by Ruth Rosen
As far as ideas and ideals, socialism was a strong influence in Moishe’s youth. He recalled, “When I was growing up, most of the Jews on the west side of Denver were influenced by Marx and Engels. We looked forward to the day when all people would be free and would not be ‘wage slaves.’ There would be great equality. There was no talk of violent revolutions or world conquest—certainly none of the darkness of communism. What we shared was a kind of political optimism, believing that socialism would usher in a time when all people would have enough food and whatever else was necessary to live well.”
As for Moishe’s quality of life, it took quite a radical turn when, at fifteen, he began spending time with the person whom he credited with having had more influence on him than anyone else he’d ever met, before or since.
SIX
My girlfriend and wife is the most influential person in my life. She is someone of superior intellect and imagination, a very caring person.
—MOISHE ROSEN
Moishe adjusted his long strides to keep from outstripping the petite brunette beside him. Even as he slowed, she lengthened her short, brisk steps, and their initially awkward gait fell into a companionable rhythm. They headed toward Sloan’s Lake on what was, at least for Moishe, their long-awaited first date.
When the attractive Boston-bred newcomer first moved into the neighborhood, all the guys had been eager to meet her. One day, fourteen-year-old Celia Starr—or Ceil, as she later preferred to be called—joined a group of teenagers who had congregated outside the house next door. The guys teased her, asking her to say park and car and bottle. Then they hooted gleefully and tried to imitate her as she pronounced the words cah and pahk and, best of all, boh-ull with no t.
Moishe watched and listened with interest. The new girl’s exotic accent was almost as appealing as her pretty face, framed by long dark hair, and her very feminine figure. But Moishe saw something that had escaped the rest of the guys. The new girl was shy.
It had taken forever before Ceil had finally agreed to go out with him. He didn’t know that the next-door neighbor girl, Paula, had given Ceil a “friendly warning” to ignore Moishe’s attentions. “He’s a nobody,” she’d said, “and if you want to get to know the popular kids, you’d better stay away from him.” Ceil had been grateful for the quick and convenient friendship with Paula and decided, at least for the time, to take her advice.
Over the next twelve or so months, Ceil often saw Moishe helping her mother carry groceries, and she smiled inwardly to think he was probably hoping for a chance to see her. One day Mrs. Starr reciprocated Moishe’s kindness as he went door to door, selling glow-in-the-dark light pulls (to be attached to ceiling fixtures) and house numbers, and she bought light pulls.
When Moishe delivered the pulls a few days later, Ceil was at home. They struck up a conversation, and she agreed on a date to go rowboating at the nearby lake.
At the lake, Moishe secured the oars in the locks and deftly rowed out into deeper water. He didn’t bother telling his date that he didn’t know how to swim. The pair stayed on the water for two or three hours and never ran out of things to say. Her shyness melted as he encouraged her to talk. Moishe’s questions flowed from genuine interest. It wasn’t just that she was pretty; she was smart, and she’d been to places like New York City. He wanted to know what those places were like and was impressed by her ability to describe them. As he listened, he could almost see the Statue of Liberty and other famous landmarks he had only read about.
Ceil was what his parents considered a nice Jewish girl. Yet she was, by her own admission, “sick and tired” of religious rules and regulations that, to her, seemed old-fashioned and irrelevant. They tried to teach that sort of thing in Hebrew school as well as at home, but as a teenager, she wasn’t having any of it. “I liked learning Hebrew,” she said. “Languages are fun. But forget about all that other stuff.”
“You were still in Hebrew school when you left Revere?” Moishe was surprised since most people he knew stopped going once they turned thirteen.
She explained that it was an upper division school, Hebrew Teacher’s College in Roxbury. But she started cutting classes because it took an hour and a half travel by subway and streetcar each way—and she found the translation of minutia with no explanation as to its relevance boring.
“And what about your trip across the country?” he asked. “What was that like?” As he listened to her describing the sights, Moishe nodded and asked more questions and was happier than he could remember being in a long time.
She concluded, “It was night when we got close to Denver, so I couldn’t see, but when I woke up, there were these big, beautiful mountains in the distance, all purplish-pink in the morning light. I’d never seen anything like it.”
Moishe grinned, inexplicably proud that the Rocky Mountains—which seemed to spring up practically in his own backyard—had impressed this girl who had seen so much more than he had.
She smiled back, studying his face. There was that funny gap between his two upper front teeth—you couldn’t help noticing it, but still, he had a nice wide grin. His light brown hair was brushed back, but a stubborn cowlick always flipped one lock of hair back over his forehead. His brown eyes were warm and friendly, he had a strong jaw, and his features were regular and actually kind of handsome. Yes, she thought, if he wasn’t so skinny, he would be handsome. He was no weakling, though, she observed, as he continued to row the boat around the lake.
Then the sky began to cloud up, and it started to rain, so the two hurried ashore. Moishe walked Ceil to her door and mumbled something about hoping to see her again soon. She thanked him, perhaps a little primly, and said she’d had a nice time. While she was not exactly swept off her feet, she would not mind seeing this boy again.
At first, Ceil was mainly impressed by how impressed Moishe was with her. She recalled, “But as we began to get to know one another, I found him to be easygoing and very caring. He was never demanding and always willing to spend more on our dates than I thought he should, considering he didn’t have very much money.” She slowly grew to appreciate Moishe for his own qualities and eventually found herself returning all the romantic fervor of a first love.
Moishe was smitten from the start. “Anyone could understand why I would get a crush on this girl,” he said.
She was very pretty and poised, and she had charm. I suppose those things might grow less impressive after a while if her personality had been dull. But she would tell me about things I never heard of before, and through her, new worlds opened up to me.
At fifteen, I’d only left Denver once, and that was on a train trip to Kansas City. It didn’t occur to me that I could experience much beyond my hometown. . . . I figured I’d go into some small business or other. I had never been very ambitious, didn’t want very much for myself. But I really wanted Ceil’s company. So, in arranging social things, she’d take the lead. And that meant I was meeting new people, going places—even to a dance, though I felt awkward and wasn’t much good at it. But I’d do more, try more, because of Ceil.
There were also a few things I discontinued because of her. For example, the occasional shoplifting stopped. I figured my girlfriend wouldn’t like it, and I didn’t want to have secrets from her. Caring for her good opinion made me want to be a better person.
She became the most significant person in my life. I knew that she was overconfident about some things, and maybe overly opinionated about others, but I liked her backbone. I didn’t see myself as a particularly resolute person so I admired her decisiveness. . . . She’d learned to read early and had skipped first grade, so even though we were the same age, she was a year ahead of me in school. Of course I was attracted to her physically, but she also stimulated my mind.
Though Ceil was shy and somewhat reserved, she chose choral performance classes and sought out extracurricular activities that put her in touch with school life. Unlike Moishe, who didn’t care much for sports, she appreciated the social
aspects of attending their school’s sporting events. She was thrilled when she got accepted into the Valkyries, North High School’s somewhat elite all-girl pep club. Despite Moishe’s disinterest in sports, he was more than willing to sit through a football game if it meant being with his girlfriend.
Moishe took Ceil to school functions because he wanted her company. In return, she went with him to air shows and listened to him talk about guns and airplanes and other military stuff that fascinated him, and for which she politely pretended interest. But mostly, they did things both could enjoy such as taking long walks by the lake or joining his family on outings when they’d all pile into his father’s big Buick on a trip to the mountains or a picnic in the park.
Ceil gravitated more and more to the Rosens’ house at the end of the block. There the atmosphere was far less controlling than the environment in which she’d been raised. Nevertheless, it took her a while to feel comfortable around Moishe’s father. Ceil recalled, “His mother was always friendly, but his father scared me because he just sat in his big easy chair by the radio and never talked much. I thought he didn’t like me.”
Within less than a year, the couple had decided they were in love. And one day, when they were sixteen, Moishe asked Ceil, somewhat casually, “You wouldn’t be interested in someday marrying a guy like me, would you?” She was surprised because they were still in high school—but it did seem to be a logical conclusion to the relationship. So after a moment’s reflection, she replied, “Yeah, probably I would.”
While it was not an official engagement, both of them considered that some kind of proposal had been made and accepted. From then on the couple took it for granted that one day they would marry. They fell into a weekly routine of Sunday afternoons at the movies. Every Sunday as they walked from the streetcar stop to the theater they passed a street preacher who stood at Sixteenth and Champa, in front of the big department store. He sang and recited Bible passages loudly enough to be heard half a block away.
Sunday after Sunday, the couple never stopped to listen or talk to the man. He might have seemed clownish to some, yet Moishe was deeply impressed by the man’s courage and dignity. In a strange way, Moishe envied him. Once as they passed him, he told Ceil, “I wish I believed in something strongly enough that I’d be willing to stand up on the street corner and shout it.”
Moishe had long since lost the sense that the Almighty took any real interest in his daily life. As far as religion went, Moishe had never really connected God and religion. To him, religion was always a human effort, not something delivered from or expected by God. Over time, Moishe’s perception of religion and religious people took on a rather cynical perspective, not unlike his father’s.
Through his teen years, Moishe had developed a more or less pantheistic view that God “is all and in all.” But he wasn’t ready to give up the idea that God had a mind and God had a will. He always believed that there was a First Cause that brought the world into existence, but following that, he figured that God might or might not know, care, or otherwise be involved in what was going on. Moishe later described this as “a weak deist view which, by the time I was sixteen or seventeen, was a cynical skepticism.”
Whereas Moishe felt that one couldn’t really know much about God and need not be too concerned about his existence, Ceil was quite outspoken about her view that God did not exist at all. As much as Moishe respected her intelligence, she could never persuade him of anything if he thought she hadn’t the proper grounds for it. For all he knew, her certainty of God’s nonexistence was a subconscious punishment aimed at her overly strict parents and the God she supposedly did not believe in. But whatever reasons she gave to support her unbelief, they never struck him as altogether reasonable. He therefore argued the point and said that certainly there was a God.
Despite his cynicism regarding religion, Moishe felt a need to identify with and belong to the Jewish community. Yet he didn’t quite know what his religious obligations were. This ambiguity probably was due to the semi-religious upbringing after early childhood, the largely secular nature of Denver’s Jewish community, and the wide range of what people considered “proper Judaism.” Moishe and Ceil agreed that they would have a Jewish household when they married, but it would be an American Jewish household, free of the outdated rules and regulations their families had brought from the Old Country.
Of course when they began talking of marriage at the age of sixteen, no one thought the romance would last that long. And when they were eighteen and decided the time had come to carry out their intentions, their parents were concerned that they were still too young. But whatever people said and whatever they thought, the marriage was apparently meant to be.
Moishe’s cousin Dorothy recollected the romance between her cousin and friend and wrote this to me:
Your mother was a very sexy young woman. I always thought she looked like a cat. She moved like one, and with the dark hair and [hazel] almost yellow-gold eyes, she looked like one. Her movements were very natural—she wasn’t even aware she was moving like that, but guys sure were. Once she started going with your father, she didn’t know any other male existed. . . .
We worked in the same office building one summer. She would come to pick me up for lunch. You could hear her coming down the hall in her high-heeled shoes. The young lawyers would stand at their doorways to watch her walk down the hall. This also she did not see. A couple of them asked her out. She said, “No. I’m engaged.” Then your father came down to the office to see her and she introduced him. Later the guys said, “But Celia, he’s just a kid!” She said, “No he isn’t, he’s my fiancé.” He was a tall gangly kid and sometimes he acted like a kid, but none of that mattered—they were in love!!!
SEVEN
When we shoot the gun of anger we can be killed by the recoil.
—MOISHE ROSEN
The first sergeant leered at Moishe as he delivered one of his most disgusting insults: “Tell me, Rosen, are all Jewish women whores or just your mother?” Clearly the sergeant was trying to provoke a fight. Moishe clenched his teeth and looked around to see the other guys’ reaction. They only looked away. Maybe they didn’t want to risk the sergeant’s anger by sticking up for Moishe, but what would it have cost for a couple of them to find him later and say, “Hey, Rosen, he’s just a jerk. We don’t feel that way”? But they never did. In fact Moishe knew that some did feel “that way.”
Being hated simply for being Jewish was nothing new; still the seamier realities of military life were a somewhat rude awakening for Moishe. Throughout high school ROTC, and as an underaged member of the National Guard, he had attended weekly drills, collected his three dollars per session, and truth be told, enjoyed the activities and the classes. He had been eager for this time of military service. He could hardly believe that he would receive five and a half dollars for each day. (He’d been raised to that prodigious amount for achieving an officer’s rank through correspondence courses.) Not only that, but he’d never been away to any kind of camp before. So with anticipation and a great sense of adventure sixteen-year-old Moishe packed up and left for his fourteen-day drill.
There were two significant facts of which he was unaware. First, a crisis was brewing with the Soviet Union in Berlin and Moishe’s Guard unit was about to be nationalized. And second, he would be practically the only Jew in his battery.
The only other Jewish soldier Moishe encountered proved to be small comfort. Some of the guys had a habit of singing out, “Sheeny, sheeny,” whenever they passed him, and he’d just grin as though enjoying a friendly joke. And once, when a group of guys demanded, “Show us your circumcision,” he had dutifully complied while they snickered.
That incident so incensed Moishe that when the others left their hapless victim, Moishe was anything but compassionate. He stormed over and kicked the soldier’s tail. “You want to make a fool out of yourself, then make a fool out of yourself,” he barked. “But don’t make a fool out of our people. When they
insult you for being a Jew, stand up to them!”
Moishe had grown to his full height of six feet one inch and had won enough fistfights over being Jewish that few people wanted to pick that particular quarrel with him. But the first sergeant was not “most people.” Stocky and well muscled, he was four to six inches shorter than Moishe. He used his mouth to compensate for his height as he continually antagonized Moishe with obscene and racist remarks. He used his rank as well, refusing to give Moishe his mail on time, forcing him to ask for what was regularly delivered to others.
As the insults and injustices built up, so did the pressure of Moishe’s barely repressed anger. One day he was alone in the barracks when the first sergeant came in and made one of his usual obnoxious remarks. Then he inspected the lockers as though he had just made a passing comment about the weather. Whatever had been holding back Moishe’s anger burst, releasing a sudden flood of rage-induced energy.
Moishe picked up a carbine and swung the butt end upside the sergeant’s head. It felt so good to hurt him that Moishe was actually frightened by his anger. But even that fear could not hold back his fury as he stood over the sergeant. All the hostility he’d ever felt toward “them”—the world of Jew-hating Christians—culminated as he stood staring into the hate- and fear-filled eyes of the one man who seemed to represent them all. He doesn’t just hate me; he hates my mother, my father, my girlfriend. He was probably cheering for Hitler . . . he’d love to see us all wiped off the face of the earth.
The sergeant rolled onto his stomach, but before he could push himself up, Moishe raised one leg and brought his combat boot down full force on the sergeant’s back, hoping the blow would connect with his kidneys. When the sergeant got up, Moishe began goading him into fighting back. When he did, Moishe had the excuse he wanted to hit harder until he finally backed off, his adrenaline spent. The sergeant was disheveled and dazed, but he wasn’t bleeding.
