DAVID RIESMAN
585
brought home to me was my mother saying, "We German-Jews have lost
whatever creativity we had at an earlier time." The Eastern European
Jews were the successful ones who were taking over the businesses that
had once been founded by the German-Jews.
On my mother's side, I remember my great-grandmother living on
Spring Garden Street until 1929 with a horse and carriage. She had ten
children; survived her husband by sixty-five years, and lived to be one
hundred and four. Her family had had silk mills. But my mother still said,
"The Russian-Jews," as she called the great majority of Jews, "have the
energy we've lost. We're pallid. We're run out." Her models - foci -
were Christian. She brought Shirley Watkins, a young novelist, to give
Bible lessons to my brother and sister and me. We sang Christmas carols;
we celebrated Christmas. We had Easter eggs.
You know, Friedrich, who was from Germany, did something very
important for me. He pointed out to me that I was anti-Semitic. And he
was right. A non-Jewish German who had thrown his full weight against
the Nazis would of course be alert to that. He noticed that in my senior
year, which is when I met him at Harvard, I had no Jewish associates.
The "girls," like my future wife Evelyn, who went to the dances I at–
tended, the debutante parties and so on, weren't Jewish. Friedrich could
see I wasn't associating with any of the Jewish students. There were Jews
in my class; they were pre-meds; they were studious. And I didn't know
any of them. In a way , here again I was sharing the parental attitude I de–
scribed so dramatically as an adult.
DB:
So eventually with the help of Friedrich and Fromm you became
more aware of what was going on, and also stood your ground: ''I'm not
going to hang onto any orthodoxy." Even coming out against the ROTC
at Harvard, I suppose, was another example.
DR:
Well, not that - after all I went to a Friends school and I'd gone to
Friends Meetings weekly for six years. So if you ask about my religion,
I'd say, I accepted the pacifist outlook; I was a pacifist. Not only did I
protest the ROTC, but I protested the decorations at Widener Library of
only the Americans in the First World War. Very early I had become
critical of the First World War and our entry into it. One of the themes
that runs through my thinking - I've illustrated it about the Civil War
already - is sometimes called counter-cyclical, counter-factual. I was
thinking of how if Woodrow Wilson had not been prepared to enter the
First World War, he could have brokered a peace between Germany and
France in 1917. The French were worn out, they were having mutinies;
the German Social Democrats were voting against war credits. And we
would've had neither Nazism nor Stalinism....
