I never seemed to be right. Maybe I never shall be right, but here is where our paths separate. My family never thought well of me, I was different. My mother alone has faith, and when you coldly tell me you think I am doomed to failure you belong to that pack that has ever snarled at me and whom I hate since I can first remember.
Olga complains that in over a year of promises he has shown her “nothing material”—presumably in the way of making a living and supporting a family. “Can’t you fathom my soul that maybe never will see anything material on this earth?” he replies, then rues the absence of “a counterpart of femininity that could mate with my own temperament and see the sky when I see the sky.” The ostensible purpose of the letter is to assuage Olga, to repair a breach between them, but its main thrust is self-justification. EVM mingles promises and threats, emollience and defiance.
I was and still am willing to drop my cloak of poetic aspirations towards that which may be aesthetic and non-productive and turn down your path. Don’t you see that sacrifice I was willing to make for you? And yet you call me selfish . . . Olga don’t you realize that you and I have not lost each other because there is no money but because we can’t agree? A saint couldn’t stand the constant bickering I have had to and the Lord knows I am no saint! I undertook law as a profession and I think I will do well in it, supplemented by such writing as I shall begin when I am better equipped. I cannot work for another. Nothing can make me . . . Other people! Other people be damned. Life is but a spark that blows out when least we expect it to. Life must be enjoyed. Not that I crave social activity, merely freedom of thought. This is my ultimatum.
The two of them ignored their better instincts and in January 1925, at the West End Synagogue in Manhattan, they solemnized “in conformity with the laws of the State of New York and the rites of the Jewish faith” what my mother described as “a marriage made in hell.” Is it really that hard to reconcile the streetwise Tammany hotshot with the moody aspirant poet? They were both graspings at something EVM wanted to be, needed to be, could not be, at least not completely. Likewise his marriage to Olga. What drove him to ignore all the obvious objections, the predetermined failure of the enterprise, was his need for what she represented: normalcy, convention, a firmer place in New York’s ethnic mosaic. Olga was a respectable young woman from a respectable and unmistakably Jewish family. In marriage to her, EVM sought release from that sense of never fitting in that had haunted his youth.
Soon after their marriage EVM, now twenty-five years old, began his long and singularly unsuccessful career in private legal practice. The young couple moved to the Bronx, where EVM joined the local Democratic Party, which was run then—as it was for another twenty-five years—by Ed Flynn, the Boss of the Bronx, who became the national chairman of the Democratic Party and a confidant of Roosevelt. For EVM, Flynn became a byword for the hypocrisy of organized politics, but also an alter ego, one of those larger-than-life public figures against whom EVM compulsively measured himself. In the Bronx, he later recalled, “Everybody and his cousin gets a letter. They usually read like . . . ‘Dear Vince: Bearer is an extremely intelligent, etc. see what you can do for him.’ Signed ‘Ed Flynn’ . . . But there is a code in the initials which means ‘be nice—but no job’ or ‘this guy has something on us—put him to work.’”
The only note pertaining to his life in the second half of the twenties is a typewritten jotting made years later, referring to a particular night in August 1927:
I remember walking up the Grand Concourse. I was on my way to a well-known social-political clubhouse. When I arrived the place was crowded, especially the bar . . . Well, you know the spirit of camaraderie that makes for good bar fellows. There he was leaning against the bar, slightly tipsy.
“C’mon fellers,” he bellows. “Have a drink on me—in five minutes they’ll blast those lousy wop bastards’ souls to hell!”
Factually he was partly right. At precisely eleven that night, Sacco and Vanzetti were due to go to the chair.*
That’s why I had been walking around. That’s how I came to be at the club—couldn’t sleep . . . I refused to drink with him. He became abusive. I told him off—and plenty. Everybody was in on it. I sobered that barfly up that night. I guess I was pretty well labelled, socially and politically, thereafter.
But it took him another ten years to make his formal break with the Democratic Party.
* Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian-born American anarchists convicted and sentenced to death for murder in 1920. The trial was conducted amid anti-radical and anti-immigrant hysteria, and was widely considered a miscarriage of justice. An international campaign in their defense, including the high-profile advocacy of future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, failed to halt their execution.
3
An Intimate Accusation
The first person to call me a self-hating Jew was my father. It was in the autumn of 1967. Dad was thirty-nine, a successful businessman who was also, along with my mother, active in the civil rights and anti-war movements. I was the oldest of his five children and had already, at age fourteen, intoxicated by the ideals of justice and equality, begun my career as a foot soldier of the left. It was not only the first time I had been called a self-hating Jew, it was the first time the phrase, the idea, entered my consciousness, and it was a shock.
As a young man, against the family grain, my father had taken an interest in social and especially racial justice, and at college he was drawn to the Communist Party, which is how John Marqusee ended up with Janet Morand, Ed and Olga’s daughter, the product of a very different strand of the New York Jewish tapestry. This was in the heyday of anti-Communist hysteria, of which my parents were first victims, then accomplices. After giving a speech against the Korean War at a student conference in Prague in 1950, dad was denounced as a traitor. His passport was seized. His father told the press that if his son had said such things, he was no son of his. It was in this period, I think, that he came to rely implicitly on my mother, the girlfriend who had stood stubbornly by his side when his life seemed most precarious.
They were married in 1952 and a year later I was born. Shortly after that, the FBI came knocking on the door. After months of pressure, from his own family as much as from the repressive organs of the state, my father, with my mother by his side, just as before, reached a deal and agreed to name names. “To this day we regret the mutual decision we made,” my mother wrote. “It has been a source of incredible pain and shame.” When my father, forty-five years after the event, lay dying, sapped by chronic pain and humiliating dependence, he went over it yet again, as he had with me many times. “I fucked it up,” he moaned. The note of helplessness went right through me. There was no absolution anyone could give him. All the other contributions he’d made seemed outweighed by this ineradicable betrayal.
In the early 1960s, somehow having a wife and five kids, a big suburban home, a blossoming career as a real estate developer, was not enough, and he and my mother both threw themselves into the struggle in the American South, raising money, organizing meetings, sheltering young activists, supporting boycotts and pickets. In 1964 my dad went to Mississippi to deliver supplies to the beleaguered grassroots movement. It was a frightening time: they were now killing whites as well as blacks. Years later I learned that my mother was furious with my father over this adventure. She told him he was trying to compensate for his earlier sin, that he had no right to put his life at risk, to put this need for redemption above his obligation to his children. But in my eyes, the Mississippi visit, followed up by his participation in the Selma march a year later, made my father a hero, along with the other heroes of the movement, who for me in those days included everyone
