Until I was five years old I believed that the parades each year on Memorial Day were for me. I remember most the regiments of black Sea Scouts who shuffled down Linden Boulevard, around the corner from our apartment—their white hats, white belts, white boots. I grew up in a lower-middle-class section of Brooklyn (in Flatbush), and though my own block had been about half-Jewish, half-Catholic, my public school (kindergarten through eighth grade) had been 50 percent nonwhite, a fact that hadn’t occurred to me until after my first novel was published. I was twenty-eight years old then, and, going through some old papers which had been left at my parents’ apartment, I came across my graduation picture: only eighteen of the thirty-five faces were white, and I was surprised, pleased—pleased that I was surprised.
Although I was told (endlessly) that the Jews were a persecuted people, an oppressed minority, in the Brooklyn of my boyhood Jews seemed to be a majority. One time some Catholic kids from around the corner (Rogers Avenue) had split open the top of my head by beating me with the buckle of a navy belt (they had caught me alone on my way home from Hebrew School), but even their steady chant, while they swung the belt—“Dirty Jew! Dirty Jew!”—seemed to me nothing more than one of the daily hazards that went with growing up in a Catholic-Jewish neighborhood.
The Jews were generally the smartest students in my school, and I was persuaded early in life that good grades led to good futures. As a boy, I had a conditioned, unthinking pride in successful Jews, especially in Jewish athletes (wasn’t it true that Hank Greenberg could have broken Babe Ruth’s home-run record if only he’d played on Yom Kippur?) In our neighborhood, when our numbers were equal to theirs (as they usually were), most fights with Catholics remained verbal, and when they didn’t, we were able to hold our own.
If anything, being Jewish in my section of Brooklyn in the years following the Second World War not only made me feel special, but, inevitably, superior. Thus, when my parents let me know that they had not pressed charges against the boys who’d split open the top of my head (that night, when I’d become weak and dizzy, my parents whispered about “brain damage”; I awoke in the morning with—an accident?—the German measles), they impressed upon me the conditions of the boys’ homes. My mother had visited the house of each of the boys who’d attacked me. As in my home, the mothers of all the Catholic boys worked—but here similarities ended: most important, as my mother described the findings of her visits, the homes these boys lived in were “not-well-taken-care-of.” In some there were no fathers, in others the fathers “drank-a-lot.” Result: the children were truants, they did poorly in school. They were our poor-whites, and, my parents felt, not to blame for what they had done to me. They did not come from good Jewish homes; they were “less fortunate” than I was.
I suppose there were right-wingers in my Brooklyn neighborhood (Catholic boys I went to school with sold the Brooklyn Tablet outside Holy Cross Church on Sundays, a paper I later discovered was notorious for its antisemitism and its support of Father Coughlin), but I don’t remember them. All my relatives, all my parents’ friends read The New York Post or The New York Times. America was, as far as I could tell, a free country, a place in which, if he worked hard, as I was forever taught, a Jew could become a success.
All men seemed to be judged—as guys were in the schoolyard—by their abilities. The best athlete in my school was a friend of mine, and black. He received the school Citizenship Award when we graduated. Other classmates, also black, waited with me to take our younger brothers and sisters home from the same nursery school. My friend Benny from around the corner (his father was the superintendent of an apartment house) was black and he came to my house and I went to his. As for the world which existed beyond my block, beyond my school, hadn’t my beloved Brooklyn Dodgers (I was born several blocks from Ebbets Field) dealt the deathblow to all discrimination in America by bringing Jackie Robinson into the major leagues?
That almost all the black children in my public school lived in one neighborhood—in what seemed to me at the time a rather pleasant section of wood-frame houses—was no more unusual than the fact that most of the Jews lived in my neighborhood. That some of the black boys and girls had to go to work at a younger age than I did was only a fact which made their lives seem slightly more exciting, adventurous. I was, myself, proud that I began working after school before most of my friends did.
That all cleaning women and janitors were black was something neither I—nor anybody around me—ever questioned. It was only when I was in college that my brother and I began—like some older cousins—referring to the woman who cleaned for our mother as “the family slave.” The woman worked only for my mother’s family—and there were telephone calls weekly in which my mother and her four sisters would “trade her around”—“You take the girl this Thursday and I’ll give her back to you next week.” My family could only afford to have her once every two weeks. The successful sister had her several times a week.
It was not, in fact, the blacks who were feared in my school and neighborhood. This status was enjoyed by the Italians. To gain immunity (body and property) one had to be friends with a member of one of their gangs. During my last two years of grade school one of my friends was—his real name—Victor Paradise; Vic’s older brother was chief of a gang named “The Tigers,” famous for legendary Prospect Park zip-gun and switchblade battles. Vic’s girlfriend and mine, both Jewish, were friends, and we went to parties together on weekends, played ball together afternoons; he called me Robert Taylor and I called him Farley Granger.
I did not grow up in a Marxist-Leninist-Socialist-Jewish home (the man who killed Trotsky, I’m now told, was a distant cousin of my grandmother): in fact, one of my few childhood political memories concerns a distant uncle, whom we visited rarely; the visits were dangerous excursions as I remember them, steeped in mystery. My uncle’s small apartment, in a distant section of Brooklyn, was dusty, filled with books and huge brown-edged posters of men with beards. My uncle was a tall man and looked, everyone agreed, exactly like Abraham Lincoln; when I knew him he was sick and lay always in a large four-poster bed, his eyes set in deep hollows above marvelous protruding cheekbones. Sometimes he would rise to his elbows and argue passionately, eyes glowing.
Each time we left his home my father would say the same thing: he respected Uncle Ben for believing in something (I don’t think he ever used the word “communism” in my presence) and devoting his life to it—but would Uncle Ben have been allowed to hold similar opinions against the Russian government if he lived there?
The answer was obvious, the argument irrefutable. Everything around me—parents, school, books, radio programs—supported the proposition that “only in America” could a man like my mysterious uncle not be put in prison.
Sports, at least until the age of fourteen, were my whole life. When my father came home from work each night, I’d kiss him, grab The New York Post from under his arm, and run to my room. Afterwards, if he saw me reading it, he’d ask—angrily—why I always read the back pages—the sports section—before the front pages. When I graduated from public school, in my autograph book I listed two possibilities under “Career Ambition”: professional baseball player, commercial artist. At five-foot-four or -five and 115 pounds I had a huge rainbow curve which I would aim at the batter’s shoulder or ear, and which I would then watch break across the outside corner of the plate. It kept me ahead of the batters, drew incredulous spectators to the rear of backstops. It also enabled me—by proudly telling everyone that it was my father who had taught me how to throw my curve and my “sinker”—to try to reach him, to draw him back into the magic of that world we’d existed in together that first evening in our backyard (garages, not grass) when he had taught me my most treasured skill. I was ten or eleven and we were having a catch together when one of the balls he threw to me curved—I gaped, and asked him how he did it; he showed me, and the first time I held the ball in the new position, and turned my wrist at the last moment of delivery,
the ball had spun off my fingers, and as it made its way across what must have been the forty or fifty feet between us, it dipped beautifully down and away.
My father, raised in an extremely Orthodox Jewish family, wanted his sons to be “Americans”: my mother had named me Jacob Mordecai (for my father’s father), but three days after I was born, my father changed the name to an “American” one—Jay Michael. And though my mother, who had not been brought up in an Orthodox manner, had enrolled me in the Crown Heights Yeshiva (hoping to please my father and his family, I imagine), my father had fought her on the issue, and, after a few brief months, had succeeded in having me transferred to P. S. 246. I helped his cause immensely, as I remember it, by screaming and crying my heart out on Columbus Day (or was it Christmas?)—when all my friends from the block had a holiday and I had to ride the Nostrand Avenue bus, schoolbooks hidden under my coat, to Yeshiva. “I’m an American! I’m an American!” I kept yelling.
Like all their friends and relatives, my parents worshiped Roosevelt. During newsreels at the Granada Theater on Church Avenue, everybody would applaud when his face appeared on the screen. One afternoon in 1944 some friends and I stationed ourselves beneath a window in my backyard, and when my landlord’s daughter appeared, we sprang up and shouted in singsong the ultimate taunt: “Vera votes for Dew-ey! Vera votes for Dew-ey!”
I went to high school during the McCarthy era, but I did not remember that my father had warned me against signing petitions until, during an argument years later (thinking I had held it against him), he reminded me that he had done so. I do remember that some of my teachers would preface discussions with the statement: “Now don’t go home and tell your parents I’m a Communist, but…” After school I don’t recall mentioning such things. Nor do I recall a single discussion among friends which was even vaguely political.
I worked all through high school, beginning with a job at five dollars a week plus tips in a dry-cleaning store when I was thirteen years old and a high school freshman. The owner, Mr. Berman, gave me a discount on any of my own clothes I had cleaned—and a 20 percent commission on business (from friends and family) I brought in. I spent a lot of my time riding buses to sections of Brooklyn where he had owned other tailor shops, trying to collect unpaid bills for him. Mr. Berman left me in charge of the store often and this pleased me. The first evening he did this I found a dollar on the floor in the back room, under a rack of clothes. I gave the dollar to him when he returned; he put his arm around my shoulder (I was taller than he was) and told me that he had left the bill there purposely, as a test which I had just passed. When I told my parents the story I couldn’t understand why they became angry.
At various times I worked as an elevator operator, mail-order clerk, waiter, busboy, tutor, postal worker, delivery boy. Almost all the jobs had a sense of adventure attached to them—I was a yeoman on a merchant marine ship one summer, I trucked racks of clothes in and out of cars along Eighth Avenue, I rode the subways into new sections of the city to deliver packages.
The work was the means to an end—and the end was always in sight. During high school I worked for pocket money, for college; during college I worked for my education; during the summers I worked to pay for the coming school year…. All jobs were temporary.
Someday, I knew, I would get what was spoken of in my home in magical tones—a college education. An education, I’d been told ever since I could remember, was “something nobody could ever take away from you.” To lower-middle-class Jewish families such as mine, living still with the irrational and profound fear that anything you owned could be snatched away in a moment (my grandmother had been smuggled across the Russian border during a pogrom; a friend of the family, the legend went, had once, during a pogrom, watched her eldest son dig his own grave), nonmaterial possessions were the most valuable ones.
I enrolled in Columbia College in the fall of 1955, and during my four years there I cannot remember seeing, even once, a political demonstration or a petition. At Columbia in the late fifties we prided ourselves on our apolitical sophistication, our “disinterestedness.” The largest turnout for any election held during my years there came during my senior year, when we proudly voted to abolish all student government.
The members of the college administration, like ourselves, were enlightened men. If there were injustices, grievances, problems, inequities—administrative doors were open to us, things could be discussed rationally, solutions arrived at in a civilized manner. Nobody thought about questioning the following regulation from the college catalog concerning “Academic Discipline”:
The continuance of each student upon the rolls of the College, the receipt by him of academic credits, his graduation, and the conferring of the degree are strictly subject to the disciplinary powers of the University, which is free to cancel his registration at any time on any grounds which it deems advisable. The disciplinary authority of the University is vested in the President, in such cases as he deems proper, and, subject to the reserved powers of the President, in the Dean of the College.
In those years (the Silent Eisenhower years, as they would be called in the sixties) we must have supported Martin Luther King’s bus boycott—but I don’t remember doing so. Birmingham was far away. Harlem was equally far—on the other side of Morningside Park; and we all laughed during Freshman Orientation Week when an upperclassman warned us about not taking the “wrong” subway line to that “other” 116th Street stop.
If more recent Columbia undergraduates have carried Fanon, Malcolm, Ché, and Marcuse under their arms, we stuck to Yeats, Freud, Faulkner, and Tolstoy. Our fiercest opinions had to do with ideas and literature. Our heroes were our professors, and we looked up to them, we respected them; we did not think of ourselves as being against them. We were cynical about any political action, and we admired our professors for their articulate cynicism, for their own disinterested attitude toward the world, for their ability to cut down students and other professors with witty remarks. “Well,” the teacher I had for my first advanced writing course would say after reading a student’s story to us, “it seems to me there’s less here than meets the eye.”
Between classes, after classes, we would sit along the wall in front of Hamilton Hall, or on Broadway, in Riker’s (the fraternity set could afford to sit in Prexy’s, which served “the hamburger with a college education”; I ate there once and forever after envied—and resented—those who did not have to think about the amount of money they spent for lunch), and talk about our courses, our teachers, the papers we were writing, the latest remarks, gossip.
Like my friends, I was proud of how much reading and writing the College required; during my four years at Columbia I must have averaged at least ten to fifteen pages of writing per week. All through Freshman Orientation Week, I remember, we reveled in legends of the prodigious amounts of work required by Columbia’s Contemporary Civilization and Humanities courses: our first assignment, we proudly told one another, and—after—friends from other colleges, was to read—overnight—the entire Iliad.
I remember how impressed I was one night during Freshman Week when a sophomore explained the high point of his freshman year to us: the praise he’d received from his Humanities professor—a famous literary critic—for having been the only student to understand the true magic of Don Quixote. “What I wrote,” the sophomore explained to us (we were sitting on the lush leather-covered chairs of Hartley Hall Lounge), “was that the Don was really the only sane man in a mad world: thus, you see, the windmills are giants….” Illusion, he explained, because powered by a superior imagination, was more real than reality. His reversing of a traditional view seemed, at the time, the most staggering—and admirable—of accomplishments.
That spring, near the end of my second semester, I sat up in bed almost until dawn one night, to give my brother Robert, who was just finishing junior high school, an elaborate explication de texte of the first few pages of Camus’s L’Étranger. Robert, who at thirteen listed “
Poet” as his career ambition, sat on his side of our hi-riser as I whispered, in a style of criticism which I was thrilled to possess, to be able to share, about endless nuances of language and significance.
During our years at Columbia, we learned, we were going to become “whole men” (the “w” dropped from the phrase when we referred, knowingly, to our sister school Barnard, across Broadway). We were going to become familiar with the major literature, art, music, and history of Western Civilization—and we were going to do so in small intimate classes which would be taught (even at an introductory level) by some of the world’s most distinguished scholars. (Men such as Mark Van Doren, Moses Hadas, Douglas Moore, Donald Frame, and Lionel Trilling.)
Any questioning we did was, literally, academic: was James Shenton (donning a raccoon coat and having Barnard girls dress as flappers during his lecture on the Roaring Twenties) merely a sensationalist? Was Mark Van Doren’s gentle angelic eloquence a subtle form of sentimentality? Why was Lionel Trilling so esteemed by the world when, as a classroom teacher, he seemed barely the equal—in range, in articulateness—of men such as Andrew Chiappe and F. W. Dupee?
A man such as C. Wright Mills, who taught at Columbia when I was there, was a hero to us, not for his political radicalism, but for his uniqueness as a teacher, as an individual. (He rode to Columbia on a motorcycle, he’d married his Puerto Rican secretary.) We were proud to have a brilliant maverick among us.
We collected no data on Columbia’s involvement in the military-industrial complex, on its role as a slumlord; instead we savored gossip, legends concerning teachers, former students (many, in those years, about Ginsberg and Kerouac), and clever remarks—e.g., Irwin Edman, some years before, stopping a Faculty Club discourse on President (of Columbia) Eisenhower, by observing that “the trouble with the General, gentlemen, is that he has delusions of adequacy.”
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