636
PARTISAN REVIEW
thrown against front doors of Emerson Junior and Lakewood High School. In
the samples left in my locker, in case I had missed them, I found cartoons of
hook-nosed exploiters. I learned that President "Rosenfeld" was a member of
the Tribe, along with a diverse crew which included Jack Benny, Judas, and
a strange creature called Lilith who stole the strength of men's loins while
they slept. Of these, the only one I knew personally was Lilith.
An exchange program between German and American schools
returned a classmate who spoke to an assembly about his year in
Heidelberg: "I didn't see any Jew persecution. But I didn't have to see any
Jews, either."
There was laughter and people turned around to look at me.
The principal of the school, when he finished , thanked the boy for
reporting so well on a broadening experience which contributed to bring
about better understanding of a nation which was often unjustly attacked in
the controlled American press.
I suppose I had two choices in dealing with all this. One was the
reaction I met later: The Jews who crossed Euclid Avenue to become
Unitarian, changed their names, hid from the storm. The other was defiance.
I wanted to discover the meaning of this secret power with which I was
credited and blamed for. I realized it was more than the bellying rabbi had
explained, more than the fights about "Christ-killer," the herring can through
the window, the sweating boy next door, the girls greedy in the afternoon
after school, the mysteries of being different in a different way from my
friends among the other oddballs of Lakewood High School.
It was a rickety matter to decide it merely wasn't a disadvantage to be
aJew. That wasn't enough. I found something as unreal and fantastic as a
travelling carnival in the fights with boys I didn't even know, the kisses from
girls who wouldn 't let me come to their parties. Too many negative
enticements around here. Yet I liked my friends. I liked the kisses, too.
Perhaps the name "Gold ," my father and mother speaking with their
accents-nobody else in Lakewood seemed to have an accent-came together
to make a disadvantage which I liked.
There was a third option which I wasn't yet ready to discover.
It
was
in the air I breathed, the life I lived at those ages, in that time and place.
It
would have been to make a life as aJew on grounds more solid than exotic
defiance.
I found a book to love even more than I adored the books of Thomas
Wolf. "Oh lost and by the wind-grieved ghost, return." (Lovable stuff for a
seventeen-year-old) and James Branch Cabell (elegant fencing among
undefined yearnings in cloud-cuckoo land, or maybe Virginia). The book was
a collaborative series of novels by Paul Eldredge, a professor of French at
