Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American

by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

  I must have finally slept, for I woke suddenly with the collar of my plaid wool robe scratching my face and a sense of someone standing very near my bed. There were two of them. It was my mother and father, and they gazed at me tenderly, standing shoulder to shoulder. I noticed they looked shorter and squatter than normal, and insubstantial, like the reflections in a funhouse mirror. They stared at me and I stared back at them for a long time, as if each of us was looking at the other down a long dark tunnel. Then I knew that they were ghosts, not my parents at all. I was not afraid, but my mouth was dry. I hoped they had come to my bedside to bring me a glass of cool water. “I want—” I began. “I want—” I stopped talking.

  They looked interested, but I had a sense that because they weren’t alive they couldn’t speak, or act. It made them seem pitiable and helpless. I noticed that their feet did not quite touch my rug, as sometimes my own feet did not touch the floor when I sat in a chair. After a few long, slow seconds—just when I had grown accustomed to the oddity of their being there at all—they grew wavier and wavier, like bad reception on a TV set, and vanished.

  I woke in the cold, damp grayish light an hour or two before dawn. It was too early to be awake on Christmas morning—I had the guilty sense of having stolen something in advance, stolen time. The vaporizer hissed quietly now. It gurgled and sighed to itself in a corner of the room. I could see the puffs of steam it sent up, like clouds of breath on a cold day. And just there, leaning against the bed, against my wooden footboard, substantial in the cool bluish-gray light, so beautiful and radiant that it brought a pang to my heart, was the red sled.

  The Cossacks of Connecticut

  DANIEL ASA ROSE

  I was raised an assimilated Jew in a WASP town on the Connecticut shore. Rowayton in the ‘50s was half lobstermen who would finish their labors by noon every day and half advertising execs who would ride the 7:02 to Grand Central every morning and the 7:14 back every night. There was also a smattering of poets and painters who through luck or good sense could afford to live by the water. These were my neighbors, and I felt much closer to the children of these lobstermen and admen and artists than I did to my elegant pale cousins in New York, the Orthodox cousins who went to shul on Saturdays while we were out fishing for horseshoe crabs to kill with our bare feet.

  It would be incorrect to call Rowayton a suburb. In the ‘50s it was a small town not unlike a small rural town in Minnesota, say, or Winesburg, Ohio, where everyone knew everyone else: You knew which girl had scallion breath at dancing school, whose mother beat him with a clothes hanger for hanging out at Hummiston’s Drug Store, which family had jellyfish coming out of their radiators during hurricane season. The only difference from a town in Minnesota or Ohio was that from Rowayton’s beaches you could see the spires of Manhattan twinkling in the blue haze forty miles down the shore. The capital of the universe was one hour away. And of course this made all the difference in the world.

  Rowayton in those days had world-class WASP icons. The Man in the Hathaway Shirt—that distinguished-looking gent with the black eye patch—could frequently be spotted at the helm of his ketch puttering up the Five Mile River. The yacht club around the corner from my house fired off its cannon each day at sunset. At Miss Hunnibell’s ballroom dancing school both girls and boys had to wear white gloves. Charles Lindbergh was forever flying overhead to his estate across the river, and when our grade school principal Mr. Cunningham rattled on at assembly about how much he appreciated the verse being published by Lucky Lindy’s wife, he failed to mention the fact that Lindbergh was what was most charitably called an “isolationist” at the beginning of World War II—as if all Lindbergh did was advise us to stay out of the war, not revisit Germany numerous times and express admiration for their way of life.

  And of course there were the lobstermen. If there were Cossacks in the Connecticut of the 1950s, they would have been the lobstermen—a nonmenacing version of those ruffian cavalrymen who had so terrified my antecedents under the tsars. Full of pomp and swagger, they were up and out on the river before dawn every day to boisterously set their traps, then spent the rest of the afternoon rather meekly playing checkers on a couple of weatherbeaten benches by the docks. The pomp and swagger that started out so fresh at dawn was, by lunchtime, more than a little faded, in the way that I imagined Cossacks would be faded by the middle of the day when they had to come home for lunch. The lobstermen of Rowayton were almost but not quite dashing in the way that the Cossacks of Russia were almost but not quite dashing, cutting a glamorous figure from a distance, standing tall and proud in their stirrups or the cockpits of their lobster boats, posting to the galloping plains or waves, but up close they both smelled pretty bad (booze and horse in the one case, booze and fish in the other). If any pogroms had taken place in Rowayton they would be the ones to conduct them, but they were totally devoid of malice; the rowdiest they ever got was to occasionally stray, drunk and harmless, through the halls of our elementary school, the squeak of their moist rubber boots on waxed linoleum making them sound not so much like fierce warriors as tardy schoolboys, lost and wet, and perpetually at a loss to find homeroom.

  I never witnessed anything like an incident of out-and-out anti-Semitism in our town. I was liked by teachers and classmates both, so everyone took pains to protect me from the faintly distasteful secret that I was different. In my presence, the grade school teachers overprotectively referred to Moses as a “Hebrew.” To spare me embarrassment, Mrs. Wallace in current events class once referred to Israel as being inhabited by “people of the Hebraic persuasion.” My classmates, solicitously and with great concern, sometimes asked me if I celebrated Halloween. The fact that I was not Christian was tolerated, the way a mascot will be forgiven his limp so that it’s almost not noticed anymore. All this of course had echoes far beyond our cosmopolitan hick town: Assimilated Poles in the 1800s used to say of themselves that they were “of Mosaic denomination.” If there had been a grade school yearbook they might have called me “our Jew,” the way some Czech or Rumanian villagers were said, in centuries past, to have grown fond of the few Jews in their midst.

  Rarely did someone in Rowayton not know that I was Jewish, and on those occasions the information was received with benevolent surprise. “Really? A Jew?”

  “Sure,” I would reply, shyly. “What’d you think I was?”

  “I didn’t think you were anything!” came the reply. A backhanded compliment if ever there was one, for they were right: I wasn’t.

  My instinct was to wince and blush. I felt apologetic, for no reason I understood. In school there was sort of an unofficial don’t ask, don’t tell policy: Everyone knew, but it was unmannerly to talk about it. I wasn’t trying to pass—that would have been shameful—but neither did I want to push anyone’s face in it. We had a mezuzah on our house and I thought it proper to have one but I wished we could have had it on the back door where it wouldn’t be so visible. It was proper that we did not celebrate Christmas but that didn’t stop me from feeling self-conscious that the garbageman saw no boxes of discarded glittery wrapping paper down by our mailbox the morning after.

  It’s like what they say about sabras: hard on the outside, but on the inside, very hard. I was embarrassed on the outside, but on the inside, very embarrassed. Being Jewish was like having a shoe fetish. We were part of a special group, all right; I just wasn’t sure it was anything to boast about.

  For all appearances I looked perfectly assimilated, but there was a lot going on under the surface. My self-consciousness was as acute as Woody Allen’s in Annie Hall imagining that strangers were calling him a Jew when in fact they were only saying “Didju …” Scanning a newspaper article, my eyes would be alert to words starting with J. I lowered my voice when I sang the chorus of the Beatles song “Hey Jude.” I was mortified that the license plate on our family station wagon had the letters “YD” in it, thinking we were pegged. On those unlikely occasions when I happened to look up something Jewish in a libr
ary card catalogue, I would leave the file open to a different topic so the next person wouldn’t suspect what I’d been perusing, in much the way an overweight person will push the weights back before stepping off a scale.

  But I wasn’t merely embarrassed. I was also aware that I was supposed to be proud. Even while blushing at photographs of Hasids, I was conscious that there was a sense of honor integral to being Jewish. I tried to do it both ways. At High Holiday services, conducted in a nearby borrowed church, I would fantasize about how I would save “my people” by throwing myself on a grenade some anti-Semite might toss in the window, but at the same time I wore an earphone that snaked down into my suit jacket pocket where I had my hidden transistor radio tuned to Cousin Brucie on WABC, so while the rest of the congregation was singing the Kol Nidre, I was humming Herman’s Hermits under my breath.

  In twelve years of growing up in Rowayton, whatever anti-Semitism I encountered was of the most mild generic sort—as benign as such a thing could ever be said to be. The mother of a friend, a kindly watercolorist with bangs in her eyes and an interest in books, asked me with genuine anthropological curiosity if my family ate “bajels”—pronouncing bagels with a soft G as in Jell-O. I never saw it firsthand, but I heard of another neighborhood mother who routinely offered her family their choice of two kinds of bread: “white bread or Jew bread” (rye). The only discourtesy I ever received at the hands of my classmates took place where most American children learn their first hard lessons of life, at the junior high school bus stop.

  Our bus stop was made up of the same two knots of people all American bus stops were: the girls, talking decorously among themselves with round little puffs of white breath, and the boys, standing in a circle, stamping their feet against the cold and making valiant stabs at scatological conversation. And although the circle of boys always seemed to be aligned against me every morning as I walked the long block toward them toting my little clarinet case, I knew this was just my imagination. They only seemed to be staring at me as an outsider, and every morning after I walked up and took my rightful place in the circle I acknowledged that staring was just a condition of the waiting; whoever was in the circle would always stare at the newest straggler who was walking up the street just as self-consciously as I had. These were the locals I had grown up with since first grade, and though we now ran in different crowds at junior high—some of us in the drama club, some of us building up steam to drop out—there was a more or less mutual respect, a more or less genuine effort at trying to find things we still held in common and could agreeably talk about. We were polite, mostly, and our attempts at scatological humor fell generally short of the mark, that early in the morning. Though we thought ourselves rough and tumble, we were basically all good little suburban gentlemen and the idea of being overtly rude or cruel—of singling someone out because he was different, or even using the word for his difference in a disparaging way—was unthinkable. Which was why it was so odd when it did happen one morning.

  It was prompted by a foreign boy, significantly, the only actual foreigner among us. Grady Vanderhausen had come over from Holland in third grade and made it his career since to disguise any group memory in us that he was not local. My mother, who was from the Low Countries herself (she had escaped Belgium in 1939), had been instrumental in getting his family out of Europe in the mid-’50s, and had even hired his mother for a few months to help clean our house. Maybe this was humiliating to the Vanderhausen household; maybe Grady had picked up talk around his dinner table about “those rich Roses.” (We weren’t really rich but just enough so to be different: My father was a doctor, our sandwiches were made of pumpernickel instead of Wonder Bread, we played marbles on Persian rugs, Pablo Casals could be heard blasting out of our windows on Sunday.) But Grady was the one who used the word at the bus stop that morning, the only time I ever heard it used in a negative way. Referring to the shop teacher, he said, “Oh, he’s such a Jew.” There was a general murmur of assent around the circle, then an almost audible intake of breath as they remembered; then a pause, followed by a torrent of apologies as they blinked and blushed at the one kid who stood there clutching his clarinet case. “Not you, Danny,” they assured me, “you’re a good Jew.”

  So this was a new thought. There were good Jews, apparently; what did that make all the others? I accepted their lavish apologies like the good sport I was and we all went back to stamping our feet and staring at the latest newcomer. But for the first time I thought: Ah ha.

  Discomfort made me rash. I was rebellious and confused and ferocious. I was what my parents called me, “Piss ‘n Vinegar,” even though I melted in the company of people I sensed were truly kind. I was the picture of paradox: hot-blooded, thin-skinned, quick-tempered, strangulated by the world’s injustices and full of get-even schemes, but ever ready to dissolve into a puddle of milk at the slightest word of warmheartedness from a stranger, which came not infrequently. My loyalty to that stranger would thereafter be iron.

  Perhaps the most noticeable thing about me was my proclivity for recklessness. This made perfect sense, though I didn’t grasp it for a couple of decades. It was this: that my specialty of hiding was intrinsically cowardly, so I compensated by exhibiting bravado in other areas. I dangled from high places with one hand, jumped across chasms, talked back to teachers, played pranks on policemen, rode ice floes around the harbor. I drove my bike blindfolded. I studied how close my sled could come to the back wheels of moving cars. I alarmed friends by how long I stayed underwater. I leapt from a cliffside rope swing into the water during lightning storms. Not that I was invulnerable. Far from it. The tree limb frequently snapped, the ladder tipped, the teacher flipped. I chipped my teeth, sprained my ankles, broke my leg and then broke the cast racing a friend on crutches and had to have the leg set again. By the time I was twelve, I had fallen through the ice of Long Island Sound four times. I remember calculating my odds, that if I continued in this fashion, I’d be falling through every third winter for the rest of my life. I was to get into a total of thirteen car accidents.

  Actions like these and a dozen others convinced me and people around me that I was an intrepid fellow. I wasn’t. I resorted to such foolishness because I couldn’t do the one truly brave thing that is asked of any human being, and that is to be who he is.

  To the limited extent that I defined myself as a Jew, there-fore, it was not through positive associations but through negative. We did not go to church. We did not hang lights at Christmas. My mother the refugee hid in her bedroom when “Christian gangs”—otherwise known as carolers—stormed the snowy driveway. What were the positive associations I had? That we celebrated Hanukkah? But that was such a dinky event, compared to the onslaught of Christmas, that it was embarrassing: even at its grandest, on the final night, it was like holding eight pencil-thin candles up to a 50,000 megawatt Santa Claus on his neon reindeer. Ho ho ho! like a jolly green giant of the Arctic north, laughing at our paltry attempts at winter cheer. Instead of pride at my heritage I felt shame. Shame at a mother who beneath her gaiety was brittle as a piece of buttered matzo, shame at the little skullcaps that seemed like embroidered bald spots, shame at the phlegmy Eastern European accents that made me want to leap on a chair and shout, “For cripes’ sake, clear your throats!”

  In direct proportion to my shame, I was pleased to be assimilated. In our home we ate rice pilaf rather than noodle pudding. When we gathered round the piano it was more likely to sing “In the Good Old Summertime” than “Sunrise, Sunset.” At school assemblies I soloed “Edelweiss” on my clarinet. I was known to be one of the fastest hunters at neighborhood Easter egg hunts. I did not care to know the difference between Purim and Sukkos, and only remembered that the year in Hebrew chronology was 57-something because Heinz had 57 varieties of ketchup. I could read a few lines of Hebrew but only with the vowels added, beginner style, not like real Jews who could skim through text without the aid of such training wheels. And though I was barmitzvahed and it meant so
mething to me, my girlfriends were blond and blue-eyed as a matter of course. Jewish girls, though beautiful in a heartbreaking way, seemed too sisterly; the notion of kissing them raised in my mind the specter of incest.

  I turned to the Christian world for the sex appeal I found lacking in Judaism. I found my parents’ hard-drinking Christian friends glamorous, friends like the old New York Times Moscow bureau chief who would drive up from Manhattan in his convertible Spitfire and twirl his fiery Italian countess wife out of the passenger seat on the driveway—he was very light on his feet, in his faded seersucker suit and those pallid eyelashes of his—and the two of them would waltz to the back of the car and pop the trunk revealing a tumbler of martinis, nicely shaken by the drive up the Connecticut Turnpike upon which one in six drivers were said to be rip-roaringly smashed out of their gourds. To be a drinker was to proclaim one’s non-Jewishness loud and clear, it seemed to me, and I was glad about the hard-drinking Rowayton social whirl that my parents were in the thick of, my mother so very gay, in the ‘50s sense of the word, at the loud jazz parties they would throw where I as bartender would serve fisherman’s punch and Scotch-and-sodas. Rowayton was a series of fizzy fascinating cocktail parties where world-renowned psychoanalysts in Fijian shirts would stuff the bathroom floor to ceiling full of balloons so no one could squeeze in, and middle-aged heiresses would plunk down on the floor next to the Labrador retriever and teach the dumb mutt to beg, and famous TV news anchors would pass out on the Castro Convertible in my bedroom, which doubled as the guest room. They were giddy, racy, boisterous parties and my parents would let my sister and me have a glass or two and encourage us to mingle, to mingle, then afterward report how Mrs. McKissock declared us to be charming; and we were, we were charming in the Connecticut manner, despite or as a result of the fact that I wore that earphone, and the whole time I was mingling I was listening to Cousin Brucie and the Good Guys.