Back Then (8 page)

J.K., Central Park, 1931.

For all his faith in business and the Republican Party Tobias remained an observant Orthodox Jew. He put on tefillin and prayed upon arising, obeyed the dietary laws, respected the Sabbath and Holy Days, and attended almost all services at the local shul, Congregation Ohab Zedek (Lovers of Wisdom) on West Ninety-fifth Street. For a year, when we were in mourning for my mother, he often dragged me along to weekday services in the basement, an awful place that smelled of schnapps, bad breath, and moldy prayer books. I suspected he did all of this less out of zeal than habit and resignation. On his deathbed at Mount Sinai Hospital he recited Psalm 22 (“Why hast thou forsaken me?”).

Tobias sent me to the Center School on West Eighty-sixth Street, a private progressive school equipped with a swimming pool, gymnasium, woodworking shop, and rooftop playground. The building was one of the first Jewish community centers, part of an emerging movement to socialize and secularize Judaism and release it from the confines of the synagogue. In the early grades we read
Julius Caesar
and
Romeo and Juliet,
built a six-foot-high Mayan temple out of bricks and papier-mâché, mapped the Mexican railroad system, studied French, wrestled with the girls, and—in obedience to the creed of progressive education—never learned descriptive grammar or how to join letters in cursive script instead of block printing them. A home tutor brought me up to speed with weights and measures and the times table. Miss Helen Cushman, the third-grade teacher on the Center School's mostly gentile faculty, lost her left eye to an arrow shot by a student, a sacrifice inadvertently offered to John Dewey's principle of hands-on education: in this case, we were studying the buffalo hunting tactics of the Plains Indians. Wearing an eye patch she came to our apartment once and talked my father into installing a hallway trapeze to improve my coordination.

Weekends, during Sabbath services in Ohab Zedek's airless and overheated Moorish interior, I endured the torments of Gehenna.
They began with boredom, restlessness, and uncontrollable fidgeting and proceeded to a state of acute anguish—I wanted to weep for my imprisoned self, my neck in its collar, my toes in their shoes, and for all the glories of the bright day outside. When sermon time came, the rabbi, an overbearing, golden-voiced, and thoroughly Americanized man named William Margolies, turned into Savonarola. He abused us for allowing our minds to turn to profane things like movies, tennis, and the World Series (which sometimes—God putting us to the test—collided with the Day of Atonement). After four or five years of such pastoral flogging and pummeling Margolies fell like the archangel Lucifer. He had got into difficulties with the law—involving, so the whispering ran, a stolen Buick and embezzled moneys, all of this aggravated, maybe even set in motion, by an affair with a parishioner's wife. Our rabbi traded his pulpit at Ohab Zedek for a cell in Sing Sing. On his release he put himself in the hands of a psychiatrist, transposed letters of his old name into a new one (Gailmore), and resurfaced as a liberal-minded political commentator on a New York radio station. By then the congregation had expunged him from the record, and he was never again seen—or heard—on Ninety-fifth Street.

He had been replaced meanwhile by a newly arrived refugee from Frankfurt am Main, Rabbi Dr. Jacob Hoffman, reputed to be a distinguished biblical and Talmudic scholar. His spluttering English, gargling gutturalisms, steam-engine fricatives, and Moses-like gravity sent me into paroxysms of laughter that mortified and enraged my father. Several times Mr. Turteltaub (turtledove), the shammes, removed me to the lobby.

After the long morning of sermon and liturgy I sang the closing anthem—“Adon Olam” (“He is the eternal Lord”)—as if released from the Babylonian captivity. I had a week of freedom ahead of me. At home my father drank his glass of cream sherry and read the Saturday
Herald Tribune
before going in to lunch, invariably a parched chicken salad made from Friday night's soup fowl. Meanwhile I went to my room, closed the door, and in secret conducted a black service of my own devising: switched the lights on and off, handled money (my coin collection), lighted matches, scribbled in my school notebook, drew pictures, laid out cards for solitaire, and tried to think up other ways to violate and desecrate the Orthodox Sabbath. I went away to college in an unforgiving mood—the next time I entered a synagogue after my father's funeral was to attend the funeral of an uncle, and even then I couldn't help giggling.

I was not altogether irreligious, and despite my attempts at desecration, I didn't abhor the Sabbath. In its softer, observances—the lighting of candles at sundown on Friday, the blessings over bread and wine—the Sabbath had a sacramental sweetness and purity. But it was hard to ignore the angry old men at Ohab Zedek shushing and glaring at the young. “The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat” (I had been reading the New Testament on the sly) and defiled a religion that despite my intolerance I revered—at least for its fervor and the literary splendors of its Bible. But for me Orthodox Judaism seemed to have no place for joy, spontaneity, celebration, youth; its windows were nailed shut.

As for the women: they were segregated both in daily life and on the synagogue balcony, hidden behind a Jewish purdah (I imagined their white thighs). By tradition and inclination they were ignorant of Torah and content to serve as acolytes and handmaidens. Both my mother and her sister knew Latin and Greek. Educated in Massachusetts schools at a time when women were fighting for the vote, they were suffragists with a touch of socialist radicalism and outraged memories of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. But they never questioned what the rabbis told them was their organic inferiority and an uncleanness that had to be washed away once a month in ritual baths. My mother went to the opera, loved Puccini, Caruso, and lilacs, and introduced me to
Gulliver's Travels
. But she had an intransigent mind-set. Nothing in her religion mattered so much as the strictest letter of the domestic observances she learned from her mother: the relentless koshering of chickens and the voodoo purging, with boiling water and red hot stones, of tableware contaminated by accidental contact with food products of an opposite dietary gender.

I lusted after forbidden foods: ball-park hot dogs, supposedly composed of ground-up rodents and slaughterhouse sweepings; glorious, super-American Jell-O, taboo because its gelatin came from the hooves and bones of unkosher animals; pork sausages and bacon. (Despite a few unattractive qualities, including an appetite
for garbage and occasional carnivore ferocity, pigs are delectable creatures, as I recall reading somewhere, “walking butcher shops of hams, chops, roasts, and ribs, with twice as many drumsticks as turkeys.”) I lusted after these forbidden delights, partly because I believed millions of Americans couldn't be altogether wrong about such simple (and apparently delicious) sources of gratification, but mainly because they were forbidden. I had my first bacon at a summer camp breakfast cookout at Fort Ticonderoga, New York, a month before I went off to college. I had my first lobster and steamers at the Union Oyster House, Boston, on D day, June 6, 1944. Later that evening, with too much whiskey in me, I broke my wrist and passed out on the sidewalk after a failed attempt to scale the fence of the Harvard Botanical Gardens.

J.K. with father, Tobias Kaplan, summer 1938.

My parents never acknowledged the historical existence of Jesus or the New Testament (the term “New” being in itself an affront to Mosaic law). They dated their letters and checks by the Gregorian calendar, but insisted on B.C.E. and C.E. instead of B.C. and A.D. when it came to 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 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.