MORRIS DICKSTEIN
843
never mentioned at the yeshiva- for his English was not even rudi–
mentary. Even in Europe he would have been the epitome of the un–
worldly scholar, and here he was probably raising six small children
on a tiny salary. Once he looked up from his text and asked me
gruffly why I wasn't paying attention. Instead of answering in Yid–
dish I said, "Because it's spring, tra-la, and the birds are singing."
He understood hardly a word, but the rollicking laughter from the
class left him with a stricken look, and the brazen reply became a
legend that followed me to graduation and beyond.
And graduate I did, despite three years of iron resistance to
learning a single additional page of Talmud. Day after day I kept up
a stony wall of inner emigration while remaining the blue-eyed
favorite of my regular teachers. The links that bound me to Judaism
must still have been strong. Not only did I inexplicably remain at a
school where I was wasting half my day in passive rebellion, but
when I arrived at college this erstwhile radical looked like some kind
of religious throwback. I still kept kosher; I fell in at first with other
kids from vaguely religious backgrounds; and each weekend I went
back to my parents' synagogue to read the Torah, a skill I had per–
fected for my own bar mitzvah.
What I believed at that point I can scarcely fathom, but Ju–
daism remained the anchor of my life even in opposition. I may have
been an atheist but I was
ajewish
atheist, even a religious one. One
of my freshman roommates was a Catholic kid from Buffalo, as
eager and innocent as they come. While I donned my yarmulka to
rehearse for the weekend performance, he sat at his desk on the other
side of the room under a huge crucifix. We understood each other
perfectly. Our two other roommates, bleached-out jews, thought us
both a little strange.
For me the double regimen of life at home and life in school
couldn't last. The split I had endured easily enough in high school
became a chasm. In the spring of my freshman year, as I headed
back home one Friday afternoon, I was overtaken by panic. My
heart was racing, my breathing grew shallow, and I became con–
vinced that I would never get off the train alive. Somehow I stum–
bled home, and the family doctor gave me some tranquilizers, but in
the weeks that followed the same kind of anxiety would invade me
each time I began to read the Torah.
Some obscure conflict was tearing me apart and the cracks
were beginning
to
show. This time the doctor sternly ordered me to
"take it easy." This was just the license I needed to do as I pleased,
