Free Back Then by Anne Bernays Page B

with tiles, cement, tools, and whiskey and was only semiconscious by the end of the workday. Donna, the cook, another of Josephine’s desperate wartime hires, was clearly crazy. She would lie on the floor of her cabin after a few nips of Southern Comfort and invite me to watch as she masturbated the large male mongrel she had picked up at the Santa Fe pound. When this exhibition failed to have the intended effect on me, she flew into a rage. One evening she threatened me with a loaded shotgun. The day after, Josephine had her carted off to the state insane asylum.
    Josephine’s mate, Wayne, needed all of a month to figure out that “Kaplan” was not a Scots name, as he had assumed when he hired me (“able-bodied Harvard student”) at the U. S. Employment Service in Santa Fe. (The main business of this office was recruiting workers for a secret military research establishment hidden in the hills at Los Alamos.) “You may be a Jew,” Wayne said after we had got the name business cleared up, “but I like you, and I think of you as a white man.” We shook hands on this. Presumably we were peers, fellow “Anglos,” as distinguished from the “Mexicans” with whom I drank beer in the Glorieta saloon at the end of the day.
    Wayne’s compliment, such as it was, set me to thinking about the human order in this New Mexico wilderness as it related to my own feelings of belonging. I lived in a cabin on the edge of a vast national forest bounded by the Sangre de Cristo range. Possibly no one had ever walked or ridden over much of this land, not even the Indians. Like many other parts of New Mexico it had remained unexplored for centuries and so “belonged” to no one, meaning, I supposed, that I had as much a right to be there as anyone.
    â€œEvery continent,” D. H. Lawrence wrote, “has its own great spirit of place.” For me the spirit of place in New Mexico was far more life altering than that of Europe when I got there several years later. Among the books I brought with me to New Mexico was Matthiessen’s monumental study of “art and expression in the age of Emerson and Whitman,” American Renaissance . I also brought Alfred Kazin’s On Native Grounds, a work of discovery and appropriation: a Jewish writer—outsider—son of immigrants, raised and educated in Brooklyn, doing his reading at the New York Public Library on Forty-second Street—laid claims to American literature as his own “native grounds,” despite the incongruities.
    Henry Adams, anti-Semite and supreme representative of the American social and political patriciate, became the darling of Jewish critics and biographers, perhaps because they fell in love with their tormentor, believing they understood him on a higher, more tolerant plane than he understood himself. They were dazzled by his brilliance, fully as dazzled as Adams himself. The same process of appropriation, maybe even Eucharistic ingestion and incorporation, transformed another monstre sacre of American letters, Henry James, whose antipathy to Jews was at least as pronounced as Henry Adams’s. Leon Edel, a Jew, wrote a landmark biography that in effect made Henry James his property, and for a while, until it was stolen, Edel wore the novelist’s gold signet ring. Even preferring to ignore James’s comments on “a Jewry that had burst all bounds” and effected “the Hebrew conquest of New York,” I felt sickening dismay the first time I read The American Scene, his account of a return visit to his native country in 1904. In one appalling chapter he described the denizens of the Lower East Side—my grandparents, Sir!—as belonging to “the nimbler class of animals in some great zoological garden.” They were “human squirrels and monkeys,” glass snakes, worms, ants, a “swarm” of insects, and “fish of over-developed