Free Back Then by Anne Bernays Page A

locating events in the past. I secretly used the King James Bible as a crib when I was supposedly learning Hebrew. I turned up my nose at Yiddish because it seemed the language of old people who couldn’t speak or read English. My parents forbade me to pitch pennies and play punchball with the Irish kids, Catholic and poor, who lived around the corner toward Columbus Avenue—they were “bad boys,” “common.” Deprived of their company and of education in the streets I was well on my way to sissyhood.
    Xenophobic, and at times paranoid, the Jewish mentality that saw the gentile and all his works as the enemy had plenty of justification. Even in the heart of our enclave on West Eighty-sixth Street, as I stood under the canvas canopy of the Jewish Center building, a stranger stopped to shake his fist at me—“Little kike bastard!” We knew about Hitler; the Kristallnacht pogrom, when Nazi mobs gutted nearly two hundred synagogues while the police looked on; forced expulsions and concentration camps. But our dismay was blunted by resentment of the wave of refugees from Germany and Austria, some arriving with huge crates, parked in the streets, containing entire households of heavy bourgeois furniture. The newcomers made no secret of their assumed superiority to the vulgar, materialistic, self-indulgent American society that had taken them in. Some still believed an awful mistake had been made and that to the end they would remain Germans or Austrians who happened, inconveniently, to be Jewish as well.
    A boy growing into adolescence on the West Side could feel a certain airlessness and an urge to escape into the great secular world outside. You had a choice if you thought your distant business was with the written word: to look inward and meditate on the fate of being Jewish, or to look outward, at the risk of being shunned both by the faithful for abandoning the faith and by the others for trespassing on their cultural property. When I reached college and graduate school I wondered what business I had as a Jew engaging with the Christian canon of English literature, much of which was not only alien but openly hostile. T. S. Eliot was the most problematic of all. I worshiped him, and the melancholy cadences of Four Quartets penetrated my subliminal being, but it was impossible to reconcile his hold over me (and my generation) with his High Church allegiance, royalist politics, public primness, and, most of all, his pervasive anti-Semitism. “Reasons of religion and race,” he said, “combine to make any large number of freethinking Jews undesirable.”
    I was baffled by a growing sense of disconnectedness and remoteness in my studies. With the exception of the scholar-critic F. O. Matthiessen, my teachers at Harvard regarded their discipline as hermetic and scorned connections between literature and life. On his advice I took a leave of absence from graduate school and went out to New Mexico. For half a year I cultivated chili peppers, mucked out horse stalls, and pumped gas and diesel in the Glorieta valley, southeast of Santa Fe.
    My employers, a retired car dealer and his middle-aged girlfriend, had fled their spouses in Dallas to start a new life, but they missed their old life and talked about it all the time. They had bought a place they hoped to turn into a guest ranch after World War II, but Arrowhead Lodge, as they named it, was still only a truck-stop eatery with half a dozen unheated cabins and a couple of undernourished horses. To re-create her suburban garden back in Dallas Josephine set me to planting jasmine, arbutus, hibiscus, and other shrubs that needed pampering; the soil was so loaded with clay that the holes I dug for them with a pickax, shovel, and buckets of water hardened into their graves almost right away. In line with her taming of this wild land she hired a man from Lubbock, Texas, to set tile in the cabin bathrooms. He arrived in a pickup truck loaded