THE ARTIFICIAL JEWBOY
Lyons, Gene
THE ARTIFICIAL JEWBOY Gene Lyons A young man maturing as I did in the Eastern provinces of our country during the Fifties — the period in American life which lasted from 1948 to 1967 — and...
...In very short order, moreover, lessons begun at the pool were continued...
...And except for one proud woman whose son was a "big television producer" and who drove a Cadillac, none of us had any idea where those children were or what they did for the most part...
...To assimilate and understand a culture and its values, always with the consciousness of being an outsider determined not to be swallowed alive by the majority...
...Jews will stick together to defraud the simple Christian...
...I condemn and affirm, say no and say yes, yes and say no...
...From 1948 until 1952 I spent at least two hours of every day in her home...
...Or shall I simply observe that in arriving on the campus of Rutgers for my freshman year I was for the first time in my life confronted with persons far beyond my intellectual depth — almost my comprehension, as it seemed at the time — and who treated my obvious inferiority with patient, if kind, condescension...
...Even more significant in our gentile paradise, "The Colony" drew carloads of Jews without money from the hot streets of Newark, Elizabeth, Irvington, and Union...
...If he is an arrogant, self-seeking schemer, he is also a Real Go Getter...
...It strikes me that most of what I know on the subject is on a level with the kind of tribal super-stitution that created the complementary myth that Catholic girls screwed like mink because they could confess it all, but invariably became pregnant because they forbade the use of rubbers...
...The kind of girl who knew the value of a good body and a fresh face and was not about to be pawed or spurted upon by anybody who couldn't afford her...
...By the time we arrived, however, the membership was aging, many having died or moved away, their children long since departed and the old left to keep up fifty year old houses on wooded plots that they had cleared themselves by hand when the experiment was new...
...So what did I want with ideas...
...Although I have always found my grandfather's curses against the English dated and my father's forced, they are emotions that persist...
...called "the life of the mind" during those years, first appeared to me as an almost exclusively "Jewish" phenomenon...
...So I know exactly what Leslie Fiedler means when he calls Ralph Ellison a "black Jew" and have no doubt that he is correct...
...If such a book were published at all, there is little doubt that it would have been denounced as a clumsy slur, its degree of literary merit an index to its danger, and its appearance brooded upon as presaging some dark turn against the Jews by the American public...
...One of our famous family legends concerns his thrashing of three men, including his older brother Jim, who tried to hold him down and make him drink whiskey...
...We were the recent owners of a 19" Dumont console television set, also our first...
...I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility...
...If I knew that Judy was a Jew, or if she attached any significance to our Catholicism, I cannot recall it...
...Behind all of this lies the suspicion that whatever else Jews are, they are serious people, little given to frivolity and waste...
...One could not look beyond or around it, and one could hardly call into question the credentials of anyone who wished to invoke its horrific shadow, even if one suspected at a level too deep for conscious articulation that the invocation was occasionally self-serving when used as a means of avoiding all criticism by persons no closer to the actual event than my father is to Belfast, and not so close as my grandfather (whose own parents fled it) was to deliberate starvation...
...So what images my boys will use to form themselves I have not yet at hand...
...Whatever he was doing the Old Man would drop it and go...
...For all of the cross-religious carrying on that was conducted in parked cars all over northern New Jersey, during the period we stayed as ignorant about each other as so many stone age savages sharing a rain forest together...
...Sensing a soft touch, many of them came to count on him for tasks my brother and I were too young to do...
...Katz had a stuck door...
...Whatever he thought of the "miserable Jewbastards" when the vapors were on him my father was unfailingly polite and helpful towards our elderly neighbors and became a community favorite...
...What is more the protesters would very likely have been correct...
...Merhaps nothing I have written or probably can write will convince some readers that I harbor no Nazi within, or explain what I mean by calling myself an "artificial Jew-boy...
...Maneuvering the Dean into a bureaucratic sandwich where he was forced to allow my tenure recommendation to pass has not the drama of playing fullback with a dislocated shoulder...
...a laborer and his wife whose two room shack smelled of gin and garbage (the wife was never once seen out of doors in ten years...
...Denounce and defend what, one asks...
...Then, too, casual bias against Catholicism is so pervasive in American culture that it is hardly noticeable, particularly to those ex-Catholics like myself who partly share it...
...We ain't animals...
...And I defend because in spite of all I love...
...Genevieve's school two blocks west...
...What is more, if my description of Zarin seems tainted with barely disguised anti-Semitism of the cheapest kind, it should be clear that Eddie not only cheerfully accepted these terms, he invented them himself...
...I am not to the past of my people as my father is...
...No cabanas, no sandwiches, no liquor...
...They suffer because they are Jews...
...Shall I begin with Beethoven, with chess, or with physics...
...The extraordinary and continuing burst of creative and intellectual activity by the American Jews and European immigrants reinforced this predisposition to see the Jew not as Superman but as Everyman...
...But we fucked up, my wife and I. The farce is so transparent here, the swindles and brutalities so barefaced and callow, and the people who run things so generally incompetent or unwilling to cover up the mess they are making that I have been forced to be a different kind of Jewboy, whether artificial or real only a handful of people here know the difference — we are all Easterners to them...
...Although we attended the same college (Rutgers) and lived only ten miles apart, our friendship, if that was what it was, was confined to working hours only...
...Halfway through the discussion I notice her hands shaking and I begin to get the point...
...Yiddish and all, we children received this as the gravest of truths, and on our block at least, I believe that we practiced it...
...Such a conversion would have been mere pathology, like coming down with leukemia instead of polio...
...But tell me why it is the Jews suffer so damn much, Morris...
...Here I was tall, well set-up, and not bad looking...
...It reminded me of the time Mrs...
...Literature was a hell of a way to try to assimilate anyway and I ought to have known better...
...A regular feature on those afternoon children's shows from Channel 13 in Newark was a public service announcement on behalf of brotherhood, a cartoon in which a smug blonde trapeze artist swung back and forth refusing the grasp of successive minority partners until he fell, as the announcer cried, "Oh Joe, you schmo...
...The intensive emphasis upon the literature of high contemplation, if not of literary criticism itself, into the characteristic "human" act — was inextricably tied up, it seems to me, as it seemed to me then with much different implications, with the idea of Jewishness...
...Zarin never let us forget that he was paid twenty dollars a week more than the rest of us for the same job, that he had been given it primarily as a kind of scholarship for a nice Jewish boy, and that the goyim were expected to do all the work...
...Switzen wondered was he maybe going by the train station...
...In December of 1953 my family moved permanently to the largely gentile suburb of Chatham...
...He refers to "All in the Family," which he has seen a few times, as "The Man Like Grandpa Show," based upon his perception that even a caricature like Archie Bunker has a certain basis in reality...
...Malamud is a skillful literary artist and intended, I am sure, no slur...
...Consider that unmatched set of affirmations in the Epilogue to Invisible Man, another novel I encountered at roughly the same time as The Assistant and which likewise bore the imperishable stamp of "art": So it is now that I denounce and defend, or feel prepared to defend...
...The Chatham Colony Association was founded in 1922 by a group of Polish, Russian, and German immigrants seeking to establish a cooperative community on Socialist principles in what was then the remote fastness of the Jersey woods...
...To this day I continue to harbor an irrational mistrust and distaste for all varieties of Protestantism, and secretly regard the lot of them as self-seeking or deluded simpletons of the Pat Boone-Charles Colson variety, whose zeal for public righteousness masks the shallowest and most crocodilian morality...
...It ended only when his cursed avaricious Kike of a landlord refused to renew the option on his lease so he could do it for ten more...
...Fortunately for all of us, the pool was located at the end of a dead end street next to a power line right-of-way and most "Chathamites," as they were designated in the town's weekly paper, did not know it existed...
...An understandable reaction to the Holocaust, and Stalinism, and to what seemed to be the failure of ideology, resulted in the guilty enshrinement of the Jewish intellectual by gentiles and the simultaneous celebration of America as a land of freedom and plenty for almost all...
...The farther I live from it, the more I am conscious of the dominant shaping of an historic past, those places and that unknown heritage that lies inarticulate beneath my father's anger and his sadness and my mother's mute dread...
...My mother's objections to this migration might have been settled by a classier set of neighbors, although they would have terrified her, but the economics of the thing landed us smack in the middle of the only Jewish neighborhood in town, a sizeable tract known as the Chatham Colony Association...
...Our gentile neighbors were halfway specimens like ourselves: an alcoholic lawyer whose wife took in boarders and typing, and whose sons (as my mother never let me forget) ate Clark Bars and drank Pepsis for breakfast...
...James Joyce, I suppose, would have qualified, but he had, after all, this thing about Jews himself...
...Unlike so many others, though, we did not move west as a result of postwar prosperity so much as in search of it, purchasing a huge four-apartment investment of a home in what my mother, who hates it to this day, considers the remote provinces, twelve miles from the house she was born in, and my father more affectionately calls "the sticks," although it is scarcely more rural now than The Bronx...
...For now I offer these few comments: In my experience Jewish girls seemed to be on franker terms with their desires and less concerned with maintaining about their flesh an aura of mysticism than their shicksa counterparts...
...As desperately as my parents wanted respectability there was something comforting about living among poor Jews, for in no case were they in a position to condescend...
...Judy also had a two-car garage cluttered with cases of empty chrome-fauceted seltzer bottles, the better to imitate Clarabelle the Clown with, and a large abandoned wardrobe chest inside of which she, Peggy Mac-Namara and I exhibited to each other our private particulars and pissed into empty Dutch Boy cans to demonstrate their use...
...We had purchased security at the expense of respectability...
...Without public complaint, he hung shelves, unclogged pipes, moved furniture, played taxicab, and lifted things...
...He could talk butterfat content for hours, extolling the merits of the Dairy Queen product over all competitors...
...we are speaking here of ad hoc arrangements...
...For those of us who were only imaginatively involved in an event which had transpired before we assumed consciousness, and in another land, after all, the disaster of the European Jews provided a kind of eschatological thrill...
...Unathletic and given to plumpness, at least in my strenuous sense of what was athletic, Zarin had an abhorrence of physical labor that made me seem energetic by comparison, and devoted astonishing amounts of time to avoiding it with a barefaced chicanery that was almost ingratiating in its openness...
...And he is good to his family...
...I wonder if Philip Roth is aware how badly all of us with murky class origins wanted the archetypal young snub-nosed cheerleader he calls Thereal McCoy...
...when I began to learn that Jews were prejudiced against us and prejudiced in ways that could not have been better designed to contribute to my own secret conviction that I was a foundling unrelated by blood to anyone with whom I lived...
...I thought that my mother, a redhead whose maiden name was Sheedy, was the loveliest woman in New Jersey...
...At a time when everyone else in town was joining country clubs and taking up golf, my brother, sister, and I wheedled eighty bucks out of the Old Man for a season membership at "The Colony," which had water the color of light coffee, bullfrogs, and a tarpaper shack for a dressing room, through the plywood walls of which Barry Irving and I drilled scores of peepholes...
...The intensive cultivation of morality, Jewishness, and literary intelligence as virtual synonyms has been noted elsewhere, perhaps most re-vealingly in Norman Podhoretz's Making It...
...They will have to reject something...
...Zarin drove the rest of us to fits by beating everyone at an improvised handball game we had invented by mastering chops, spins, lobs, and undercuts while I lost three points to two setting him up for soul-satisfying smashes...
...My God, how I wanted to suffer when I first read that book in 1961 or 1962...
...Although most lived modestly, at least a few made trips to Israel, others to Europe and Russia, and some wintered in Florida, Arizona, or California, perhaps with their children...
...The Assistant notwithstanding, we were deemed in no immediate danger of becoming Jews...
...Nice logic there...
...Even the showers didn't work...
...Ideas themselves, by God, that was the thing...
...No tennis, golf, volleyball, or swim team...
...Having learned a bit more in academic life about bluffing, I suspect now that most of the earnest discussions we held deep into the night on Beauty, Art, Truth, Sex, and the Existence of God would have struck even college juniors as fairly jejune, but to me they were effusions of the pure ether of reason, virtually the first indication I had ever really had that ideas did matter...
...In the meantime I must report that I have a renewed interest in shicksa pussy...
...I should have been a hustler and my own kids punks like me...
...To hear them talk, most of my new pals in the dormitory had come at it from the other side...
...So it is that I have finally begun to sort out the things that most bewildered me in that Rutgers dorm 14 years ago...
...The Holocaust itself stood forth as the central historical event of our times: the suffering of European Jewry became the quintessential symbol for all that was mad in a maddened century...
...12, two blocks east of my home, instead of St...
...I never saw myself what difference it made...
...Besides giving credence to the terms I am using by calling his version of the literary establishment a "Jewish Family," Podhoretz is irritatingly accurate in discussing...
...That the whole works conflicted with other fables of Jewish existence and was internally inconsistent anyway never bothered them, although being as literal minded as I was, it gave me no end of trouble...
...Whenever I read, in this autobiography or that article, of the formidable intellectual influence upon various individuals by the eminent Scholar and Professor X, I am puzzled and suspect either exaggeration or sycophancy...
...I can recall quite vividly volunteering in a Sunday School discussion of religious tolerance that my best friend was a Presbyterian, and basking in self-congratulation because I forgave him in this world the sure knowledge that he would suffer an eternity of punishment in the next...
...As he had been with the Prudential (we had a painting of the Rock of Gibraltar in our living room) he became a Dairy Queen believer, a very Morris Bober of the soft ice cream trade...
...If my father was going to sink, he could man his own lifeboats...
...Something definite ended back in there somewhere, probably when my family moved to the suburbs, although it has taken me over twenty years to figure it out...
...They were first and second generation Russian and Yiddish speaking immigrants, former ghetto dwellers and long time ardent Zionists...
...Witness the following exchange between shopkeeper Morris Bober and repentant Italian thug Frank Alpine: "Nobody will tell me that I am not Jewish because I put in my mouth once in awhile, when my tongue is dry, a piece of ham...
...Who, after all, was there to be troubled by a dense and beautifully written novel of social injustice, moral blindness and self-deception which proved literary intellectuals to have made the only possible choice...
...On weekends the husbands arrived to sit chewing cigars and reading the Newark News, dressed in sleeveless undershirts, bermuda shorts, and crepe-soled web sandals with calf-length black socks...
...His reviews appear regularly in the new york times...
...A few families from New York summered in flat roofed bungalows on the community property, serene in what they considered "the country...
...From the time school let out until Howdy Doody was over at 5:30 and we all went home for dinner, every kid on the block — most of them Celtic Papists like me — could be found in front of the little round screen in the Peckerman living room ruining our eyes together...
...a stigma which grew all the stronger as the suburbs spread and the woods and fields rilled up with executives and their kin...
...Why literature itself, of course...
...Scarcely are these words on the page than I feel compelled almost as a matter of reflex to disavow anti-Semitism, for my education has been such that one simply does not speak of these things...
...So from the seventh grade until I left New Jersey permanently after college, I spent most of every day at the Colony pool, exchanging with the solstice gentile friends for Jews, and passing, as time went on, from member to lawn mower and drain skimmer, and from there eventually to head lifeguard, retaining at each step all of my former duties, so that when I attained my loftiest position with the organization I was performing (or rather malingering) at everything from teaching lifesaving to digging used Kotex pads out of the toilet...
...Over a period of years the members had converted a swampy pond on a back corner of their property into something resembling a swimming pool by damming one end with a cement wall, digging an- artesian well and dumping in granular chlorine at odd intervals from a row-boat...
...Where there was garbage to be collected or chlorine drums to be unloaded Eddie would usually be deep in conversation with one of the old ladies at the front entrance, with whom, as the only Jewish lifeguard, he was an assiduous favorite...
...Had it been more public I do not doubt that attempts would have been made to get the County Board of Health to shut it down...
...My second reaction was suppressed anger and some resentment — because I began to suspect that no one, least of all the persons who made up the terms of the debate, truly believed in either cultural or racial equality, and to realize that I could not argue back against the idea of Jewish superiority because to do so would be beyond the bounds of civilized discourse as I had internalized them...
...Yet, while it may be my faulty memory, I do not remember her coming to my house...
...In the 1950's that consideration would have been far more important than anybody's religion...
...Let me explain: I first became aware of Jewish-ness as an issue in the fall of 1952, when I was nine years old...
...My initial reaction to this idea was a kind of mild panic, because I knew I thought it was true, but had been trained by every respectable organ of public opinion since Joe the Schmo that such invidious distinctions between races and cultures were by their nature evil...
...Doubtless Ellison's rhetoric and its overwhelming acceptance at the time it was written was made easier by the lack of direct objects to all those high-sounding verbs...
...Not only are some of them public or semi-public figures whom I do not wish to embarrass for attitudes that some readers may conclude to be projections of my own, but as I have said, in Zarin and Cantor the pattern was laid...
...In any case a continued on page 42 The Artificial Jewboy continued goy with a book, I learned, was considered a contradiction in terms and was to be approached gingerly, like a trained bear in a tutu...
...Francis of Assisi are taken in the novel, although hardly vitiating its central force...
...My first Jewish acquaintance was Judy Peckerman, the daughter of a housepainter and seltzer salesman on my block who had provided his family with a television set...
...He boasted but would never try to prove that he could beat me in the same way at basketball, which was more my game, although we both knew he couldn't, since I was by then my father's size and fairly proficient at a sport more suited to sheer physi-cality...
...But there is also the fact of a common enemy on both sides of the Atlantic: the WASP...
...A bolder voyeur than I, "Irv" once packed a lunch and spent an entire day sitting quietly in the open rafters over the Women's dressing room, which could be reached from the Men's side...
...But like ex-Jewboy Portnoy I cannot help being what I am not, and if one has difficulty pretending, it is not always easy...
...The very fact that ethnic and regional identity is now permissible in mass culture is the surest sign that it has become almost totally devoid of substance...
...The metamorphosis is complete...
...Just as Sandy Koufax was unquestionably the best pitcher in baseball history, and just as Elizabeth Taylor could claim to be the loveliest woman on earth (now that she had done the sensible thing), so were Marx, Freud, and Einstein the three great geniuses of the modern age — and all of them, of course, were Jews like Irwin Cantor, who never took more than five moves to beat me at chess when he really wanted to, having taught me just enough about how to move the pieces to beat my dummy of a roommate, but not enough so that I could anticipate what he was doing to me...
...Chatham's second-string dancing teacher, who conducted classes in her living room and whose husband was permitted inside the house only to stoke the furnace...
...The only reason he played with me at all, I am sure, is that I puzzled him...
...Our life is hard enough...
...Still vivid in my mother's mind is her father's excuse for his besottedness: signs reading "Irish need not apply...
...This was because there was a sometimes tacit and sometimes spoken assumption that we were not in it for the long haul...
...You could fix it...
...a machinist whose wife conducted an open liaison with the town's garbage contractor (he arrived in his truck...
...Palms sweating, I am explaining dangling modifiers or somesuch, while my dangling immodifier is counseling lust, wanting to rest my hand on hers and tell her that all she need do is smile and forget the sick broodings of Conrad, Dostoy-evsky, and Lyons and the world will be hers...
...Ah, but to be human: to be above or outside the battle without proclaiming oneself indifferent...
...Where was I supposed to learn any better...
...Kaplan from down the street stood on the sidewalk in front of our house shaking her cane and shouting that my brother and I were "little Nazi pigs" for wrestling and hollering on our front lawn, leaving us bewildered and abashed and providing impetus for a twenty year grudge between my mother and her...
...But then I only went out with the kind of Jewish girl who goes out with gentiles...
...More likely an explanation, I think, was that these were summertime games away from home where one's "reputation" could not be affected...
...I was a gov in a Christian country...
...to transform oneself and one's expectations without being changed — that we shared...
...One was not even supposed to notice, in Most appealing to me as a young man...
...Walking home that morning in my white suit, black and white saddle oxfords and floppy bow tie, hair water parted and admiring God's daffodils, I had the only glimpse I have had, then or since, of a state of grace, and a fading glimmer of what it is people are after when they enter churches...
...I have neither knowledge of nor serious interest in Judaism — or in any religious doctrine for that matter...
...Do you like to suffer...
...It is difficult not to feel foolish writing this down in 1975, and people outside the east coast may be forgiven treating it as a hopeless anachronism, but against all reason and most statistics, Irish Catholics there still see themselves essentially as landless peasants in a system run by and for their hereditary oppressors, an attitude they continue to share through the parish church with their fellow ex-peasants of Eastern and Southern European extraction — and which all of them share with increasingly equal dubiousness with the Jew...
...And not only was I introduced to that mysterious form of oriental sensuality known as the Photo Credits Norman Mailer/Wide World Photos Saul Bellow/Jill Krementz Philip Roth/Widener Library Karl Marx/Widener Library Sigmund Freud/Wide World Photos Albert Einstein/Widener Library Woody Allen/Wide World Photos Mel Brooks/Wide World Photos Lenny Bruce/Wide World Photos Jewish girl, but by mutual consent I was able to keep my infatuations a secret...
...It was on the advice of friends in the dormitory that I first read The Assistant, a work which moved me at the time as very few books ever have, then or since...
...What attracted and repelled me then was the restless, skeptical, categorizing intellect I came to associate with Jews...
...If I were enough of a putz to strain my goyische back, it was fine with Eddie and would only serve to confirm his already low opinion of my intelligence...
...Sachs' car wouldn't start...
...Neither Cantor nor any of the other Jewish friends I had at the time had much reservation about admitting, or sometimes insisting, and much more seriously than Green-berg, that Jews as people were intellectually superior to the rest of us...
...I envied my new friends the ready-made identity, to risk another cliche of the period, that they had, and for which I was obliged, heaven help me, to search...
...Not long ago I had in my office a young thing called, of all the alliterative banalities in the world, Wendy Wilson, one of those absolutely flawless Cybill Shepherd — Thereal McCoy types that teases your hope that there is somewhere in this world a life as simple and blissfully lovely as they are...
...Ideas were for Jews...
...At the same time the Dairy Queen was failing, the domestic sign of my father's inability to move us into the suburban mainstream was the Chatham Colony Association's only public enterprise, the most ramshackle swim club in northern New Jersey...
...Two needs were thus taken care of...
...on the run, never making anything more than ten dollars a day he could skim off the top...
...Perhaps Simon Daedalus is right, and the Irish never persecuted the Jews because they never let them in...
...Besides which in their for-eignness they were apt subjects for Aesopian fables of moral instruction...
...How someone could actually put Carvel ice cream in their mouth was beyond his comprehension...
...So overpowering is the moral authority of the Holocaust, so tangible are the achievements of many of the men and women I may seem to be slighting, and so pervasive the commercially valuable and ideologically useful mythos of Jewishness, that one hesitates before them...
...The kind of girl who, when I was at Chatham High, could make me feel like a clot of dried mud by saying that she had plans to wash her hair for the next eleven Friday evenings, but how sweet you were to ask...
...Because it was free I went to P.S...
...In 1956, by which time it was plain he was not going to make his fortune with the Prudential, he sunk his life's savings and all he could borrow, together with what remained of his belief in himself, nurtured by all those years of athletic triumph and personal charm, into a Dairy Queen franchise on a badly chosen country highway in Wayne, 20 miles from our home...
...It seems they like to suffer, don't they...
...Why should we hurt somebody else...
...Occasional bows in the direction of St...
...For the larger cultural despair that underlies my obvious confusion, though, I have, like the proverbial Jew, no answers, only questions...
...When the Cadillac went by we sometimes shouted "Jew Canoe" as soon as it was out of range...
...Arkansas is in a time-warp of ten to fifteen years proportion, and is now in the midst of a regional version of Camelot, with Senator Dale Bumpers and a new Governor named David Pryor sharing the title roles...
...Looking back, it is not at all difficult to see how that cultural metamorphosis came about...
...Just overweight, and some not so overweight, lower middle class housewives with their hair as often as not in curlers playing Mah-Jongg, canasta and bridge under the trees while their children pissed in the water...
...Not for very long, that is...
...Why did it move me as a work of literature expressive of Universal Truth rather than as the contrived exercise in ethnic self-indulgence that it is...
...But they will tell me, and I will believe them, if I forget the Law...
...At the times and places I was taught there was an unfailing, if often unspoken, association of those key words expressive of the highest values in life and art: "literature," "tragic," "ironic," "human," "moral," "symbol," "organic," and "Jew...
...Partly because the contrivance was not cheap...
...So far as I know neither of my parents has ever gone to a gentile doctor for anything important...
...Such were the conditions of my growing up that intellectualism itself, that peculiar amalgam of restlessness and inertia most often rather smugly Gene Lyons teaches English at the University of Arkansas...
...My oldest son, Gavin, who is five, speaks with a pronounced Southern accent which he will probably lose when he gets a bit older and realizes the associations it has...
...It was our first new car...
...Even if this theory was advanced most openly by people whose idea of literature was Exodus or Only in America, it hurt...
...My family lived on Magie Avenue in the Elmora section of Elizabeth, New Jersey, a gritty third-rate industrial city bordering on Newark and just opposite Staten Island...
...Jews without wealth were accounted for, and a powerful moral lesson was imparted: Don't ever leave home, my parents were telling us, do you want to be like a Jew...
...For five consecutive summers we spent most of every day together...
...Genevieve's...
...Would that it had always been so...
...That my mother's family was an almost paro-dic example and my father's just barely removed from what most Jews seemed willing to think that we were did not lessen my discomfort at gradually discovering that we Christians, and we Irish Catholics in particular it seemed, were held to be drunken undereducated philis-tines, Jew haters to the core, and prone to random outbursts of insensate violence...
...As I write, moreover, I am in danger of falling into another kind of sentimentalizing fiction...
...Do I need to say at this point that these young men were Jews...
...By way of avoiding semantic backflips and apologies that sound all the more insincere for their repetition let us imagine that a novel had appeared in 1957 in which a greedy Shylock of a landlord raised the rent on a humble Italian shopkeeper until that man was forced out of business in order to make room for a more profitable tenant...
...Whatever, we never made it to Easy Street...
...Better I should hang around with Dennis Murphy, Joe Helenowski, and Joe Gerassi...
...He once played the fourth quarter of a football game at fullback after dislocating his shoulder in the third and having his teammates pop it back into place...
...Until I hid out in a gentile jock fraternity house at the end of my sophomore year, my real teachers were all students — and almost all Jews...
...I spent frustrated hours sweating over the spigot, the old man bellowing instructions over my shoulder in a fruitless attempt to perfect the trademarked curl that had to go on the top of every three ounce cone...
...In the aftermath of the most unimaginably "inhuman" cataclysm in European history it was perhaps inevitable and certainly healthy that the Jew assume a position of special moral and intellectual authority in American life...
...Meesthair Lynz," Fanny Sachs once told me, "is a good man...
...More matter of fact and less hysterical about it all, Jewish girls did not seem so anxious to make one pay for what one was getting...
...Why then was I not as a young Catholic from the lower orders made at least uneasy by Bernard Malamud's The Assistant, the plot of which I have not parodied but simply turned inside out...
...For a lost boy in a neurotic civilization that was losing confidence even as it tried to insist on itself as a classless capitalist country in which the parameters of political debate conformed almost exactly to those of human possibility — for such a young man and such a country, what figure could have been more appealing than one who had a historical identity whenever he wanted it, an identity moreover, that did not require belief or commitment (not in Cold War America anyway) and which might be claimed or denounced almost at will...
...Active among my father's resentments is the anti-Catholic bias of the Prudential Insurance Company, only very recently reported to be giving way...
...was the realization that one need not be Jewish to be a Jew...
...As for the next generation, I hope when I come to it I will be modest in my sense of what my experience has to offer them...
...Those were my ideas of literature too...
...In early September of that year my father had brought home a 1953 DeSoto sedan, powder blue with a semi-automatic shift, to replace our 1946 Chevy...
...The pool helped by providing me ready access to people to whom I did not have to feel inferior, both because of their faith and their social position...
...But she has, I imagine, enough trouble getting people to take her seriously, looking as she does, and I am a good husband and father like all Jewboys, so I keep it to myself...
...Contrary to popular myth there was no hint of anti-Semitism in my Sunday school devotions at St...
...Writing is not fighting...
...I arrived at college with a mind possessing all the density and rigor of silly putty, and was too inexperienced to do more than sit with my mouth agape taking notes in the presence of any of the real luminaries of the Rutgers faculty...
...He would scheme for days to be sure the lawn was mowed on his day off — usually dropping a hint to our aged employers that it was looking ragged as he went out the gate the night before...
...Not in any immediate or palpable way, of course, for while I hoped for a life of moral anguish and difficulty I expected no pain...
...For all I know the others didn't have children, or lost them...
...How in the name of all that was holy could they say that...
...Throughout my remaining years at Rutgers and four more at the University of Virginia I never wavered in my private conviction that what I was getting was essentially a "Jewish" education...
...I probably did OK with the girls (little did he know...
...Neither of my parents has ever read a book...
...For all of this petting and pawing, incidentally, I never in my life actually showed up at a Jewish girl's house for a date...
...Closer at hand was a more insidious trap for our immortal souls: Protestantism...
...those days, that there is sometimes such a thing as a "Jewish nose...
...She is scared to death of me, but I suspect she is also intrigued...
...And so were they...
...For every disloyal intellectual and potential subversive there is a Smart Jew Lawyer, who knows the value of a good education, and is the only kind to have when you are in trouble...
...This is why we need the Law...
...Adlai Stevenson was all you got, you should live so long...
...And who taught me Joyce...
...For all of that I could never bring myself to dislike old Zarin, for while his chauvinism was sometimes annoying it was also simple, essentially amoral, and at bottom comic in a way that is very nearly sad...
...His alleged clannishness, like his other qualities, is a two-sided coin...
...Grass Does Not Grow Under His Feet...
...Truly it never occurred to me to think, nor did it occur to anyone to encourage me to think, that there could be such an animal as a Roman Catholic or an ex-Roman Catholic intellectual...
...What civilized habits we attained, such as literacy, were held to be a thin veneer over a spirit only slightly advanced since the time when our ancestors painted themselves blue and worshipped totems...
...May I be pardoned for saying that for all its brilliance the with a liberalism so tepid that it would qualify for the Ripon Society anywhere else...
...For everybody should be the best, not only for you or me...
...Most appealing to me as a young man almost wholly out of touch with himself and anything one could call a tradition, and I do not mean to be at all flippant about this, was the realization that one need not be Jewish to be a Jew...
...To this day the sight of a girl like that in a tennis dress triggers in me contradictory impulses of near homicidal desire...
...Our discussions of the subject were often, in fact, protracted games of "Catch a Gentile by the Toe," in which the object (unconscious most of the time) is to needle the half-despised goy into revealing his own presumed hatred, then to recoil in horror while he turns against himself in shame...
...and that the alleged superiority was, if not racial in origin, at least the product of a better genetic pool...
...Here were young men of lower-middle-class origins who shared, or at least were conversant with, my own cultural enthusiasms — Jerry West, Willie Mays, Chuck Berry — but who were simultaneously able to distinguish by ear between Mozart and Stravinsky, to discuss the merits of various openings in chess, who seemed to know a lot of history, and not only had heard of relativity theory but professed to understand it...
...So I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love...
...Furthermore, although he flirted with probation the whole four years we were at Rutgers together and had not yet graduated when I left, he treated his intellectual superiority as an unchallenged matter of fact...
...I was not cut out for the retail business...
...Not in any way I can communicate to children, anyway...
...Like them I am all sharp edges and suspicion now, restless, cynical, convinced that it is my duty to be a permanent member of the semi-disloyal opposition, touchy for signs of betrayal among my friends, and with the suspicion that one has to be an abrasive schmuck if one is to maintain one's integrity, and grown almost self-satisfied (and yes self-hating) so that I probably appear to be a moody contentious egomaniac to most of the people I know...
...This means to other people...
...For me, lurching through adolescence in a suburb only slightly less caste-ridden than Calcutta, the pool was a multiple blessing...
...As useful a survival mechanism as this must be it was not easy to cope with...
...but no Jew will allow another to go hungry...
...These were not your upward mobile, country clubbing, assimilationist type of Jewish persons...
...The Old Man had played semi-pro baseball and football, as well as having recently been the center (at 6'2" and 215 pounds) of a Prudential Insurance Company basketball team which won the New Jersey State AAU championship but which the company had declined to send to the Nationals...
...At least publicly, anti-Semitism was viewed by almost every serious person in the United States as an unthinkable perversion...
...M relationship with Eddie Zarin, fellow lifeguard, was a case in point, and premonition of more complicated relationships to come...
...That kind of thing...
...While I was terrified of flunking out in my first semester and going home in disgrace, they were arguing the merits of Albert Schweitzer and Harvard Medical School and debating the relative stature of Chicago and Berkeley in physics or English — institutions of whose existence I had previously been virtually unaware...
...One had neither to join nor fight, merely to become An Intellectual...
...Let us further imagine that said Shylock had out of remorse gone to work for nothing, operating the Italian's pushcart when he fell ill, in the process falling in love with his Jew-hating shicksa daughter, and being gradually won over by their simple and heartfelt faith to the hope everlasting and a merciful Jesus, converting to Roman Catholicism on the last page...
...THE ARTIFICIAL JEWBOY Gene Lyons A young man maturing as I did in the Eastern provinces of our country during the Fifties — the period in American life which lasted from 1948 to 1967 — and aspiring to that form of endeavor that has been called "The Quality Lit Biz," particularly one whose entrance into the trade required the crossing of ethnic and class barriers, has had to learn to cope with the Jews...
...What is equally important I think is that perhaps because he cannot — anyone can spot one — the Jew does not as soon as he gets a few dollars ahead become a Republican and begin aping the gentry...
...I had to get out of the hole I was in somehow, and at the time and in the place I was educated, literary Jewishness, a more complicated, subtle and serious version of the games I am describing, was the prestige ticket...
...Thus novels like The Assistant and the cultural climate that exalted them cultivated a sense of tragedy, of ambiguity, and of contradiction that was the only "mature" attitude that one could take toward life — life in those days being a more vivid but unforgivably random source of images from which to produce "art...
...Zarin and Cantor themselves, I am sure, might have used the ideas for the protection and advantage they offered, but even if they believed them they wouldn't have expected the world to concur...
...For one thing it freed artists, writers, and thinkers to be as openly "Jewish" in their preoccupations as they cared to be without needing to be fearful or apologetic...
...It was not just the big three, Sigmund, Karl, and Albert, but all the rest: Kazin, Trilling, Fiedler, Howe, Rahv, Hook, Arendt, Fromm, Bellow, Mailer, Roth, et al...
...When the rest of us complained, he would urge us to straighten things out with the handful of Christian mothers in the place, because obviously no Jew would do such a swinish thing...
...From one or two trips to the gym he knew that I was a natural athlete who had played at least creditably in high school competition...
...Had my duties required anything short of conversion to the faith of Abraham, I am sure I would have grudgingly performed them...
...This is what a Jew believes —" "I think other religions have those ideas too," Frank said...
...If one of my own sons happens to read this essay fifteen years from now, it will be as if written by a stranger...
...Whether copping a feel off Bambi Irving in the murky waters or dry-humping Ruth Kantrowitz against a tree in the woods I was safe from detection...
...Whether sanely or madly I continue to believe that Jewboys artificial and real are the sand in the lubricated imagination of contemporary America and that which keeps it from dreaming visions of a simpler world than ever was or will be and trying to make it so with guns...
...I even suspected that there was a foreskin hidden in there somewhere, although like everybody else I knew I had been circumcised at birth...
...those misplaced louts, and go out for pizzas, than kibbitz at the chess games, or talk about Crime and Punishment...
...By moving to the suburbs we skipped a generation in my family...
...When Ruth Kantrowitz and I were caught in a moderately compromising position on her grandmother's back porch we suffered politely the old woman's Yiddish accented lecture on tradition and the individual goy because it was less upsetting for her to fear that her son's daughter might marry a Christian than that she simply liked to do what she was doing...
...They settled for Rutgers after not quite making, or making and being unable to afford Harvard, Columbia, or Yale...
...By coincidence there were several boys my age or my brother's, and we shared two things: fascination that sometimes edged over into revulsion for our strange neighbors, and a common social stigma derived from living near them...
...It was Ruth who introduced me to the idea, later to become familiar, that Jewish girls would be far more willing to play You Do It For Me and I'll Do It For You with one of us than with one of their coreligionists because of the lack of long-range prospects involved...
...We had actually made a downward move to the suburbs, leaving a stable lower middle class environment to settle with a tribe of "friggin' Sheenies...
...What stories of the clan I will tell them I have no idea...
...1 have learned remarkably little in the intervening years about the peculiar habits of mind and emotion that I have attempted to describe except that I have read a good many more books and have grown skeptical in my dotage...
...Imagine my surprise then...
...Explicit in Grandmother Kantro-witz's lecture, in fact, with me sitting right there trying to tuck my shirt in, was that there was no logical attitude for gentiles and Jews to take toward one another except mutual suspicion and dislike...
...For in spite of the fact that I am able to extemporize and abstract the question as no one else in my family ever has — no, because I am able to do that, having been like so many others of my generation the first in its history to obtain a college education — a link with the past has been irretrievably snapped...
...Although it was believed that all of our neighbors had vast sums hidden away and they were smuggling bags of loot to Israel, their outward need was evidence of yet another truth: the Jew in his greed was like the farrow that ate the sow, and the departed children of the elderly, having robbed their poor parents of life and goods, were leaving them to die in shame while they wintered in Miami...
...If they think we are going to let the idea of literacy die out, they have not been paying attention...
...Having lost the sharp definitions of the city I only half comprehended, as we all did, what was going on...
...In which ethnic and racial chauvinism of the mild sort I have described was not only permitted but looked upon favorably, at least in public...
...Nor is there any point in discussing my personal dealings with those more formidable people I was to encounter later on...
...Why Robert Langbaum of course...
...Jews were to be respected as possessing an erroneous but deeply held and coherent tradition...
...Or, to reverse the near tautology that the novel creates by its end: "They are Jews because they suffer...
...Without the sustaining categories of city life, I simply floated...
...But then like a photographic negative of Alexander Portnoy's encounters, my limited erotic experiences during the period of adolescence were confined largely to shicksas who Didn't and Jewish girls who Did, or more frequently Almost Did, or Did Everything But...
...More than anything else it served to convince us that a life of passive virtue could have the tragic consequences we half-desired without having any more idea what we were talking about than so many children...
...More important than any of that, though, was that like Malamud's Frank Alpine I was on my way to becoming an Artificial Jewboy and I was not alone...
...But neither did most of the Jews I am talking about...
...He had a way of knowing (small cousins) which of the bathrooms had been befouled by a child and would volunteer to clean the others before anyone else knew what was up...
...In an altogether serious way — and for once I do not mean to be glib about this — those Jew-boys saved my life...
...So people like Irving Howe are correct in thinking that persons of my persuasion do not any longer believe in literature the way they do, but they are wrong in making us out to be cartoon figures and hypocrites, just as I was uncharitable about those people in Amherst, and fools to think they can keep running that same old number...
...The phone would ring at dinnertime, my sister would shout "It's one of the Jews" — all had heavy accents and depended upon them for identification, beginning conversations in medias res: "Lyons, in the attic is such a business with squirrels I couldn't sleep...
...Yes, and the pride, the intellectual arrogance, and the moral superiority...
...My pre-communion training, what there was of it, stressed the belief that while only Catholics could enter the Kingdom of Heaven, Jews were to be respected as possessing an erroneous but deeply held and coherent tradition...
...From my father I learned to reject the smug and successful, from them I learned to reject my father, and from the Jews around us, I am now convinced, I learned how to maintain my dignity even as I half accepted and partly rejected the vicious anti-Semitic stereotypes of which my parents were intimately and my classmates more coolly convinced...
...Since I have noticed that theological anti-Semitism is often stronger among my coreligionists who attended parochial schools, it may be that the brotherhood stratagem was self-consciously assumed for public school students, but I doubt it...
...I am not even of my people in any real sense...
...But bookish old me...
...I only wish I knew more than I do about the whole subject of Jewish girls and gentile boys, and hope that some scholar more learned in the ways of the world will appear to enlighten us...
...And such a neighborhood...
...Anything to stay out of the Dairy Queen...
...The same goes for doctors...
...Otherwise why not Hiroshima, Nagasaki, or even Dresden as similarly symbolic totems...
...In any case we are talking America here, and American delusions...
...M If ly father's Jew hatred, like his nigger phobia, grew sharply more pronounced as his own feelings of failure and my mother's barely submerged hysteria closed in on him...
...Only months before I had made my First Holy Communion, a sacrament received on a gloriously appropriate spring day entirely out of character with my memories of northern New Jersey...
...Implicit in all our dealings over a five year period was the often repeated assertion that as a Jew Zarin was shrewder, more cunning, and fundamentally saner than we coarse louts who were so stupidly vain as to hoist 100-pound chlorine barrels to our shoulders and carry them through the grounds for the sole purpose of showing off our muscles...
...In order to get some of it down I have to love . . . too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate...
...By no means were all of our neighbors poor...
...In order to avoid my father's stubborn self-defeating pride it was necessary that I continue to be only subliminally aware of class differences...
...the cultural synthesis of the generation that taught my own...
...So I approach it through division...
...So when the Jew is discussed in those circles it is with ambivalence...
...Instead of working from Easter to Halloween and going south for the winter, my father spent the next ten years putting in 16 to 18 hour days all during the warm months, commuting home from "The Pru," grabbing a sandwich and heading for the "D.Q...
...Portnoy's story, up to the adult part of it anyway, was my own story...
...I admired my father, a handsome freckle-shouldered Irishman whose uniformed pictures bear a striking resemblance to Mike Riordan of the Capitol Bullets, with uncritical abandon...
Vol. 1 • October 1975 • No. 4
