When I went to visit the rabbi, he gave me a book to read but little other encouragement. Conversion in Jewish thinking is not a light matter, and I’m sure he could see that I was not ready to make any radical changes in my way of life, the kind that Judaism asks. That would come later.
What was important for me was the irritant that Tamara had planted in my soul, the question about myself—was I a Jew or not?—that stayed with me until I finally resolved it years later. At Brown, though, Tamara suggested that since I was staying in Providence for Passover—she would be out of town—I should share a seder meal with a local Orthodox family. Always eager to ingratiate myself with her, I did so, joining a family associated with the outreach-oriented Hasidic sect Chabad. I can’t say I was enamored of the experience, but something one of the other guests told me turned out to trigger a turning point in my life. He was a young man from Brooklyn, studying to be a rabbi.
He noticed that I understood little of the Haggadah, the seder text, and he tried to explain a fundamental point of it. At Passover, he said, every Jew should see himself as if he is part of the Exodus from Egyptian slavery that the festival recalls. Judaism, like Jungian psychology, postulates a sort of racial memory passed down through generations, not in books but through something like spiritual genes. Nervously, I broached to the young man the subject of my adoption. It seemed that, as far as racial memories go, I was out of luck, I said. I had no claim on Jewish genes, but I realized at that moment that I wanted them.
My new friend looked warmly at me and issued a sort of prophecy. “I’m not sure what God has in store for you,” he said, “but I’ve got a feeling that someday you may become a convert. Do you know what a neshamah is?” I said no. “It’s a soul. Every soul contains a spark from God. All the sparks belonging to all the Jews who would ever live were present at Mount Sinai. All the converts who would ever live were there, too. When one of these sparks is born in the body of a gentile, it seeks to return to God.”
That was the first time the thought entered my mind that God might have a particular plan for my soul. In Hebrew, the word for this minute divine attention to and involvement in the details of our lives is hashgachah. In English, it is, of course, Providence.
The unexpected influence of Brown continued to follow me when I left the city of Providence. I was still a spiritual dabbler, not yet committed to Judaism. But after graduation, a batch of clips from my columns for the Herald got me my job at National Review. At the time, NR was a haven of traditional-minded Catholics, a tribute to the spiritual influence of the founder, Bill Buckley. A young woman I met and dated there, the daughter of a professional right-wing Catholic antiabortion activist, filled a Tamara-like role for me. Once again, I was involved with a girl whose spiritual life I envied.
Wanting what she had, a relationship with God, I considered Catholicism but ultimately was provoked by spiritual envy to look more deeply at the religion I had inherited by default from childhood, Judaism.
Now that I’m a father, I wonder whether my children would benefit from going to Brown. A conservative and religious parent might prefer to see his son or daughter attend a piously traditional college. But a parent shouldn’t expect a smart and independent young person to emerge as if from a printing press, inked with exactly the same thoughts and impressions every other student emerges with.
Education, as Judaism understands it, is both provocative and unpredictable, as the case of Abraham, the first Hebrew patriarch and prophet, demonstrates.
Shortly before Abraham’s wife, Sarah, gave birth to his son and spiritual heir, Isaac, Abraham and Sarah moved to the Philistine city of Gerar. Why would this father of all Jewish fathers subject his son’s earliest upbringing to the influence of a city that was urbane, cosmopolitan, and secular, a city where Abraham observed, “There is but no fear of God in this place”? Apparently, as Jewish rabbinic interpreters have suggested, it was because Abraham valued the challenge the city would pose to Isaac. Spiritual growth is aided by provocation.
But as with any growth, a good education takes unexpected twists and turns. Educators may wish to plant certain ideas in their students, but what happens, in fact, is unpredictable. Ideas can grow in the most fantastically unexpected directions. I believe that a traditionalist father or mother should consider the advantage that Abraham saw for his son Isaac in being challenged by neighbors holding views diametrically opposed to those of his parents. There is a danger in this, of course. But so too is there a risk in subjecting your child to a monotonous upbringing surrounded by mirror images of his parents. The risk is boredom. The risk is also the possibility that the child will never learn how to defend his tradition. When he finds it challenged after formal education is over, he may discover that he lacks any intellectual armor to ward off blows from hostile secularists.
For my children, I hope for a firm commitment to their tradition, but one grounded in independent thought and strong enough to answer critics. Maybe Providence will lead them to Brown.
Townie
ROBIN GREEN
When people today act all impressed that I went to Brown, I always feel compelled to set the record straight. Yes, I went there, but I was a townie. In other words, a category apart, and a lesser one. I suppose I assumed Brown had some kind of quota for townies, a pact with Providence to let some of its natives in. How else with my not-exactly-earth-shaking grades and test scores did I squeak by? What other explanation could there be?
Of course, I never took steps to find out if there was any truth to my theory. To be admitted at all was a coup for my family. My grandparents were immigrants, and though my own folks were funny and smart and assimilated, I was the first generation to go to college. And an Ivy League one no less. So who cared why I got in there?
Thus, in 1963, armed with an inferiority complex and inchoate resentments, I arrived on campus. Campus was a mile from our house on Wayland Avenue, near the old Brown gym, but I had never set foot inside. It was a world I had never imagined being admitted into. I knew even then that I was fulfilling my parents’ yearnings.
I had some scholarship money from the state, and my own earnings. My parents sacrificed for the rest so I could live at school and have the full experience they dreamed of. I soon learned, however, that townies were not consigned to Andrews or Metcalf or a real dorm; instead, we were ghettoized at West House, a rambling 1885 wreck that I can’t believe still stands on the corner of Meeting and Brown Streets and is, today, the green dorm, a vegan palace, special. Back then it seemed like the outward manifestation of my gut feeling: See? You can come here, but not really.
Fine with me. Who were these Pembroke girls anyway? (Remember, it was a women’s college then, and stayed that way well beyond my four years there.) What did these young women have to do with me? I had gone to a public school across town, a college-prep high where other go-getting grandchildren of early-twentieth-century immigrants went—Italians, Jews like me, a handful of Irish, maybe your random WASP. Most of the WASPs had fled the East Side for places like Barrington and Bristol when the Jews started to make money and move in.
I had learned about the WASP aversion to Jews firsthand, having spent days of my childhood summers with my family and their friends at the cabanas on Canonchet Beach in Narragansett Pier, aware from an early age that the much nicer Dunes Club down the beach did not accept Jews as members. I don’t know about Italians. And blacks? Forget it. Same with the country clubs. Not that my family had the money even for the fancy Jewish country club to which their friends belonged.
And now, here I was at the regular Tuesday morning convocation, where all eight hundred Pembrokers were made to gather. Before me was a sea of blonde hair, more blonde hair than I had ever seen in my life or imagined. Dunes Club girls. Who had all gone to private girls’ schools, like my rich Jewish girlfriends right here in Providence (I did not reserve my envy and resentment solely for WASPy blondes).
I soon found that I could compete with them in the classroom—wel
l, maybe not with the New York Jewish girls who had gone to places like Fieldston and arrived on campus having already read the entire American Literature 101 syllabus—but did they even care about the classroom, other than the fact that there were Brown men there, prospective husbands?
Oh, the social opportunities in those years! The mixers and frat parties and football games and who knew what else? Certainly not me. Not having gone to a private girls’ school, I had never been to a mixer and wasn’t about to start now. It wasn’t exactly a philosophical stance; what most likely kept me away was simple fear and social ineptitude.
To be sure, I had new and eye-opening cultural experiences at Pembroke—my first pork roast and chipped beef on toast, served by fellow Pembrokers in hairnets while I, a summer restaurant and factory worker, sat like a princess. I wasn’t the lowest on the totem pole after all. I eventually had the genuine dorm experience, at Andrews, enjoying the luxury of weekly maid and linen service and sharing a room with three roommates I didn’t much care for (see paragraph above on socially driven girls). After that, I was given a nice single in Metcalf, the serious (to some weird and geeky) girls’ dorm, where I actually made a few good friends.
But for the most part, and much to my parents’ disappointment, I stuck with what I knew, including my townie boyfriend, a handsome Greek-American who was now working as a parking lot attendant in Boston. Also my townie friends, the ones who hadn’t gone off to college somewhere. I spent a lot of off-campus time with a friend who was a telephone operator and had a cool basement apartment across from Prospect Terrace Park. She was the sometime girlfriend of the son of an extremely high-level Mafia chief, a boy I had known since junior high. He had money and motorcycles and jailbird thug friends as bodyguards. We delivered messages from his father to other thugs at a nightclub in Boston’s Combat Zone. We were wined and dined (despite being underage) at a now-defunct steakhouse downtown by staff who fawned over my friend the Mafia prince. It was all impossibly romantic—Valachi had recently testified about the existence of Cosa Nostra, but Mario Puzo’s Godfather was not to be published until 1969, so who even knew about this stuff?
I remained an outsider at Pembroke. And Brown. I wasted four precious years maintaining a social distance, even as I became immersed in my studies—English and American lit with the incredibly handsome Mr. Van Nostrand and the passionate David Krause, and art classes down the hill at RISD. However, when I started writing short stories, which I did sophomore year after a professor identified in me a talent for writing and recommended I apply to John Hawkes’s fiction seminar, my townie life actually paid off. It became my subject. And my stories were pretty good. Good enough to put me at the helm of Brown’s literary magazine, and good enough that when an editor at the New Yorker magazine came up to campus, it was one of my stories that was chosen to be read and discussed by him before students packed into that very same sea-of-blondes Tuesday convocation hall.
And again, much later, those long-ago townie Mafia experiences came in handy when I spent six and a half seasons as a writer and producer on The Sopranos.
I know now how lucky I was to go to Brown—er, Pembroke, I mean. How it helped me to find myself. How it opened doors for me and gave me the wherewithal to venture out into other towns. And as Brown’s stature in the Ivy League and the world has grown, so has mine when people learn I went there. But I always, still, for some reason, tell them I am a townie.
The Dyslexic Brain Kicks Ass
JONATHAN MOONEY
I wasn’t supposed to make it to a place like Brown. I was the dumb kid. I didn’t learn to read until I was twelve years old. I was one of those kids who couldn’t sit still. I spent elementary school chilling out with the janitor in the hallway. Couldn’t keep my mouth shut, so I spent middle school on a first-name basis with Shirley, the receptionist in the principal’s office. And high school? I spent much of it hiding in the bathroom to escape reading out loud with tears streaming down my face. I was diagnosed with dyslexia in fourth grade, dropped out of school for a time in sixth grade, and had a plan for suicide when I was twelve years old. The only thing I was successful at was playing soccer.
I had transferred to Brown from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. I went there only to play soccer. But the universe had a different idea—the fourth game of my sophomore year I broke my leg and ankle, ending my season and possibly any potential career. It was a relief, soon followed by emptiness and confusion, followed by an act of pure will that I still don’t quite understand: I decided to do the one thing I was never supposed to be able to do: school. I took every literature course I could and declared to anyone who would listen that I was transferring to an Ivy League school. And what a dismal Ivy League applicant I made: spelled at a third-grade level, read in the thirteenth percentile, had the attention span of a gnat. I was a mediocre high school student; I had average test scores and a single-minded focus on one subject. They all said no. Brown said yes.
Transfer orientation went down in the basement of Mo-Champ on Pembroke and began with an icebreaker. We were handed a list of anonymous fun facts and our job was to match the facts with other transfer students. I was terrified. Here I was, with the “smart kids,” the kids who sat in the front row, hands raised, the ones who got the gold stars. That wasn’t me. I was the kid in the stupid reading group. In my school the smart and stupid tracks had been thinly veiled. There were the blackbirds, the bluebirds, and then my group, the sparrows. Might as well have named this group after a bird that did not fly: the ostriches. We read Fun with Dick and Jane. The other kids were reading War and Peace, and we all know that reading is what makes you smart. Getting As in a few literature classes at LMU didn’t sew back up where I was split in half. It didn’t help that kid in the hallway feel like he had a place in the classroom. Didn’t help the ostrich feel like he had a mind that mattered.
That first night at Brown, I stood in the corner when the icebreaker began and thought about heading to the bathroom. When I looked up, another student was standing in front of me. I don’t know why he sought me out, standing alone in the back of the room, staring at my Sambas and pulling my white hat down over my eyes, but he did. He had purple hair, bicycle chains around his wrists like bracelets, paint-stained pants, and the elongated consonants of Hanover, New Hampshire.
“My name’s Dave,” he said as he ran his finger down the list of fun facts. “I got it,” he said. “Circus performer.”
I didn’t get the joke and said very seriously, “No, I played Division One soccer.”
“No way!” he shouted. “Don’t buy that for a second.”
“You?” I said.
“Investment banker,” he deadpanned. “Now,” he said, waving his hands wildly, “tell me something else.”
I thought about my mom. She had walked me to my dorm room to say good-bye. I didn’t want my mom to leave. I survived school because of my mom. No one messed with Colleen Mooney. She wasn’t a tall woman—five four in high heels on her tiptoes. Not a rich woman. Raised my brother and two sisters on welfare in San Francisco. And she had a high-pitched voice like Mickey Mouse. But mom cursed like a truck driver and if you were a teacher or a principal not doing right by her, you did not want cursing Mickey Mouse in your office. But that is where she was. Every day. I said good-bye to my mom on the stairs of Pembroke, on the seal that supposedly put a curse on you if you stood on it. My mom was always a woman of few nonprofane words. She told me she was proud of me. That nothing was wrong with me. Then she left.
I told Dave that I had not learned to read until I was twelve years old. He stopped moving. “Now, that’s cool,” he said.
“Cool?”
“Yeah. Are you kidding? The dyslexic brain kicks ass.”
Then he told me his story: high school dropout; struggled with substance abuse; graduated from a two-year college for students with learning disabilities and attention deficit disorder. Dave was the first of many truly singular people I met at Brown. I also met Becky, my
Patrick Ewing–adoring, John Starks–worshipping, West African–dancing, fluent–in–American Sign Language–and–Spanish, tough–little–New Yorker future wife. People like Dave and Becky are exceptional, not in the trite way that word is most often used—as a proxy for successful or accomplished. No, they were two of the many rare breeds of mutants who populated Brown, people whose interests and passions radiated in diverging and overlapping concentric circles that couldn’t be squared. They, and I, found a home at Brown. I had felt like a freak my whole life. But at Brown, difference was the norm.
It is common to tell kids that they are all special snowflakes, then in the same breath tell them to sit their special-snowflake asses down and learn the same way as everyone else. Not at Brown. I did over half my education as independent study. Took time off. Wrote a book. Developed a nonprofit. Went to a naked party and wrote about it for a literary theory class. At Brown, I wasn’t the dumb kid anymore. I learned that I never was.
Neat-Hairs
ARIEL SABAR
I first spotted her in the slop line at Verney-Woolley. We were on opposite sides of the buffet. She wore a white apron and a hairnet, ladling turkey tetrazzini onto the passing cafeteria trays. I wore Bermudas and a vintage Hang Ten surf shirt, and I lingered, hoping to catch her eye as she flipped the glop du jour onto my plate.
It wasn’t just the Marcia Brady hair—long, sandy blonde, parted in the middle—or the wide-spaced gold-green eyes. There was also an air of either hauteur or indifference. If you want to judge me because I look like a slob in this grease-stained kitchen uniform, go ahead, she seemed to be saying. Because, you know what, I am a bit of a slob.
The Brown Reader Page 16
