From Judaism and Stanford Freshman Year

All four of my grandparents were Jewish.

When my father’s father Charlie was a little boy in Chicago around the turn of the century, he didn’t want anything to do with the old country. Their name had been changed from Levinsky at Ellis Island, when his parents came from Poland. He wanted to be an American kid. When the Rabbi would come to their apartment to give him Hebrew lessons, he would sneak out the window before the Rabbi got there. Eventually his parents gave up. He never got bar mitzvah’d.

My father’s mother Sophie was the only one of my grandparents not born in the US. She came from Russia (actually Ukraine) when she was about 6 years old. She grew up in a religous family — her father was a Cantor. But when they came to America the children begged their mother to stop covering her hair with a wig because “they were in America now and she didn’t have to do that anymore.”

Charlie and Sophie with their first child, my uncle Marsh

She married Charlie in Hollywood when she was a teenager and he wasn’t much older. Charlie was so much against religious observance that all I remember her doing was making her big family meals for Passover and maybe other Jewish holidays. Even though there was no Seder ceremony and virtually no reference to the meaning of the holiday, these dinners at Sophie and Charlie’s provided a feast of smells, tastes, sights, and sounds that still resonate as the positive center of any sense of Jewish identity I have. Sophie had a scrapbook of wisdom sayings, a couple of books of American Jewish stories, and an Old Testament that I still have. She always managed to sprinkle her English with some Yiddish, and with a little wine would do her Yiddishe mama rendition of Sophie Tucker vaudeville songs. And she lit candles for her husband daily for a year after he passed away.

Mary was told by my mom (Elaine) and dad (Eddie) that when my brother Randy became a born again Christian and tried to “convert” grandma Sophie, that she rebuffed him and said that she was “born a Jew and would die a Jew”.

These were my dad’s parents. As far as I could tell, my father Eddie had absolutely no Jewish training or observances growing up. The only trace I discovered was that he had a mezuzah on the door frame of our house in Winnetka.

Mary adds that he loved to throw in somewhat surprising and funny references to bits of Yiddish and Jewish cultural lore. He always called horseradish his “Jewish Dristan”. But he had no kind words for anything about ANY organized religion.

I also believe my mother Elaine had extremely little if any Jewish observance in her household. It certainly never came up the whole time I lived at home.

Elaine has told Mary several times that her family were members of the beautiful old Wilshire Blvd Temple when her dad (Walter) was Purchasing Manager at Universal Studios. She remembers that her older sister Barbara went to Saturday school for a while. Elaine was told that they stopped going to temple because Barbara was being a troublemaker, asking embarrassing religious questions. Mary suspects that the family’s financial downturn contributed to their discontinuing temple membership.

Mary also says that Elaine has told her that she identifies strongly as being Jewish but secular. She said that she did not pursue going to college because she “knew” that in her day she would not be able to get into a sorority because she was Jewish. She was very social and therefore didn’t want to go at all.

As a result of all the above, in my home growing up there was virtually no mention of religion. I remember hearing my father saying “our family is our religion”. I vaguely remember going to a Reform Jewish Saturday school once or twice.

Just when some of my fifth grade friends at Melrose Ave. Elementary in our mostly Jewish neighborhood in West Hollywood were starting to prepare for their bar mitzvahs, we moved to a new little house in the suburbs. I was one of the very few Jews in my new school, but it was never something I was aware of. I didn’t identify as a Jew. There was nothing in my upbringing that would cause me to. As far as I was concerned I was about as totally assimilated into the American melting pot as you could be.

Mary adds the following three items: first, that Elaine mentioned moving to the valley took pressure off the family to have me bar mitzahed because they didn’t have the financial means to support the process. Also, not pursuing the temple membership in the valley had a little to do with money.

Second, mom and dad would “hide out” in their store to work on inventory, with the shades down and the door locked during Jewish holidays and hope not to be seen by their Jewish friends and customers on those days. There was a bit of guilty pleasure in these escapades.

Third, Mary says Elaine says things that to her imply that she identifies with being Jewish. When they were talking about burial she clarified that if she went to Forest Lawn it would be to the “Jewish Part”. She clearly indicates which of her best girlfriends are non-Jews. All a bit more than when Eddie was alive.

There was a first hint that something might be awry when of the four of us in my high school graduating class who applied to Stanford, three were accepted. The one who wasn’t groused that it was anti-semitism, that he didn’t get in because he’s Jewish. I didn’t say it out loud, but my thought was, “No that’s not it, obviously, because I got in and I’m Jewish”. My second thought was “But I’m not really Jewish”. Instead of exploring what I meant by that, I just let the whole thing pass without setting up a ripple.

My first personal experience of being identified as Jewish was toward the end of my Freshman year at Stanford. I guess now that, partially because it was too painful for her, and partially to protect me, mom never told me her feelings about college, sororities, and anti-semitism. And I was a very cheery smart alecky 18 year old. At any rate I naively entered into fraternity rush with my buddies in the dorm. Two of them were heading toward Kappa Alpha, known as the Southern fraternity. I went to one introductory event, and I can’t remember exactly how the message was delivered, but I soon learned that this fraternity did NOT admit Jews. I was beginning to struggle in my classes, drinking too much at parties, and entertaining notions of dropping out to emulate Jack Kerouac by hitch hiking and writing. But a potent part of the mix that led me to drop out was the visceral contact with anti-semitism, which I didn’t allow to fully register, suppressing the shock mostly below consciousness.

That’s where I kept any sense of Jewish identity for the ensuing multi-year adventures in the Counterculture. My first stop as I was in the process of re-entering the mainstream culture was establishing myself in the community at Zen Center of Los Angeles. Almost a third of the leadership group was from Jewish backgrounds, which provided a sense of cultural and social familiarity, but was totally non-threatening. I’ll continue later with something about the Jewish workshops Rabbi Don Singer and Bernie Glassman led, and the latke feasts at Bernie and Helen’s around Chanukah.