Free Steven Spielberg by Joseph McBride Page B

fall. Arnold was one of the beneficiaries of that change, and he became a stellar example of achievement in his newly developing field. But his family paid a price in rootlessness and instability as he moved them around the country, responding to career opportunities and the eventual westward migration of the computer industry.
    â€œJust as I’d become accustomed to a school and a teacher and a best friend,” Steven has recalled, “the FOR SALE sign would dig into the front lawn…. And it would always be that inevitable good-bye scene, in the train station or at the carport packing up the car to drive somewhere, or at the airport. Where all my friends would be there and we’d say good-bye to each other and I would leave. This happened to me four major times in my life. And the older I got the harder it got. E.T. reflects a lot of that. When Elliott finds E.T., he hangs onto E.T., he announces in no uncertain terms, ‘I’m keeping him,’ and he means it.”
    The anxiety caused by the first of those moves may help account for the fact that, as Spielberg has said, “I’ve been biting my fingernails since I was four”; the move from his hometown of Cincinnati to New Jersey took place the year he turned three.
    Explaining why he nevertheless has always felt a basic optimism, Spielberg said, “I think growing up I had no other choice. I guess because I was surrounded by so much negativity when I was a kid that I had no recourse but to be positive. I think it kind of runs in my family, too—my mother is a very positive thinker. One of the first words I learned, when I was very, very young, one of the first sentences I ever put together—my mother reminds me of this, I don’t consciously remember it—was ‘looking forward to.’ And it always used to be about my grandparents. I loved it when they’d come to visit from Ohio to New Jersey, and my mother would say, ‘It’s something to look forward to, they’re coming in two weeks,’ and a week later she would say, ‘It’s something to look forward to, they’ll be here in a week.’”
    During their first three years in New Jersey, the Spielbergs lived in a hugecomplex of identical red-brick buildings at 219 South Twenty-ninth Street in Camden, the Washington Park Apartments. Although the complex looked like a barracks, it had the consolation of being considered the place where, as family friend Miriam Fuhrman put it, “All the young Jewish couples lived” (it is now populated largely by African Americans and Hispanics). While the Spielbergs were living in Camden, Steven’s oldest sister, Anne, was born in Philadelphia on Christmas Day 1949 .§
    In August 1952, the Spielbergs moved a few miles to suburban Haddon Township, adjacent to Haddonfield, an affluent, quaintly picturesque village of seventeen thousand settled by English and Irish Quakers in the early 1700s. Many other RCA employees and people who worked in companies doing business with RCA also lived in the Haddonfield area. Although the Spielbergs were part of a migration of young Jewish families from Camden to Haddon Township, their move to the suburbs was a momentous step, culturally speaking, because it meant entering a more heterogeneous community in which Jews were expected to assimilate in order to be accepted.
    â€œAfter 1945, the social and economic profile of American Jews was transformed into one that closely approximated the American ideal,” Edward S. Shapiro wrote in A Time for Healing. “… The most important aspect of the postwar mobility of America’s Jews was their relocation to the suburbs and their movement into the middle class. While mirroring national currents, these demographic trends were more intense among Jews. Historian Arthur Hertzberg estimated that, in the two decades between 1945 and 1965, one out of every three Jews left the big cities for the suburbs, a