by Anne Bernays
He had been replaced meanwhile by a newly arrived refugee from Frankfurt am Main, Rabbi Dr. Jacob Hoffman, reputed to be a distinguished biblical and Talmudic scholar. His spluttering English, gargling gutturalisms, steam-engine fricatives, and Moses-like gravity sent me into paroxysms of laughter that mortified and enraged my father. Several times Mr. Turteltaub (turtledove), the shammes, removed me to the lobby.
After the long morning of sermon and liturgy I sang the closing anthem—“Adon Olam” (“He is the eternal Lord”)—as if released from the Babylonian captivity. I had a week of freedom ahead of me. At home my father drank his glass of cream sherry and read the Saturday Herald Tribune before going in to lunch, invariably a parched chicken salad made from Friday night’s soup fowl. Meanwhile I went to my room, closed the door, and in secret conducted a black service of my own devising: switched the lights on and off, handled money (my coin collection), lighted matches, scribbled in my school notebook, drew pictures, laid out cards for solitaire, and tried to think up other ways to violate and desecrate the Orthodox Sabbath. I went away to college in an unforgiving mood—the next time I entered a synagogue after my father’s funeral was to attend the funeral of an uncle, and even then I couldn’t help giggling.
I was not altogether irreligious, and despite my attempts at desecration, I didn’t abhor the Sabbath. In its softer, observances—the lighting of candles at sundown on Friday, the blessings over bread and wine—the Sabbath had a sacramental sweetness and purity. But it was hard to ignore the angry old men at Ohab Zedek shushing and glaring at the young. “The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat” (I had been reading the New Testament on the sly) and defiled a religion that despite my intolerance I revered—at least for its fervor and the literary splendors of its Bible. But for me Orthodox Judaism seemed to have no place for joy, spontaneity, celebration, youth; its windows were nailed shut.
As for the women: they were segregated both in daily life and on the synagogue balcony, hidden behind a Jewish purdah (I imagined their white thighs). By tradition and inclination they were ignorant of Torah and content to serve as acolytes and handmaidens. Both my mother and her sister knew Latin and Greek. Educated in Massachusetts schools at a time when women were fighting for the vote, they were suffragists with a touch of socialist radicalism and outraged memories of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. But they never questioned what the rabbis told them was their organic inferiority and an uncleanness that had to be washed away once a month in ritual baths. My mother went to the opera, loved Puccini, Caruso, and lilacs, and introduced me to Gulliver’s Travels. But she had an intransigent mind-set. Nothing in her religion mattered so much as the strictest letter of the domestic observances she learned from her mother: the relentless koshering of chickens and the voodoo purging, with boiling water and red hot stones, of tableware contaminated by accidental contact with food products of an opposite dietary gender.
I lusted after forbidden foods: ball-park hot dogs, supposedly composed of ground-up rodents and slaughterhouse sweepings; glorious, super-American Jell-O, taboo because its gelatin came from the hooves and bones of unkosher animals; pork sausages and bacon. (Despite a few unattractive qualities, including an appetite for garbage and occasional carnivore ferocity, pigs are delectable creatures, as I recall reading somewhere, “walking butcher shops of hams, chops, roasts, and ribs, with twice as many drumsticks as turkeys.”) I lusted after these forbidden delights, partly because I believed millions of Americans couldn’t be altogether wrong about such simple (and apparently delicious) sources of gratification, but mainly because they were forbidden. I had my first bacon at a summer camp breakfast cookout at Fort Ticonderoga, New York, a month before I went off to college. I had my first lobster and steamers at the Union Oyster House, Boston, on D day, June 6, 1944. Later that evening, with too much whiskey in me, I broke my wrist and passed out on the sidewalk after a failed attempt to scale the fence of the Harvard Botanical Gardens.
J.K. with father, Tobias Kaplan, summer 1938.
My parents never acknowledged the historical existence of Jesus or the New Testament (the term “New” being in itself an affront to Mosaic law). They dated their letters and checks by the Gregorian calendar, but insisted on B.C.E. and C.E. instead of B.C. and A.D. when it came to locating events in the past. I secretly used the King James Bible as a crib when I was supposedly learning Hebrew. I turned up my nose at Yiddish because it seemed the language of old people who couldn’t speak or read English. My parents forbade me to pitch pennies and play punchball with the Irish kids, Catholic and poor, who lived around the corner toward Columbus Avenue—they were “bad boys,” “common.” Deprived of their company and of education in the streets I was well on my way to sissyhood.
Xenophobic, and at times paranoid, the Jewish mentality that saw the gentile and all his works as the enemy had plenty of justification. Even in the heart of our enclave on West Eighty-sixth Street, as I stood under the canvas canopy of the Jewish Center building, a stranger stopped to shake his fist at me—“Little kike bastard!” We knew about Hitler; the Kristallnacht pogrom, when Nazi mobs gutted nearly two hundred synagogues while the police looked on; forced expulsions and concentration camps. But our dismay was blunted by resentment of the wave of refugees from Germany and Austria, some arriving with huge crates, parked in the streets, containing entire households of heavy bourgeois furniture. The newcomers made no secret of their assumed superiority to the vulgar, materialistic, self-indulgent American society that had taken them in. Some still believed an awful mistake had been made and that to the end they would remain Germans or Austrians who happened, inconveniently, to be Jewish as well.
A boy growing into adolescence on the West Side could feel a certain airlessness and an urge to escape into the great secular world outside. You had a choice if you thought your distant business was with the written word: to look inward and meditate on the fate of being Jewish, or to look outward, at the risk of being shunned both by the faithful for abandoning the faith and by the others for trespassing on their cultural property. When I reached college and graduate school I wondered what business I had as a Jew engaging with the Christian canon of English literature, much of which was not only alien but openly hostile. T. S. Eliot was the most problematic of all. I worshiped him, and the melancholy cadences of Four Quartets penetrated my subliminal being, but it was impossible to reconcile his hold over me (and my generation) with his High Church allegiance, royalist politics, public primness, and, most of all, his pervasive anti-Semitism. “Reasons of religion and race,” he said, “combine to make any large number of freethinking Jews undesirable.”
I was baffled by a growing sense of disconnectedness and remoteness in my studies. With the exception of the scholar-critic F. O. Matthiessen, my teachers at Harvard regarded their discipline as hermetic and scorned connections between literature and life. On his advice I took a leave of absence from graduate school and went out to New Mexico. For half a year I cultivated chili peppers, mucked out horse stalls, and pumped gas and diesel in the Glorieta valley, southeast of Santa Fe.
My employers, a retired car dealer and his middle-aged girlfriend, had fled their spouses in Dallas to start a new life, but they missed their old life and talked about it all the time. They had bought a place they hoped to turn into a guest ranch after World War II, but Arrowhead Lodge, as they named it, was still only a truck-stop eatery with half a dozen unheated cabins and a couple of undernourished horses. To re-create her suburban garden back in Dallas Josephine set me to planting jasmine, arbutus, hibiscus, and other shrubs that needed pampering; the soil was so loaded with clay that the holes I dug for them with a pickax, shovel, and buckets of water hardened into their graves almost right away. In line with her taming of this wild land she hired a man from Lubbock, Texas, to set tile in the cabin bathrooms. He arrived in a pickup truck loaded with tiles, cement, tools, and whiskey and was only semiconscious by the end of the workday. Donna, the cook, another of Josephine’s desperate
wartime hires, was clearly crazy. She would lie on the floor of her cabin after a few nips of Southern Comfort and invite me to watch as she masturbated the large male mongrel she had picked up at the Santa Fe pound. When this exhibition failed to have the intended effect on me, she flew into a rage. One evening she threatened me with a loaded shotgun. The day after, Josephine had her carted off to the state insane asylum.
Josephine’s mate, Wayne, needed all of a month to figure out that “Kaplan” was not a Scots name, as he had assumed when he hired me (“able-bodied Harvard student”) at the U. S. Employment Service in Santa Fe. (The main business of this office was recruiting workers for a secret military research establishment hidden in the hills at Los Alamos.) “You may be a Jew,” Wayne said after we had got the name business cleared up, “but I like you, and I think of you as a white man.” We shook hands on this. Presumably we were peers, fellow “Anglos,” as distinguished from the “Mexicans” with whom I drank beer in the Glorieta saloon at the end of the day.
Wayne’s compliment, such as it was, set me to thinking about the human order in this New Mexico wilderness as it related to my own feelings of belonging. I lived in a cabin on the edge of a vast national forest bounded by the Sangre de Cristo range. Possibly no one had ever walked or ridden over much of this land, not even the Indians. Like many other parts of New Mexico it had remained unexplored for centuries and so “belonged” to no one, meaning, I supposed, that I had as much a right to be there as anyone.
“Every continent,” D. H. Lawrence wrote, “has its own great spirit of place.” For me the spirit of place in New Mexico was far more life altering than that of Europe when I got there several years later. Among the books I brought with me to New Mexico was Matthiessen’s monumental study of “art and expression in the age of Emerson and Whitman,” American Renaissance. I also brought Alfred Kazin’s On Native Grounds, a work of discovery and appropriation: a Jewish writer—outsider—son of immigrants, raised and educated in Brooklyn, doing his reading at the New York Public Library on Forty-second Street—laid claims to American literature as his own “native grounds,” despite the incongruities.
Henry Adams, anti-Semite and supreme representative of the American social and political patriciate, became the darling of Jewish critics and biographers, perhaps because they fell in love with their tormentor, believing they understood him on a higher, more tolerant plane than he understood himself. They were dazzled by his brilliance, fully as dazzled as Adams himself. The same process of appropriation, maybe even Eucharistic ingestion and incorporation, transformed another monstre sacre of American letters, Henry James, whose antipathy to Jews was at least as pronounced as Henry Adams’s. Leon Edel, a Jew, wrote a landmark biography that in effect made Henry James his property, and for a while, until it was stolen, Edel wore the novelist’s gold signet ring. Even preferring to ignore James’s comments on “a Jewry that had burst all bounds” and effected “the Hebrew conquest of New York,” I felt sickening dismay the first time I read The American Scene, his account of a return visit to his native country in 1904. In one appalling chapter he described the denizens of the Lower East Side—my grandparents, Sir!—as belonging to “the nimbler class of animals in some great zoological garden.” They were “human squirrels and monkeys,” glass snakes, worms, ants, a “swarm” of insects, and “fish of over-developed proboscis.” And yet, as they had done with Henry Adams, Jewish writers like Edel made love to Henry James, enfolded him in their own emerging literary tradition, and emboldened others—like me—to tread on “native grounds.”
By the 1950s—at least in New York, Chicago, and on the West Coast—Jewish writers and intellectuals no longer skulked in the alleys of American culture. There was even some danger, given the historical precedents of fifteenth-century Spain and twentieth-century Germany, that Jews as a group may have become too successful and perhaps ought to keep their heads down. They were conspicuous in areas like entertainment, book publishing, “communications,” and even the academy, especially in previously off-limits English and history departments. Writers like Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Allen Ginsberg challenged the traditional WASP hegemony in American letters. These writers weren’t descended from what Emerson had called “the establishment,” the pantheon of American letters. Not without opposition they created their own mainstream along with a literary language, this one with a Yiddish and vernacular substrate, that was as formative as the language of Mark Twain, Henry James, and Ernest Hemingway.
One night, over drinks in a Montauk, Long Island, restaurant, Philip Roth entertained Annie and me with an imitation of Prince Sadrudin Ali Khan, publisher and chief patron of the Paris Review, speaking at the magazine’s annual award ceremony. Roth indicated a dignified hush and then drew out the prince’s precise upper-class articulation when he spoke and, in an unintended context of comic incongruity and delicious irony, presented “The Aga Khan award for short fiction, to Phee-leep Roth for ‘The Conversion of the Jews’” (one of the stories in Goodbye, Columbus).
My pride in belonging to a stubborn, perdurable people had come slowly, along with the recognition that, like the color of my eyes, this was for life, a membership nonelective and nonresignable, and that one had better make the best of it. Jewish collective survival over the millennia, against all odds and all reason, even gave me a faint intimation of impersonal immortality.
CHAPTER 3
As one of two brotherless sisters, I was skittish around boys. For two years I went to City and Country, a progressive school for boys and girls on West Twelfth Street, an institution my father plucked me from after he found out that I hadn’t, by the age of eight, learned to read. After that, I went to the Brearley School, a polite and venerable all-girl establishment, then on to two female colleges. Until late in my teens I found men, like raw clams and fast sports cars, something of a novelty, something of a risk.
I was twelve when my periods began, and it was my mother who discovered this before I did. Superstitiously uneasy with her, convinced that she could navigate and chart the chaos of my mind, it dismayed but didn’t surprise me that she saw the blood first, as I undressed in front of her, having been sent home from school early with a stomachache. But even before I became a “woman” I existed in a state of heated infatuation with boys. One evening as I sat next to one of these on a piano bench—behind us stood half a dozen formal wedding portraits within silver frames—talking with his eagle-eyed parents, the edges of our shoe soles touched, and I felt a rush of desire so violent it nearly knocked me off my perch. I mentioned my eagerness to cuddle and smooch to no one; it was my secret, kept even from my sister, Doris, who had a way of worming almost anything out of me. Whenever I met a new, good-looking boy (for I had definite standards) at my cousin’s house in South Orange or my friend Carol’s in Woodmere, Long Island, I couldn’t wait to feel his tongue inside my mouth, his member tight against my pubic bone—under layers of clothing—and the melting of the bones in my legs. Most often, I ended up dizzy, loose in the knees, from these baby encounters. I had never seen a live penis.
My passion for movie stars—Ronald Colman, Tyrone Power, Macdonald Carey, Gary Cooper—was not a mere schoolgirl crush on two-dimensional idols but throbbing, stomach-churning, heart-stopping lovesickness. I collected pictures of these and other actors, cutting them from movie magazines and attaching them with thick white library paste to the pages of an album I hid on a shelf in my closet under my ski pants and showed to no one.
Starting when I was eleven, I had so many boyfriends that, lest I forget any, I kept an up-to-date list in a notebook, placing a star-shaped mark alongside the names of those with whom I had shared great kisses. Sex with these youths was passionate but chaste, maybe more passionate precisely because for years, until I was seventeen, “nothing happened.” Lust was stalled at a notch or two below orgasm and so my appetite was never appeased. We “necked,” we “petted,” we jabbed our fully clothed bodies rhythmically against each other, but w
e never went “all the way”; home runs were out of the question, pregnancy being roughly equivalent to a death sentence.
Constantly on the prowl, juices on the simmer, I was about as steady as a trayful of champagne flutes on a North Atlantic crossing in February. I rated handsome far higher than character, temperament, sense of humor, intelligence, or communications skills. It didn’t matter if they preferred Batman comics to the poetry of William Butler Yeats, my boyfriends had to have regular features, sited symmetrically, strong chins and brows, lean bodies, good posture. They also had to be graceful and adept at ordering food from a waiter, paying and tipping a cabdriver, and knowing which shoes to wear when. Raised in a household where being Jewish was a silent reality rather than an imperative, I made little distinction between Jews and gentiles—except that gentiles were more likely than Jews to have the physical style I required.
The following is a sampling of the men I dated, considered, and eventually parted from.
