Herself (7 page)

Mail does come, from all sides. When addressed to the magazine, it is answered by them, copies of both being forwarded to me. In accordance with their habit of checking any possible usage with existent authorities, they have countered one correspondent who has protested my use of “race” (as applied to Jews of course), with a citation on that word from B’nai Brith, which has O.K.’d my use of it. Letters addressed to me care of the magazine are sent on for my reply. I answer them all, as I will all correspondence from then on. (Even though you believe, as I do, that the best works of imaginative literature are not primarily or a priori controversial, if you also believe that the pen is a power, you cannot refuse to deal at least once with any response it evokes. Up to a point, and addressed to whatever grain of sense.) Still I am grateful for that editor’s warning, otherwise the bundles of hate that keep arriving would really throw me.

A Rabbi Silver of Cleveland—
The
Rabbi Silver, as I am told by friends closer to actively Jewish circles—writes a diatribe in his newspaper. I begin to see that the anger, whether it is illiterate, orthodox, written under a university letterhead or scrawled on an obscene postcard, is all covertly the same. Whether it is felt that I have criticized Jews’ life-habits, or have even collaborated with the Gentiles by suggesting that
special
Jewish habit exists—I have in each case touched on the same self-hatred and secret fears; I have dared to imply that Jews are not impeccable. (Like art.) And it is all the worse, all the harder to get at, because I have done it under the guise of art.

I understood their anger well enough, also that it goes deeper than anti-Faganism (Jewish villains in literature, movies, et al.). Goes below even the holy feeding of many Jews (more anti-Christian than moderates ever admit) that “now of all times”—after a war in part fought for the six million dead—Jews must stand together, and Jewish artists also, by not letting one “anti” iota enter the already half-poisoned air. By never ever even “contributing to it”—as the phrase often went—with any of the unfortunate humor and self-analysis to which centuries of stress had bred us.

I understood what I had done better than they—or earlier. My sin was double. I had expressed some of these tormenting self-doubts which even the most outwardly impregnable Jew—rich, assimilated, cosmopolitan, living an easy life scarcely subject to slurs, much less oppression—may still be born with: Are “we” anything like “they” say we are? Are we defensively proud of being whatever we are, because we have to be? What are we really, underneath the pride? And: Would we really rather not be what we are? Worst, I had explored what must never be admitted to enemy forces—that there are divisions in our ranks. Not only divisions, but hierarchies. I had turned up the underside of our own snobberies.

I was well equipped to, having been born into some of them. My mother (whose portrait I had given in a story called “The Middle Drawer,” as well as in “Old Stock”), had been born in a small, rural town probably not so nearly “on the outskirts of Frankfurt” as she claimed, and of a family at the most respectably petitbourgeois; it pained her to admit that a beloved maternal Grandfather Rosenberg, a refined man had been a cattle dealer. Her pretenses were enlarged by her ever present consciousness that, in spite of heroically perfect English, she was still in her own mind—must it not always be in other people’s?—an emigré. Women like her made the Bovarys, the sighers in all the provinces of Europe; later, as a young woman in New York, just in sight of the city feast, but much too respectable to make anything flamboyant of her beauty, she had waited again to move out of her environment. The maternal aunt and uncle-in-law to whom she had come at sixteen, owners of a thriving bakery company in Yorkville, lived in the brownstone ranks of German Gentiles who seemed to me very like themselves. Most of the women in that family (it was the women who emigrated) did indeed look so “German” that it was hard to believe in their pure Jewish blood, or else not credit the very inheritance of acquired characteristic. In turn, they hated the newer ranks of Galitzianers, Poles, and Russians for their foreignness, and, as I grew to know in my adolescence, for their colorfulness. German Jews of that era hated those others for their presumed peasant vulgarities, which “dragged down” Jews like themselves into the ranks of the “unrefined.” Really, it was that those others had been inexcusably late. Even any who had been university-educated in the old country or were already professionals here—(now and then I brought home their sons and daughters)—were regarded by the German Jews with the suspicious contempt of people who had never had the idea of the university in their blood.

What my German family admired was rich merchants, industrialists, which a few became; they had no taste for learning as far as I knew, and may well have thought this a Galitzianer or Russian talent too. Once, as we sit in my aunt’s bay-window in Seventy-Ninth Street, there draws up at the door the longest limousine I have ever seen, come to take my aunt and uncle for a drive, and I hear my mother’s respectful breath at my elbow “Mr. Littauer.” Foundation-wealth, as years later I discover. But at the moment I wonder only why they should think it so exceedingly nice of him to trot up the front steps himself, instead of sending the chauffeur.

In a pre-World-War-Two Germany, my mother’s half-brother has risen to a townhouse in Berlin with brocaded-walled dining room, and to a white Mercedes of a length identical with Von Hindenburg’s—on occasion standing up in it to bow to a populace which mistakes him for the minister. I learn this from his son, my cousin, who in 1937, fleeing from the Fatherland as the first of a train of refugees to be sponsored by my father, gets off the boat with eighteen pieces of pigskin luggage and a German actress on one arm, and sad memories of a ski-hut in the Dolomites, whose table has soup-bowls hollowed into the wood. I have no reason to disbelieve his legends; none on that side are imaginative, neither the women, with their short straight noses and censorious mouths, nor the men who now keep arriving, thickened and formal with white-flab hands gruesome to receive in the limp, European handshake. None are in the professions; my father has had to find the once-rich young cousin, who has made a bad investment in sugar en route through Holland, a factory job. And none are artists. … It was a good background from which to rebel.

My father, on the other hand, has a towering pride in his Jewishness
and
in his Southernness; how Southern Jews of his era had managed this was a nineteenth-century triumph which has come down to me, diluted. He could read Hebrew, no doubt with a drawl. His sisters, trained in music and needlework at the Academy of St. Joseph, in the Richmond of their day the “only” place to go, see nothing untoward in this nor does he; while Jewish men carried on the heritage of near-learning, they had had to get the education ladies got. They are all comfortable with Gentiles, having had them as close friends and neighbors, but this generation, except for one maverick, would not have married them. Their sons and daughters, including me, will do so entirely.

My father’s education, formally stopped at the age of twelve when he jumped out of a school window and ran away after having been rapped over the knuckles with a ruler by a female teacher, never really ceased. A great reader, he had taught himself a little Latin and small Greek, spoke a French patois the New Orleaners did, from some residence there, and could swap fake German with my mother, in an accent that disturbed her as possibly Yiddish. Years later, in a chance quote of his, I recognize it as merely the way a self-taught Virginian might pronounce Goethe. His literary knowledge was a flossy quicksand; often only the names had stayed on top, but he knew what was to be got from books, and wistfully honored it. His own father had had a drygoods store in Richmond, but whatever schooling my grandfather might have picked up in his trek from Liverpool to the U.S.A., he had likely been but an average merchant. (When I stood in the old Richmond graveyard, closed since 1917, I could mourn this with real envy; half the early department-store names of America seemed to have come out of it. Among these Samstags and Hochschilds, and Hutzlers, only the Calishers had not achieved either a brokerage house or an emporium.)

But even as a child, I doubted that only the Civil War had ruined their fortunes—early sensing a Southern illusion carried North. My father wasn’t a beaver businessman either, although until the twentieth century caught up with him, his own brand of panache and small-town independence had done him well. But his mother, born in Dresden, must have brought a taint of learning with her; her elder brother, Siegmund Bendan, had been visiting professor of philosophy at New York University, and some Ben-Dan before them, a rabbi. When, on graduation, I finally confess to my father what I will never reveal to others later, that I want to be a writer—at the moment a poet—he brings out a notebook of his own poems, never before mentioned, flicked now under my eyes only tangentially, and at his death lost, saying “Looky here. I wanted to. But you can’t make a living out of poetry, m’dear.” Already the family flesh was a little corrupted with art yearnings! It is left to me to make the next transition between bourgeois and bohemian. “I don’t
want
to
make a living
out of it!”

Meanwhile, my mother keeps up a onesided battle-of-the-hierarchies. When she is angry at him, usually over his allegiance to his clan of matriarch mother, overbearing sisters and dependent brothers, she will try to bring them down a peg, in the peasant way. For while education is no longer suspect to her—indeed envied for what it can Americanly do, she shrewdly sees that what they do have of it they exaggerate. Besides, it is more than likely the very thing in them that bleeds the money away; somewhere along the line they have become incapable of caring most about money. Though by now herself an incipient collector, already glimpsing the road between money and art, she still knows, in her own words “what comes first.” Her supreme contempt however, is for their secure Jewishness, on which she cannot shame them, even when she voices her opinion that the family name had probably begun as Kaliski—name-endings à la Russe or Pole being the worst she can think of.

It was possible. Somewhere in the England of my greatgrandfather, Calishers had turned into Curtises, vide my father’s first cousin, Julius Curtis, and even to Campbells (in a notorious case of mistaken identities, in the 1930s, a cousin of ours, Bertie Campbell, spent some years in prison for another man’s offense, until pardoned by the Governor of New York State.) Though like many early synagogues in America, the one in Richmond (Beth Shalome) had had the Sephardic ritual, much of the congregation had been “German.” We had had a few “Spanish” connections, and also, like any English-Jew emigré I met in those days, claimed relationship with a Chief Rabbi of England, in our case through some cousins named Belais, one of whom, Diana, had become president of the Anti-Vivisection Society here. (Had she got it from watching him ritually slaughter chickens?—I always wondered.) But there is incontrovertibly a town named Kalisch which was always being swapped back and forth across the German-Polish border. And I agree with my mother; we probably came from it.

By now however, my father, in his second-generation Southernness, is quite simply a certain kind of smalltown American. In the Richmond of his birth in 1861, everybody either did know everybody else or had the idea that he could—to which were to be added all the levelings of a town first under military siege, then suffering the long effects of it. Jews there were often just people, or if socially mobile, always from their own centers of racial pride. I suppose this is why Southern Jews, up to recent times, have been so remarkably comfortable in themselves. As Jews and as Americans, they had pride-of-birth covered from either side. I saw that my father, in any company—of which, by the time I knew him, he had had a varied lot—could not be patronised. Either Southern comfort, or else what his wife called his “Jewish cheek,” would always take care of it.

What would compromise me with some Jews later, was that I had no recent
shtetl
tradition. The flaccid “reform” Sunday School I attended up through confirmation had no flavor of it, nor did the synagogue itself, where history was making a fast beeline between Judas Maccabeus and the present, on its way to Long Island—on which most of the congregation had their eye. Chosen as a nearby compromise with my mother’s neutralized ambitions, my father shrugged at it and used it only for the high holidays—she never went at all. But would the Spanish-Portuguese synagogue, where he wanted us to go, have fed me more of Mittel-Europa? I doubt it. Until I read of the
shtetl
and met its traces in friends, I had literally never heard about it. The mass of Americans who had its sub-Talmudic humors and pogrom legends very close to the ear, would always find it hard not to believe that I didn’t have it too, and was only hiding it. (Probably I must really know Yiddish and was hiding that too.) After a while, I did learn to hide our length of time in America, finding early that the very span itself—which to me was history and family memory—to them
was
patronage. Finally, it would keep me from being a “Jewish” writer, in the rising American tradition of that ethnic. We had been here too long. And I wanted more.

I wanted to be—what I was. After all, I had been taught to be that. We were merely farther on into the mixed American swirl. It never crossed my mind that my work would have to deal with this. It simply never occurred to me not to. The spoor of the crossbred American, ever in more complex overlay, excited me. I was that mixture myself.

… In the lingo of democracy, America has always been a classless nation. Yet writer after writer, from James to Faulkner, from Dreiser to Fitzgerald, has proclaimed the opposite. A work that does so here, or a writer, is always in danger, at least at first. For Americans, to go back in time is to be a recidivist, a snob, unless, like a Lowell, you are already in the national mind very clearly defined. (Then it is patriotism.) Class difference, when finally admitted in the United States, was thrown to the sociologists. Who have treated it as such a stinkbomb of a subject should be—without humor and without human coloration. So that none of us skunks would smell of the results.