5. There is something rather lovely about taking the name of the prophetess Miriam, who sings the triumphant song in Exodus 15:21: “Sing to the LORD, for he has triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea.” The Oxford Annotated Bible dates this song fragment to the time of an eyewitness to the event in which Pharaoh’s army drowned in the Red Sea while pursuing the Jewish people escaping to freedom from slavery under Pharaoh. Scholars agree it is one of the oldest surviving fragments of Scripture. The name Miriam is thought to mean “revolution.”
6. For comprehensive yet wonderfully readable documentation see chapter 4: “Racism and Anti-Semitism in Progressive America, 1900–1919” in Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America. See also the memoir of an Irish American woman who married a Jew from Chicago: “The Experience of a Jew’s Wife,” The American Magazine 78 (December 1914): pp. 49–86.
7. Holden talks about his “grandfather from Detroit, that keeps calling out the numbers of the streets when you ride on the goddam bus with him” (Catcher, p. 154)—shanda fur die goyim, to do something embarrassing to Jews in a place where non-Jews can observe it.
8. According to Orthodox law, you are not Jewish unless your mother is; the inheritance is matrilineal. One way of trying to find out without asking bluntly “Are you Jewish?” is to ask what your mother’s maiden name is.
9. Sort of like excommunication, or the WASP favorite, disowning or disinheriting, but more to the bone, sitting shiva is to perform the ritual seven days of mourning following a funeral: it is a declaration that the person is dead.
10. Also documented in a letter to Elizabeth Murray (Salinger letters archives, Library of Congress).
11. From 1890 to 1914, a total of 16.5 million people immigrated to America.
12. Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism, p. 59.
13. “Why Europe Leaves Home” by Kenneth L. Roberts appeared first as a series of articles in The Saturday Evening Post before it was published as a book in 1922.
14. Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism, p. 126.
15. Beth S. Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression (Yale University Press, 1996), especially her chapter “The Spiritual Depression,” about the assault on Jewish self-image during these years.
16. “I Was a Jew,” The Forum 103 (March 1940): p. 10. See also “I Married a Jew,” The Atlantic Monthly 163 (January 1939): pp. 38–46; “I Married a Gentile,” The Atlantic Monthly 163 (March 1939): pp. 321–26. Also, Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism, p. 293.
17. Helen Reid, the wife of the owner of the New York Herald Tribune, for example, expressed her fears of Jewish migration and its effect not just on property values, but on the values held by her sons: “I hate the thought of [my] Whitelaw and Brownie growing up with nothing but Jewish neighbors around” (Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism, p. 93).
18. “Bringing Up the Child,” The Menorah Journal 28 (winter 1940): pp. 29–45.
19. Wenger, New York Jews, p. 85.
20. Wenger, New York Jews, p. 184. Another contemporary survey found that in 1935 more than 75 percent of New York Jewish youth had not attended any religious service in the past year. Before the Depression, a minority of Jews was affiliated with a synagogue, and even fewer attended regularly. When synagogues tried to attract new members during the Depression, Jews were appealed to in ethnic rather than specifically religious terms: membership, they were told, was “essential to fortify Jewish self-respect in the face of anti-Semitism.”
21. The 1943 Office of War Information report found widespread anti-Semitism in half of the forty-two states surveyed and described intense anti-Semitism and “unreasonable hate” particularly among the middle class in Pennsylvania (Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism, p. 136).
22. Ibid., p. 87. See also Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen, Rickover (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), pp. 51, 52–53; Robert Wallace, “A Deluge of Honors for an Exasperating Admiral,” Life 45 (September 8, 1958): p. 109.
23. See also Zooey, pp. 73 and 75, for similar language of intrusion. Here, Bessie Glass is perched on a closed toilet seat while her grown son Zooey is trying to take a bath. He looks around the shower curtain and sees that she is holding a package that “appeared to contain an object roughly the size of the Hope diamond or an irrigation attachment. . . . Mrs. Glass had undressed the package and now stood reading the fine print.”
24. From 1933 to 1941 over one hundred anti-Semitic organizations were created, as contrasted with perhaps a total of five in all previous American history.
25. Another study, of twenty-seven thousand openings, also found that 90 percent went to non-Jews. Discriminatory newspaper ads for jobs proliferated, reaching a peak in 1926. Public utilities, banks, insurance companies, publishing houses, engineering and architectural firms, advertising agencies, school districts, major industrial companies, civic bodies for art and music, hospitals, universities, and law firms routinely rejected Jewish applicants. Humble Oil, Eli Lilly, and Western Union, for example, developed official policies of zero acceptance of Jews (Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism, p. 89).
26. It is difficult, I think, to underestimate the intensity and depth of the meaning of this word, landsman, in its historical context. When I read in Joyce Maynard’s memoir that during her first visit to Cornish, meeting my father in person after months of correspondence by letter, he took her hand and said, “We are landsmen, all right,” I wondered if she understood the weight of this declaration.
27. He was, however, a bit out-of-date in his view of opportunities for Jews to become professionals. Doors were slamming shut. From 1920 to 1940, for example, the percentage of Jews at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons fell from 46 percent to 6 percent. At CCNY, the percentage of Jewish graduates admitted to any medical school dropped from 58 percent to 15 percent. Law schools followed the trend as well. In 1935, 25 percent of all American law students were Jewish; by 1946, that number had fallen to 11 percent. When New York State passed a law in 1948 banning tax exemptions to nonsectarian colleges and universities that employed racial or religious criteria in selecting students for admission, the number of Jewish students in New York medical schools rose from 15 percent in 1948 to approximately 50 percent by 1955 (Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism, pp. 158–60).
28. Frederick Paul Keppel, Dean of Columbia College, 1910–18; Assistant Secretary of War, 1918–19; President of the Carnegie Corporation, 1923–42.
29. Ernest Martin Hopkins, President of Dartmouth College, 1916–45.
30. Quoted in Harold S. Wechsler, The Qualified Student (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1977), p. 135. Also Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism, chap. 5, “Erecting Barriers and Narrowing Opportunities, 1919–1933.”
31. Abbott Lawrence Lowell, President of Harvard, 1909–33.
32. These included Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Duke, Rutgers, Barnard, Adelphi, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Penn State, Ohio State, Washington and Lee, and the Universities of Cincinnati, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Texas, and Washington. New York University discriminated on its Bronx campus but not at Washington Square (Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism, chap. 5).
33. Jews were barred from most clubs and fraternities.
34. Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism, p. 88.
35. Diana Trilling, “Lionel Trilling, a Jew at Columbia,” Commentary 67 (March 1979): pp. 44, 46.
36. See JDS story “A Girl I Knew,” Good Housekeeping 126 (Feb. 1948): pp. 37, 191–96.
37. See also “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes” reprinted in Nine Stories: “Brains! Are you kidding? She hasn’t got any goddam brains! She’s an animal! . . . You want to know who I’m married to? I’m married to the greatest living undeveloped, undiscovered actress, novelist, psychoanalyst, and all around goddam unappreciated celebrity-genius in New York. . . . Christ it’s so funny I could cut my throat. Madame Bovary at Columbia Extension School. . . . Madame Bovary takes a course in Television Appreciation. . . . Brains. Oh, God, that kills me!”
38. Like young Seymour, who throws a rock a
t a beautiful girl in the sunshine (scarring her for life) “because she looked so beautiful” (Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, pp. 41, 89).
3
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
IN THE SPRING OF 1942, Jerome David Salinger was drafted into the United States army. He, along with thousands of other young men from all over the country, reported for induction and began the metamorphosis from civilian to soldier. For the entire time I lived with my father, I saw no going back, no discernible return from soldier to civilian. His civilian occupation as a writer was, at best, a distant concept for me when I was growing up. I still have the note my piano teacher wrote home about how amused she was at my not knowing. The teacher said that before our recital, to ward off nervousness, the children were all talking about what their fathers did for a living. When my turn came, she said, “Peggy spoke up proudly, ‘My Daddy, he doesn’t do anything.’ ”
What I was never in doubt about was that my father was a soldier. The stories he told, the clothes he wore, the bend of his nose from where he’d broken it diving out of a Jeep under sniper fire, his deaf ear from a mortar shell exploding too near, the Jeep he drove, his oldest friends such as John Keenan, who had been his Jeep partner throughout five campaigns of the war, the guns we used when he taught me how to shoot, his GI watch, the army surplus water and green cans of emergency supplies we kept in the cellar, the medals he showed my brother and me when we begged him to, nearly everything I could see and touch and hear about my father said soldier.
He wasn’t the only soldier in the house; I did my best, as a little girl, to be just like him. When I was a teenager and had moved on to boys, I’d forgotten how much a part of his world I had been. Though born in the fifties, I was virtually a child out of time: the forties were far more a present reality to me than whatever the real date was. I was reminded of this when I was sixteen and brought my boyfriend Dan over to Daddy’s house for inspection, and my dad took out an old reel-to-reel tape and said to him, “Dan, you have to hear this, it’s marvelous.” It was a recording of me, age four, singing my entire repertoire: “Mad’moiselle from Armentières”—hasn’t been kissed, rather than f’d, in forty years, the only nod to my age, . . . hinky dinky parlay voo. The first marine jumped over the fence, parlay voo, the second marine jumped over the fence; “I’ve Got Sixpence”: Happy as the day when the army gets its pay, as we go rolling rolling home; “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree”—with anybody else but me till I come marching home; “Abdul Abulbul Amir”; “There’s a Tavern in the Town.” I emerged from World War II when I entered kindergarten and learned a few eensie-beensie spiders and I’m a little teacups. My teacher, Mrs. Perry, was not acquainted with “Mad’moiselle from Armentières.”
While the war was often in the foreground of our family life, it was always in the background. It was the point of reference that defined everything else in relation to it. When Daddy took pleasure at being warm and dry and cozy by the fire, it was the pleasure of a man who has been truly cold and wet and miserable in his life. There is a quality, among those who have suffered, of not taking things for granted the way the rest of us do. As long as I’ve known him, my father has never taken being warm and dry and not being shot at for granted. Once, when my mother asked him to join us on an overnight camping trip, he said, outraged, “For Christ sake, Claire, I spent most of the war in foxholes. I will never spend another night outdoors again if I can help it, I promise you.”
The constant presence of the war, as something not really over, pervaded the years I lived at home. Even as a teenager, when I came home for a visit and he was bugging me about something, the way parents of teenagers seem to do, I said graciously, “Dad, will you quit interrogating me already!” He said, “I can’t help it, that’s what I am.” Not in the past tense, but in the present as though he were still in counter-intelligence uniform, interrogating prisoners. “That’s what I am.” Scary. He still drives his Jeep like a nutcase, or a sane person being shelled, same regulation haircut, only gray now.
PRIVATE SALINGER, ASN 32325200, age twenty-three, reported to Fort Dix, New Jersey, on April 27, 1942. From there he was sent to Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, for a ten-week instructor’s course with the Signal Corps. He applied to Officer Candidate School, and Colonel Baker, head of Valley Forge Military Academy, wrote him an excellent recommendation. He was accepted, but not called up. By July, most of the Signal Corps class were transferred to Signal OCS at Fort Monmouth. He was assigned, instead, to an instructor’s job with the Army Aviation Cadets and posted to the U.S. Army Air Force Basic Flying School at Bainbridge, Georgia.
My father told me a number of stories about being stationed in the South. The one that came up most frequently—or perhaps, being a kid, I just remember it best—was about bugs. He told me that, in Georgia, there are these bugs called chiggers that burrow under your skin, and they itch like madmen. The only way to get them out is to burn them out by holding a cigarette near the surface of your skin. The trick was to find the exact spot where it was too hot for the chiggers but not hot enough to burn your skin. They itched so badly, though, that the men often settled for burns.
I collected useful information, such as how to get out chiggers, the way most kids collect marbles or dolls or other precious objects. My dad seemed to know all the best stuff, like the fact that jewelweed grows right next to poison ivy and is a natural antidote. On our long walks together, times I treasured, he showed me which mushrooms were poisonous, such as the beautiful Amanita muscaria, and which were delicious in an omelette, such as morels and boletus. Big soldier to little soldier, practical tips for survival were passed on. Like the fact that anyone could turn out to be a Nazi—your neighbor, your baby-sitter, the man at the post office—anyone. And anyone could be a hero; you never knew until it happened, who would be a hero and who would be a coward or traitor.
My father’s kind of hero was not the handsome, fearless guy so often seen in the movies of the day, an image that he, through his characters, disparages at length in his war stories. One of the men he admired most in the army was a nameless sergeant who did the right thing simply because it was the right thing to do. Private Salinger had applied to Officer Candidate School and was awaiting his orders to transfer to a language and intelligence corps. One Friday, late in the day, his orders came through. He was told to report for duty at some mechanical repair corps. He knew a mistake had been made (our whole family cringed anytime Daddy so much as touched a tool—we knew it meant something was going to break, usually him—several ribs, a finger, and so on), and he went to the desk sergeant in charge of such things. It was late in the afternoon and the man, as Daddy describes him—I can see him as if I had been there—had his hair all slicked back (Daddy passes his hand over the side of his head slicking back his hair as he tells the story), shoes polished, all ready to go out for a night on the town. This was the army, a war was on in Europe soon to be joined by us, and this clerk had a date to meet in town. Private Salinger showed him his papers and said there was some mistake, and the man quietly took off his overcoat, sat down, and spent the next hour or more diligently getting to the bottom of it, for no recognition, no personal benefit, just because it was the right thing to do. By the time he detected the error and corrected it, he had missed his train into town. My father will never forget him.
The stories my father wrote for the magazines during the war have the same ring to them. As in real life where new recruits were learning life-or-death tips for survival, the characters in his stories, too, reflect this change from civilian concerns to those of a soldier. Gone from his writing is the overt preoccupation with civilian society’s saints and sinners, the in-crowd and the out, the phonies and the elite. These concerns appear in an indirect way, or, may I say, a more subtle, effective way. Perhaps this is his daughter speaking, as one sensitive to being lectured by a parent; but even his characters express an awareness of this didactical tendency. Zooey acknowledged of his whole family, “We don’t tal
k, we hold forth. We don’t converse, we expound. At least I do. The minute I’m in a room with somebody who has the usual number of ears, I either turn into a goddam seer or a human hatpin.”1 I had heard my father say this about himself long before I ever read Zooey, but, as each acknowledges, it’s not something he can control. My father’s remorse, the morning after, for an evening of this kind of behavior rings much as a confirmed alcoholic’s regret for his behavior. A mixture of sadness, embarrassment, apologies made, but without the hope or promise of turning over a new leaf. There is a real sense in his Glass stories, as in his real life, of its being something beyond his control, a flaw that is part of his being. Not that his judgment or lecture is flawed, mind you, the embarrassment is due to the fact that he can’t keep his mouth shut about it.
In his early army stories, however, there is much more story than lecture, and, as I said, a new subtlety, or gentleness really, with which his usual concerns are brought forth. Most striking of all, to me, is that in those army stories, the characters actually have real friends. There is “Babe” Gladwaller, who, in “Last Day of the Last Furlough,”2 tells his friend and fellow soldier Vincent Caulfield, “I never knew about friendship until the Army,” or Philly Burns, in “Death of a Dogface,”3 who tells his wife Juanita, “I met more good guys in the Army than I ever knowed when I was a civilian.” In my father’s books, however, one finds instead of friendship, relations between guru and seeker, as in “Teddy” and the later stories about Seymour, or between the living and the dead, as in The Catcher in the Rye where Phoebe challenges her brother, Holden, to name anyone he likes who’s living, or when Franny similarly charges Zooey with the same question, and both are forced to admit that outside the immediate family they can’t name a single living person—though the list of dead people they’d give their right arm to meet is full up. My father has, himself, on many occasions told me the same thing, that the only people he really respects are all dead.
Dream Catcher: A Memoir Page 6
