Matters of Honor (4 page)

W
HETHER
H
ENRY WAS A
J
EW
was a question Archie and I had discussed more than once without reaching a definite conclusion. Archie agreed with me that the family’s having been in Poland during the war was a reason to suppose that he wasn’t. We both believed that the Germans had killed all Polish Jews. The name White gave no clue, because it must have been changed. But changed from what? We also agreed that Henry didn’t look like a Jew. His address in Brooklyn pointed the other way. Brooklyn, Archie said, was where all the New York Jews lived. That left the fact that Henry was no friendlier with the three known Jews in our dormitory than with anyone else. According to Archie, that meant nothing. Or one could take it as a sign that Henry wanted to pass. At the time that seemed to me a reasonable conclusion. However, now that Henry had told me that he was a Jew I couldn’t imagine that in similar circumstances he would be less forthright with Archie. Didn’t that blow out of the water the theory that he was trying to pass? It did occur to me that Henry had created the occasion for this particular confession. Looked at in a certain way, it was a piece of stagecraft. He had certainly avoided saying that he was Jewish when Archie grilled him about his background that day we met. He had stopped short of a lie, but what had his intention been?

The only Jew I had known for a long time and thought I knew well was our dentist in Pittsfield, a nice man who had been taking care of my teeth since my first cavity and who had never hurt or scared me. He had a big, richly stocked aquarium in his office, so cleverly placed that you could watch the fish while he drilled, and I think that at one point I was so interested in them that I looked forward to my appointments. I was very much aware of the Jewish family that owned the big Pittsfield department store. Two of the grandchildren, both a couple of grades behind me, had gone to the same country day school as I in Lenox. My parents didn’t know their parents or grandparents, probably because they didn’t belong to the country club. But even if they had belonged, my mother and father would have kept a respectful distance from them, as they normally would in the case of a much richer or grander member of the club with whom they didn’t have a personal connection. It would have been up to the Kaufmanns to make the first move. There were Jewish musicians in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which performed in the summer at Tanglewood, but I had not had an opportunity to meet any of them. We had no Jewish neighbors. To my knowledge, there weren’t any Jews working at the bank. The position of Jews at my boarding school was, by contrast, well established. There were several New York Jews—elegant and rich—among the students, the most notable being the sons of a family of bankers. Members of that family had been coming to the school since the 1920s, and both the infirmary and the science building bore the family name. As it happened, there was no von Stein in my form, which was probably the reason that out of my form I alone made it to Harvard. According to school legend, every von Stein had a guaranteed berth.

For more than a year, the core of my general information about Jews and their problems had come from the film
Gentleman’s Agreement.
My mother, who never missed a movie with Gregory Peck, took me to see it in Pittsfield during a school break. My father never went. The next day I borrowed from Womrath’s the novel on which the movie was based. The way Jews were treated, the cowardice of practically everyone whom the Gregory Peck character confronted once he began telling people that he was a Jew, it all disgusted me. For reasons unrelated to Jews, I was envious of Gregory Peck, because his simple, affectionate, and courageous mother in the film was exactly the kind of mother I would have liked, and I was envious of his little son, because I wished I had a father like Gregory Peck. I asked my mother whether that was really how Jews were treated. She said she had no personal experience with Jews. Then, during the second semester of my last year at school, in the modern history course, we took up the Germans’ slaughter of Jews during the war. The history master, Mr. Ticknor, brought to the classroom a book of photographs taken by American soldiers who had liberated concentration camps, as well as photographs taken by German soldiers in the Warsaw Ghetto and elsewhere in Poland and Russia. This can’t have been the first inkling I had of these matters. But what I had read in magazines, or heard in snatches of conversations, apparently had not sunk in. After Mr. Ticknor’s course I had to agree with him that mistreatment of American Jews by Americans was a disgrace. As he saw it, Germans had been able to set about exterminating Jews in Europe only because neither they nor the local populations thought Jews were human. It followed that we all had to fight against anti-Semitism. On an impulse unusual in our relations, during a weekend I was spending at home I told my parents about Mr. Ticknor and his views. It was before the Easter vacation, and therefore before my interview with Mr. Hibble. They didn’t say Mr. Ticknor was wrong. I wasn’t even sure that they were paying attention. However, on my next visit, while my father and I were driving to the club, he observed apropos of nothing that there was no way you could make people love one another. Many people plain didn’t like Jews and didn’t want them around. Even if they were well behaved and respectable. The same went for Negroes and Catholics, especially Irish and Italian Catholics. For instance, Gummy—the nickname of the club’s president, Mr. Gifford Upton Morris—had sworn that he would never allow a Jew to set foot in the club. Of course, no Jew worthy of being invited to the club would want to offend by his presence the president and not a few of the members. For that matter, my father continued, he didn’t think a Jew could get a job at the bank or a management position at the General Electric plant in Pittsfield, and certainly not at the big paper mill in Dalton. I asked whether he thought that was fair. He shrugged and pointed out that violence—Germans killing Jews or Southerners lynching Negroes—was one thing, but being allowed to choose with whom you played golf or worked was another. Besides, he added, there are lots of Jews who hire only Jews and prefer to do business with their own kind. In reply, I too shrugged. There was no use arguing with my parents about anything serious. Their minds were on other things. And much as I would have liked to tell him he was full of it, there was something to be said for his views, especially if the Jew was obnoxious. It seemed that many were. Henry was anything but. If I could get past the problem of whether I could in good conscience suggest that he visit me in Lenox when I knew that his presence wouldn’t be universally welcomed if the truth were revealed, and if I could be sure that my parents weren’t going to have a big row while he was there, it would be a fine project to bring him to the club and introduce him to Gummy. Henry didn’t play tennis, but he could hang around the pool, provided he had suitable swimming trunks. Someone at school had told me that Jews wore bathing suits that were like jockey shorts to show off their dicks and balls.

So far as Henry’s wanting to pass was concerned, although he had come clean with me, I thought that probably he preferred to have other people think he was a Gentile. That was his business. I didn’t admire the impulse but certainly wouldn’t hold it against him. I doubted that Archie would either. How Henry would manage it, ducking answers about his accent and his past without some serious lies, was another matter, but that too was his business. It occurred to me in this connection that I was doing a bit of passing myself. What else was it when I let people take me for my parents’ son, with all the advantages that being a Standish instead of a Nowak or a Mahoney entailed? True, the situations were different. Standish was my name, and I had no other. Still, to claim that Henry and I were comrades in arms wasn’t much of a stretch.

It was probably a week later, over dinner at the Freshman Union, that we returned to what Henry called his Jewism. We had been able to find a table for two, and I felt that we could talk freely about these very personal matters. Enough so for me to ask him whether his parents were right. Was he trying to get away from being a Jew?

There is no such thing, he answered. You are born a Jew and you die a Jew. Hitler proved it.

I said that wasn’t true. Jews converted—I cited the example of the New York Jews at my school, who I believed had converted. Anyway, they came to chapel. Or perhaps it was their parents or grandparents who had converted.

You see—he laughed—they might as well not have bothered. You think they’re Jews anyway.

He wasn’t wrong. I told him that there was a less direct approach. To be precise, right after we met him, Archie and I had wondered whether he was trying to pass. Henry got red in the face, and I feared that our conversations, and perhaps our friendship, were coming to an end. But he answered me very calmly. It’s a fact, he said, that I derive no benefit from being Jewish, or any pleasure. It almost got my parents and me killed. A fact that doesn’t inspire me to believe in God. It makes me deny him and wish that I weren’t one of the chosen, that I hadn’t been thrust at birth into this monstrous trap. All the same, so long as there are people who care whether I am a Jew pretending to be a Gentile, I have to remain a Jew, even though inside I feel no more Jewish than a smoked ham. If the question is asked, I’m obliged to say that I’m a Jew—unless the consequence is ending up in a concentration camp or dead. I consider it a debt of honor, an odd one for someone like me, who doesn’t believe he owes anything to anybody. Otherwise I’ve no intention of making a show of being Jewish.

I wasn’t sure I understood and must have looked perplexed.

I’ll give you an example, he said. When you, Archie, and I met I didn’t think I had a duty to say, Hello, hello, I’m Henry White, a Jew. Or to wear a yellow star. I did that, in Krakow.

I told him that was really absurd.

Is it really? What would it have taken for you and Archie not to suspect me of trying to pass? If not a yellow star, then a yarmulke or side locks? Should I have a business card that says on it “Jew”? Or Untermensch—that’s German for subhuman. Incidentally, most of the fights I have with my parents now are about what I’m doing to show that I am a Jew. When I told them about you and Archie, the first thing my mother asked was, Why don’t you have Jewish roommates? I said that I hadn’t picked you; it just happened. That didn’t satisfy her. She said, You could have asked to room with someone Jewish. Sure, I replied, but I didn’t, and why should I? I don’t think you want to hear the response to that crack. Her next line of attack was: Do they know you are Jewish? I said I wasn’t sure, but if they’re intelligent enough to be at Harvard they should be able to figure it out, and if they can’t, all they have to do is ask me. You want to hear my mother’s reply? She said that maybe they’re too polite. That really broke me up and I reminded her that you, and maybe Archie as well, have spoken on the telephone with her and my father many times. Does she think that having heard them you have concluded we had come over on the
Mayflower
? Then, I confess, I turned cruel. I said that if she and my father had wanted to leave no doubt that we were Jews, they shouldn’t have changed our name. If it were still Weiss, you’d have to be a total moron to think we weren’t Jews. Yes, she and Father changed our name after we came here, as quickly as they could. The official reason is that White is an accurate English translation, and everybody knows how to spell it. That’s obvious nonsense; there is nothing unusual about Weiss, certainly not in New York. But to answer your interesting question, no, I’m not trying to pass, but I know that some people don’t immediately think that I’m Jewish, and I do nothing to disabuse them. Part of it is my name; part of it is that I don’t look especially Jewish. But the false impression usually doesn’t last long. Because of my accent, mostly they ask where I come from, as Archie did. When I say I’m from Poland, and that I was there during the war, those who have an idea of what went on there may well say to themselves, He can’t be Jewish; otherwise, he’d be dead. He must be a regular Catholic Pole who changed his name from something like Wilczuk, and they leave it at that. That’s when I wish I were called Weiss or, better yet, Cohen or Levin. There would be no such confusion. People couldn’t say I was trying to pull the wool over their eyes. The subject wouldn’t have to be discussed. But the people who get fooled are a minority. Either they aren’t curious or they don’t want to seem nosy. A regular American will follow up with something along the line of: How did you survive? Then the fat is in the fire. In case you’re interested, I knew I wasn’t fooling you and Archie, and I wasn’t trying. That you thought I was is another matter. It hurts. But I don’t blame you.

He looked downcast. It’s all right, Henry, I told him. There is no problem between you and me. Or between you and Archie. I’m sure of that.

He brightened at that, and we talked about courses and movies until the end of the meal and as we walked through the Yard to the dormitory. Once we were in our living room, however, he said he wanted to continue the conversation we had begun.

You’ve let the genie out of the bottle, he told me. You might as well know, he continued, that my mother isn’t only interested in whether you or Archie or anyone else I know realizes that I’m a Jew, and, if so, how they found out. Keeping me from leaving home—literally or metaphorically—is a more complicated undertaking. You see, they’re good parents in their own way. They want me to have a roof over my head and nice clothes, provided my mother picks them. And, of course, an excellent education. They’re willing to make financial sacrifices for that, but so far none has been needed. High school was free, and I have a scholarship here. Naturally they want me to succeed, and they want me to have all the right opportunities. But there is a limit. I’m not supposed to fly too high. Dickens might have said I mustn’t try to rise above my station. That’s a big unarticulated anxiety. Partly it’s prudence. We lost everything in the war, and they don’t want me to crash. They’re always worried about money, even now that my father is doing well in business. I understand that. The other part is the fear that if I fly high and remain up there in the higher sphere, that too will tempt me to leave them. So, the other big issue about you and Archie is whether you’re rich. If you are, maybe I shouldn’t be spending so much time with you, and maybe you shouldn’t be my best friends. You might give me big ideas and teach me bad habits. I’ve told them that I don’t think an army colonel makes as much as my father, and that you don’t strike me as rich, though I’m only guessing. Just the same, you might as well know it: in White family shorthand the two of you are Henry’s rich Gentile friends.