Free Steven Spielberg by Joseph McBride

distinctions among their living places were subtle, and helped shape Steven’s evolving personality.
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    L IVING in a Jewish neighborhood such as Avondale could be fraught with nightmarish images for a small child in the immediate postwar years, but Steven did have the advantage of starting life in an insular, cocoonlikesetting that shielded him from many of the harsher realities outside his middle-class ghetto. Relations between Jews and their minority of gentile neighbors were outwardly polite, but not without submerged tension.
    â€œBeing we weren’t Jewish, we didn’t know the people,” admits Anastasia Del Favero, an Italian-American Catholic with three children who lived next door to the Spielbergs. “They were nice people, mostly all Jewish, but we didn’t really know them. There was a family there with a baby, but I was so busy—I had three children, my husband was working—I didn’t have time to socialize.”
    â€œIt’s a shame that I do not remember [Steven] at all, but as a teenager, I don’t think I bothered much for two-year-olds,” says Anastasia’s sister-in-law, Dolores Del Favero Huff, who also lived in the house next door to the Spielbergs. “I did not baby-sit for him—they were Jewish. When I grew up in Avondale, as a gentile, I had no Jewish friends. The Jewish children stayed with their own kind. They didn’t bother with the gentiles. I just think it’s the breed—I believe that—I guess they feel they’re different from us. They’d say hello, but as far as playing or going to a movie—I did not make the attempt.”
    Meyer Singerman, a veteran of the U.S. Army Air Forces who lived two doors down from the Spielbergs, had worked for the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League. Although he recalls Avondale residents sharing Cincinnati’s exclusionary attitude toward African Americans—“I don’t think blacks could have moved between us and the Spielbergs”—he also says, “I don’t remember any anti-Semitic incidents there involving me and my family. When you lived in a Jewish community and you’re very young, you don’t see the real world.” Steven’s cousin Samuel Guttman, who was born in 1949 and has a younger brother and sister, says that whatever anti-Semitism Steven might have encountered in Cincinnati, it would have been “no more than us—having fights as kids.”
    There were not many children of Steven’s age in the immediate neighborhood; most of the people there were middle-aged. Steven, as a result, spent most of his time around adults, his parents and grandparents and their family and friends, Jennie’s pupils from overseas, and the people at the shops and synagogues. Living his first two and a half years in a neighborhood that Peggie Singerman characterizes as “culturally advanced” and Millie Tieger describes as “a hotbed of brains,” Steven no doubt acquired some of his sense of otherness, his precocious reserve and gravity, from learning to deal at an early age with people much older than he was, many of whom regarded him (benignly or not) as “different.” A child who seldom spends time with other children learns to speak when he is spoken to, and he learns to live with solitude and his imagination, finding his sense of play not so much from others but from within himself.
    What Steven experienced of Cincinnati, aside from his vividly remembered encounters with Holocaust survivors and his mother’s music, may lie mostly beneath his consciousness. His family’s devotion, especially that of his mother, no doubt fostered his early belief that he was a special creature,that his differences from other people were something to be cherished. Such a belief may have helped shield him from any conscious awareness that his more conventional and bigoted neighbors saw him as “different” in a