marked out in chapters of a book. Succoth, the Jewish Thanksgiving, was a harvest festival, a deeply exotic idea to kids who knew food only from supermarkets. Purim commemorated the revenge of integrity. Yom Kippur disturbed me (I knew I should atone for something but wasn’t sure what), but Pesach was special: the food (Olga visited with matzoh balls and latkes), the slouching at the table, the search for the afikomen, Elijah’s cup. Most of all, it was the story that pulled me in: that epic of liberation, with the oppressed triumphing over their oppressors, right over might. It was an intoxicating narrative, as exciting and satisfying as the food. People should be careful when they teach this stuff to kids. It sinks in deeper than they realize. It can even turn someone against the land promised them in the Pesach story.
One day Dad took me for an outing in Manhattan. As I had become a keen camper, we made a pilgrimage to Abercrombie and Fitch to buy a hunting knife which I had seen in a catalogue and on which I had set my heart. Afterwards, we went for a meal at Ratners, the legendary Jewish restaurant in the Lower East Side. The hunting knife in its leather sheath sat on the table, much to the dismay of the elderly Jewish waiter. “For cutting the leaves of a book a Jewish boy uses a knife . . .” he said. My dad was delighted by the episode, but I felt tongue-tied and ashamed.
In the summer of 1965, I persuaded my parents to send me, along with two others from our neighborhood, to a Boy Scout camp. We slept in saggy, gray-green tents pitched in a small clearing in a forest in the Catskills. The tents provided minimal protection from the wind and rain and even less from the mosquitoes, which feasted on our tender twelve-year-old flesh. We were soon covered in bites, which we scratched, and which turned to scabs. After a while, we gave up battling the mosquitoes and took to watching them land on our bare arms or legs, insert their needles into our skin, then fill their tiny bulbous bodies with our red blood.
The food was terrible and there wasn’t much of it. When we were taken on a hike to a mountaintop with a long-range view, we failed to carry enough water with us, and at the summit we found ourselves utterly parched. Desperate for moisture, we scoured the brush for blueberries, stuffing any we could find in our dry mouths. It became a kind of delirium, with all of us giggling and showing each other our blue-stained teeth.
Like nearly all the members of our local Scout troop, the three of us were Jews. However, it didn’t even dawn on me for several days that we were the only ones in the camp, until a kid named Jimmy, a lanky kid with stooped shoulders and a loud voice, walked up to me, looked into my face with a broad grin, and said: “Hey, you’re a kike, aren’t you?”
“I’m Jewish.”
“Yeah, you know how I could tell?”
I stared back at him blankly, my mind frozen.
“’Cause your shoe’s untied!”
Without thinking, I looked down. It was true. My shoe was untied. Again, without thinking, I bent down to tie it. The laughter erupted and I felt something deeply unpleasant rush through me, which later I came to understand as the blood of shame and embarrassment and impotence. The other kids at the camp were mostly Catholic, Irish and Italian, and though they read the same comic books as us, they all seemed tougher, more streetwise, more adept at sarcasm and insult. I had been intimidated by them even before they began the Jew-baiting.
When one of us stumbled or dropped something or made any kind of clumsy error we were met by howls of “Being Jewish again?” or “That’s a Jew thing to do” or “What a Jew!” or “Now I know you’re a real Jew.” Then there were the jokes. “Hey, Mike, you know why Jews have big noses?” (‘cause the air is free) or “What’s the difference between a pizza and a Jew?” (a pizza doesn’t scream when you put it in the oven).
We already knew that anti-semitism existed, but that knowledge had come from lessons, from books, from stories told of a distant world. We knew anti-semitism as something that had been triumphed over. But now, like EVM in the army, we discovered that there was a world out there where Jews were not the norm, where some people hated us for no reason at all. I was confident that the repartee of my fellow Scouts was ignorant and idiotic, that I was superior to them for not thinking or talking the way they did. Yet I also felt inferior for not being able to stop the abuse, for not being able to stand up for myself in terms they would understand. There was no doubt in my mind that people who judged others by their race or religion were plain wrong, and especially wrong about the Jews. My fear was that they might be right about me: that I was a klutz, that I was impractical, that I was clumsy, weak, and hesitant. Though I never for a moment accepted that Jews were worthy objects of derision, I certainly felt that I was.
It was worse for the one black kid in the camp. Mornings often began with the cry, “What’s for breakfast? Fried nigger on toast!” met with hilarity on the part of some and uneasy silence among others. I desperately wanted to be accepted by these kids but I also wanted to leave, to walk away from the whole dismaying experience. There was a stream near the camp. I caught a tiny fish and cooked it for myself, feeling pleased with the whole process until Jimmy spotted me and said, “Hey, that’s not kosher, you’re not supposed to eat that.” For a moment I feared that he might be right, but I wolfed down the fish defiantly.
Looking back, I wonder how much of the Jew-baiting was just Jimmy, who had probably picked up the habit from his family and wanted to show off with it. I wonder how much the others just followed his lead, how much they had already been exposed to, how much they really embraced. I think most joined in for the obvious reason: Jews were being picked on and it was a relief to them that they weren’t Jews.
Mostly we suffered in what we hoped was a dignified and superior silence. Sometimes we answered haughtily, “You sound just like Hitler,” or “That’s what Hitler said,” certain that the Nazi reference would trump them. Sometimes we tried another tack. “Jonas Salk was a Jew, he cured polio.” “Yeah, and Einstein. . . Jerry Lewis . . . Tony Curtis . . .” We threw the names back at them, maintaining a tone of reason, while grizzling under their utter and seemingly undentable unreasonableness.
In any case we were outnumbered. And they also enjoyed the significant advantage of being familiar with a greater variety of obscenities and sexual references than we were. Our resort to rational argument only made them more scornful of us. Nonetheless, we still joined with them in the daily activities, worked on projects and played games together, and for a time we really would be just a bunch of boys interacting without distinction. Until the Jew-baiting started again, leaving the three of us sulky and isolated.
I don’t know at what point I resolved to appeal to a superior authority. The name-calling seemed to have been going on for an eternity (it couldn’t have been more than two weeks). The scoutmaster was himself no more than twenty. He supervised us with good humor and with a light touch goaded us into doing things we didn’t want to do. He often asked me about the books I was reading, and it was during one of these chats that I told him some of the other boys were criticizing us for being Jews and it wasn’t fair.
I remember the sudden change in his expression. His neck went rigid and there was a grave look in his eyes. “We’ll see about that,” he muttered. We watched as he took Jimmy and some of the others aside and gave them a stern lecture. Somehow, I knew he was telling them about the Jews, about the holocaust. The boys looked somber, discomfited. After that, the teasing stopped. But the mosquitoes didn’t. My parents were appalled at the state they found me in when they came to visit, and with my ready assent, they took me home, though the camp season had several more weeks to run.
For several years I took twice-weekly Hebrew lessons in preparation for my bar mitzvah. Then came a year of lavish celebrations, services, dinners, dances in marquees on suburban lawns and ballrooms in midtown hotels. Mountains of gifts. Checks or bonds or little stakes in IBM or ITT. Compared to some, my own bar mitzvah was a low-key affair; my mother disapproved of the conspicuous display made by some of
