably felt similarly to many 1^st-generation Jewish (and other immigrants’) children who wanted to seem like their “normal” schoolmates.

At three years old, I was too young to grasp what had happened in Nazi Germany when news emerged of allied discovery and liberation of concentration camps, but it couldn’t have been more than a couple of years later when that horror entered my consciousness. (Only much later in life did I learn that the camps and their execution counterparts killed millions of non-Jews.) Except for the reality of the Holocaust, I might have abandoned any Jewish identity, but because of it I feel I would be a traitor of some kind to an historical tradition of evil treatment that hasn’t ended. I’ll likely be writing more about that influence, but for now I’ll mention these powerful effects:

• The underpinning of my attitudes about social justice throughout my life (as in asking myself, “Using as an antithetical guideline the immoral behavior of those Germans who looked the other way under Hitler, what choice should I be making in response to such-and-such moral outrage I’m currently witnessing?”).
• Frequent but not nightly nightmares well into my adult years that I called my “concentration camp dreams.” Only occasionally was I literally in such a camp, but routinely I was trapped by evil people, sometimes gangsters. I’m pretty sure that my strategy for survival in such terrorizing dreams was frequently to kowtow to my oppressors, including acting as a metaphorical camp capo who could stay alive by harming others (though, I think, trying to find ways not actually to do such harm). I don’t know when these dreams stopped, but I think it was only after considerable psychotherapy, which means in my late 30s at the earliest and probably later. (Until about 10 or 15 years ago, in the middle of a shower I would often feel a patina of gloom envelop me, which stopped after my therapist, the child of survivors, suggested I was being reminded of the Nazi gas chambers.)
• At one point, that therapy brought to the surface an image of my father, who was often physically abusive to me (more on that to be discussed elsewhere), in a Gestapo uniform. I don’t think I consciously had that image as I grew up, but who knows?

My parents were part of a small leftist Jewish community of chicken farmers, a number of whom were escapees from Hitler. I don’t know if any of them attended any shul, but we didn’t. I was six when Israel became a state, and I remember great celebration among my parents and their radical refugee friends: the ideal Jewish socialist state had arrived!

Consciousness of the Holocaust, along with the fellow-traveler political perspectives my parents imbued in me, is what makes me intolerant of oppression of anybody, and it is a major reason tears come to my eyes during even the corniest story about someone of virtue helping out a suffering victim of any place or age. It is also the basis for my rage at the Jewish socialist homeland’s betrayal of its birth and the way it treats its Other as an undifferentiated collection of enemies.[3]

That last statement is also an indicator of the way I realized a few decades ago that in the face of charges of being a Jewish anti-Semite because I don’t support Israel, I do have a certain, very different prejudice that because of “our” history, capped by the Holocaust, we should behave better than others. I have to keep reminding myself that all ethnic groups are riddled with a wide range of admirable and non-admirable people.[4]

While I am well aware of and troubled by the history of anti-semitism (or rather, anti-Jewish prejudice, since we’re not the only semites; I have never figured out a way around the confusing usage), it has been mostly the Holocaust (in which I’m unaware of losing any relatives, though as a child I occasionally saw forearms with blue tattooed ID numbers) that shaped whatever Jewish identity I have possessed. It would feel like betrayal of all that suffering to deny my technical/cultural (certainly not religious) connection to Judaism. For some decades, I’ve realized this is a negative connection. But without that sense, I’m not sure I would have ever bothered to identify myself as a Jew or raise my son with consciousness of that background.

Along with my sister, I and another boy who was a day older than I were the only Jews in the rural school system we attended through junior high school. My parents’ left-wing Jewish refugees from Hitler apparently lived in other towns. Our district did not have its own high school, so starting in 10^th grade all students were bused about 10 miles away (Vineland) to a high school that had lots of Jewish kids. I don’t remember what I made of that, or the reason for the demographic, but it was the end of whatever isolation I’d felt as a Jew in the middle of nowhere. I suspect I enjoyed no longer being a weird cultural specimen. I don’t know how many of my (new) friends were Jewish, though I do remember a tall orthodox boy, Philip Berg, who was graduated 2^nd in our class, went to Princeton (which still had a quota on Jews), and, as I heard it, lost physical and religious virginities there and flunked out fairly quickly. Philip was very bright, and I hope he found a better way through life.

Around 13, I was briefly taught Hebrew by the wife of a close couple. I didn’t take to it (my graduate studies in the European Renaissance would make me regret that, but it was too late, as I was far too along in adulthood to go back to learning piano that I also hated as a child). I was never bar-mitzvahed. I think I was given the option and didn’t take it. (I did the same thing with my son, though I knew having the freedom to choose would make him likely to reject the ritual and all the work it would require.) Around the age of 16, for reasons I don’t remember, I had a brief period of regretting the lack of a bar mitzvah. That feeling didn’t last for more than a few months. (My son, in his late teens, went through a period of embracing whatever version of orthodoxy, including dress, he figured out on his own.)

We had seders, at which my father had some reputation for elaborately and histrionically playing out the story of Moses and the plagues. This became an amused reference in our family folklore. My main memories of the seders are: hunger from waiting seemingly forever to get to the actual food, minimal interest in the story (though I learned it and was pleased in recent years to discover that it has little or no basis in reality), dislike for Mogen David wine (I’m not sure how young I was when first allowed to drink it), annoyance at having to learn the 4 questions (vier kashas?) related to “why is this night different from all other nights,” trepidation at having to face the pain of horseradish, a zest for being the kid to find the afikomen [spelled that right but had to check] (and I think I eventually tried unsuccessfully to watch for when my father would disappear to hide it), quickly alienated by the chocolate Hanukkah gelt (could that be the source of my dislike for milk chocolate?), and generally wanting to avoid seders, which I largely did in adulthood (though I took my son to at least a couple for whatever cultural awareness that would give him).

In junior high I encountered extensive anti-Semitism, but probably because neither my sister nor the other Jewish boy had such a problem, I have always believed it was not “real.” I was a wimpy, inhibited, relatively unsocial kid who was also very smart (itself a sure-fire way to garner schoolmates’ derision) and probably came across as over-proud of my intelligence. A kid named Slick (obviously a powerful influence in my life or I wouldn’t remember his name) especially picked on me and sometimes hit me. (I did eventually sort of stand up to him—after my father’s angry tirade and basic boxing lessons when I let him learn what was happening—and while I doubt I hurt him in any way, my vague memory is that the hitting then stopped.) The favorite taunt I remember from Slick and his cohorts was to call me “rabbi.” (I think in our last couple of years in high school he, as the phraseology went, knocked up a girl and married her.) But I don’t think these kids even knew what the word meant—or what it meant to be “Jewish.” (No one ever called me a Christ-killer. I did have other friends from the same Catholic background with whom I routinely and contentedly played sports.) I think that they just didn’t like who I was, and picked up that my Jewishness (any physical or behavioral differentness would have done just as well) was a basis for attack.

[1] My father wrote “memoirs” (covering only memories of his childhood), which include references to his father’s infidelity’s and family desertions. I’ve posted the memoirs on my old web site, and some of that discussion is in this extract: meaculpa1.html.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill

[3] I no less hate a variant in some Jews that venerates the notion that Jews are indeed a kind of chosen people, as evidenced by the frequency of their scholarly and professional achievements (at least as we define them in Western culture). The worst form I’ve encountered is contrasting the number of Jewish Nobel laureates with those from Islam. Where is the Flood when we deserve it?

[4] Sholom Aleichem, at least, and his stories collected in Fiddler on the Roof, help drive this point home.