preparedworst

PREPARED FOR THE WORST

        ON NOT KNOWING THE HALF OF IT: Homage to Telegraphist Jacobs

        IN THE EARLY days of the December that my father was to die, my younger brother brought me the news that I was a Jew. I was then a transplanted Englishman in America, married, with one son, and, though unconsoled by any religion, a nonbelieving member of two Christian churches. On hearing the tidings, I was pleased to find that I was pleased.

        One of the things about being English born and bred is the blessed lack of introspection that it can confer. An interest in genealogy is an admitted national quirk, but, where this is not merely snobbish or mercenary, it indulges our splendid and unique privilege of traceable, stable continuity. Englishmen do not have much time for angst about their “roots” or much of an inclination to the identity crisis. My paternal grandfather had a favorite joke, about a Wessex tenant in dispute with his squire. “I hope you realize,” says the squire, “that my ancestors came over with William the Conqueror.” “Yes,” returns the yeoman. “We were waiting for you.” It was from this millennial loam that, as far as I knew, I had sprung. I had long since let lapse my interest in family history, as being unlikely to prove any connection to title or fortune. For something to say, I would occasionally dilate on the pure Cornish origins of the name Hitchens, which had once been explained to me by A. L. Rowse in the course of a stuporous dinner at Oxford. The Celtic strain seemed worth mentioning, as representing a sort of romantic, insurgent leaven in the Anglo-Saxon lump. But having married a Greek (accepting confirmation in the Orthodox Church with about as much emotion as I had declined it in the Anglican one) and left England, I never expected any but routine news from the family quarter.

        My brother’s account was simple but very surprising. Our mother had died tragically and young in 1973, but her mother still lived, enjoying a very spry tenth decade. When my brother had married, he had taken his wife to be presented to her. The old lady later complimented him on his choice, adding rather alarmingly, “She’s Jewish, isn’t she?” Peter, who had not said as much, agreed rather guardedly that this was so. “Well,” said the woman we had known all our lives as “Dodo,” “I’ve got something to tell you. So are you.”

        My initial reaction, apart from pleasure and interest, was the faint but definite feeling that I had somehow known all along. Well used to being taken for English wherever I went, I had once or twice been addressed in Hebrew by older women in Jerusalem (where, presumably, people are looking for, or perhaps noticing, other characteristics). And, though some of my worst political enemies were Jewish, in America it seemed that almost all my best personal friends were. This kind of speculation could, I knew, be misleading to the point of treachery, but there it was. Then, most provoking and beguiling of all, there was the dream. Nothing bores me more than dream stories, so I had kept this one to myself. But it was the only one that counted as recurrent, and I had also experienced it as a waking fantasy. In this reverie, I am aboard a ship. A small group is on the other side of the deck, huddled in talk but in some way noticing me. After a while a member of the group crosses the deck. He explains that he and his fellows are one short of a quorum for prayer. Will I make up the number for a minyan? Smiling generously, and swallowing my secular convictions in a likable and tolerant manner, I agree to be the tenth man and stroll across the deck.

        I hesitate to include this rather narcissistic recollection, but an account of my reactions would be incomplete without it, and I had had the dream recently enough to tell my brother about it. He went on to tell me that our grandmother had enjoined us to silence. We were not to tell our father, who was extremely unwell. He had not known that he had a Jewish wife, any more than we had known we had a Jewish mother. It would not be fair to tell him, at the close of his life, that he had been kept in the dark. I felt confident that he would not have minded learning the family secret, but it was not a secret I had long to keep. My father died a matter of weeks after I learned it myself.

        The day after his funeral, which was held in wintry splendor at the D-Day Chapel overlooking our native Portsmouth, whence he had often set sail to do the king’s enemies a bit of no good, I took a train to see my grandmother. I suppose that in childhood I had noticed her slightly exotic looks, but when she opened the door to me I was struck very immediately by my amazing want of perception. Did she look Jewish? She most certainly did. Had I ever noticed it? If so, it must have been a very subliminal recognition. And in England, at any rate in the milieu in which I had been brought up, Jew-consciousness had not been a major social or personal consideration.

        We had family grief to discuss, and I was uncertain how to raise the other matter that was uppermost in my mind. She relieved me of the necessity. We were discussing my father’s last illness, and she inquired his doctor’s name. “Dr. Livingstone,” I replied. “Oh, a Jewish doctor,” she said. (I had thought Livingstone a quintessentially English or Scots name, but I’ve found since that it’s a favorite of the assimilated.) At once, we were in the midst of a topic that was so familiar to her and so new and strange to me. Where, for a start, were we from?

        Breslau. The home of B. Traven and the site of a notorious camp during the Endlossung. Now transferred to Poland and renamed Wroclaw. A certain Mr. Blumenthal had quit this place of ill omen in the late nineteenth century and settled in the English Midlands. In Leicester, he had fathered thirteen children and raised them in a scrupulously Orthodox fashion. In 1893, one of his daughters had married Lionel Levin, of Liverpool . My maternal grandmother, Dorothy Levin, had been born three years later.

        It appeared that my great-grandparents had moved to Oxford, where they and their successors pursued the professions of dentistry and millinery. Having spent years of my life in that town as schoolboy and undergraduate and resident, I can readily imagine its smugness and frigidity in the early part of the century. Easy to visualize the retarding influence of the Rotary Club, and perhaps Freemasonry and the golf club, on the aspirations of the Jewish dentist or hatter. By the time of the Kaiser, the Levins had become Lynn and the Blumenthals, Dale. But I was glad to learn that, while they sought to assimilate, they did not renounce. Of a Friday evening, with drawn curtains, they would produce the menorah. The children were brought up to be unobtrusively observant. How then, could such a seemingly innocuous and familiar tale come to me as a secret? A secret which, if it were not for the chance of my grandmother outliving both my parents, I might never have learned?

        Dodo told me the occluded history of my family. “Oxford,” she said, materializing my suspicions, “was a very bad place to be Jewish in those days.” She herself had kept all the Jewish feasts and fasts, but I was slightly relieved to find that, aged ninety-two, she was staunchly proof against the claims of religion. “Have any of your friends ever mentioned Passover to you?” she inquired. I was able to say yes to that, and to show some knowledge of Yom Kippur and Hanukkah too. This seemed to please her, though she did add that as a girl she had fasted on Yom Kippur chiefly to stay thin.

        The moment had arrived to ask why this moment had arrived. Why had I had to bury my father to get this far? On the mantelpiece was a photograph of my mother, looking more beautiful than ever, though not as beautiful as in the photograph I possessed, which showed her in the Royal Navy uniform in which she had met my father. I had interrogated this photograph. It showed a young, blond woman who could have been English or (my fancy when a child) French. Neither in profile nor in curls did it disclose what Gentiles are commonly supposed to “notice.”

        “Your mother didn’t much want to be a Jew,” said Dodo, “and I didn’t think your father’s family would have liked the idea. So we just decided to keep it to ourselves.” I had to contend with a sudden access of hitherto buried memories. Had my father shown the least sign of any prejudice? Emphatically not; he had been nostalgic for Empire and bleakly severe about the consequences of losing it, but he had never said anything ugly. He had been a stout patriot but not a flag waver, and would have found racism (I find I can’t quite add “and chauvinism”) an affront to the intelligence. His lifetime of naval service had taken him to Palestine in the 1930s (and had involved him in helping to put down a revolt in my wife’s neighboring country of Cyprus in 1932), but he never droned on about lesser breeds, as some of his friends had done in my hearing when the gin bottle was getting low. If he had ever sneered at anyone, it had been Nasser (one of our few quarrels).

        But I could recall a bizarre lecture from my paternal grandfather. It was delivered as a sort of grand remonstrance when I joined the Labour Party in the mid-1960s. “Labour,” my working-class ancestor had said with biting scorn, “just look at them. Silverman, Mendelson, Driberg, Mikardo …” And he had told off the names of the leading leftists of the party at that period. At the time, I had wondered if he was objecting to German names (that had been a continuous theme of my upbringing) and only later acquired enough grounding in the tones of the British Right to realize what it had meant. Imagining the first meeting between him and my maternal grandmother, as they discussed the betrothal, I could see that she might not have been paranoid in believing her hereditary apprehensions to be realized.

        And then came another thought, unbidden. Oxford may have been a tough place to be a Jew, but on the European scale it did not rank with Mannheim or Salonika. Yet my parents had been married in April 1945, the month before the final liberation of Germany. It was the moment when the world first became generally aware of the Final Solution. How galling it must have been, in that month, to keep watch over one’s emotions and to subsume the thought of Breslau in the purely patriotic rejoicing at the defeat of the archenemy.

        “Well, you know,” said Dodo, “we’ve never been liked. Look at how the press treats the Israelites. They don’t like us. I know I shouldn’t say it, but I think it’s because they’re jealous.” The “they” here clearly meant more than the press. I sat through it feeling rather reticent. In January 1988—the month of which I am speaking—the long-delayed revolt in Gaza had electrified Fleet Street, more because some ambitious Thatcherite junior minister had got himself caught up in it than for any reason of principle. The following Sunday, I knew, The Observer was to publish a review of Blaming the Victims, a collection of essays edited by Edward Said and myself. This book argued that the bias was mostly the other way—even if, as Edward had once put it so finely in a public dialogue with Salman Rushdie, this was partly because the Palestinians were “the victims of the victims.” I didn’t know how to engage with my grandmother’s quite differently stated conviction. But when I offered that the state she called “Israelite” had been soliciting trouble by its treatment of the Palestinians, she didn’t demur. She just reiterated her view that this wasn’t always the real reason for the dislike they—“we”—attracted.

        Well, I knew that already. The Harold Abrahams character in Chariots of Fire says rather acutely of English anti-Semitism that “you catch it on the edge of a remark.” Whether or not this is more maddening than a direct insult, I could not say from experience, but early in life I learned to distrust those who said, “Fine old Anglo-Saxon name,” when, say, a Mr. Rubinstein had been mentioned. “Lots of time to spare on Sundays” was another thoughtless, irritating standby. This was not exactly Der Stürmer, but I began to ask myself: Had I ever let any of it go by? Had I ever helped it on its way with a smart remark? Had I ever told a joke that a Jew would not have told? (Plenty of latitude there, but everybody “knows” where it stops.) In this mood I bid farewell to my grandmother and, leaving her at her gate, rather awkwardly said, “Shalom!” She replied, “Shalom, shalom,” as cheerfully and readily as if it had been our greeting and parting since my infancy. I turned and trudged off to the station in the light, continuous rain that was also my birthright.

        ENOUGH OF this sickly self-examination, I suddenly thought. A hidden Jewish parentage was not exactly the moral equivalent of Anne Frank. Anti-Jewish propaganda was the common enemy of humanity, and one had always regarded it as such, as much by instinct as by education. To claim a personal interest in opposing it seemed, especially at this late stage, a distinct cheapening of the commitment. As the makers of Levy’s rye bread had once so famously said, You don’t have to be Jewish. You don’t have to be Jewish to find a personal enemy in the Jew-baiter. You don’t have to be a Palestinian to take a principled position on the West Bank. So what’s new? By a celebrated and practiced flick of the lever, your enemies can transfer you from the “anti” column to the “self-hating.” A big deal it isn’t.

        Well, then, why had my first reaction to the news been one of pleasure? Examining my responses and looking for a trigger, I turned back to Daniel Deronda, which I had thought when I first read it to be a novel superior even to Middlemarch:

        “Then I am a Jew?” Deronda burst out with a deep-voiced energy that made his mother shrink a little backward against her cushions… . “I am glad of it,” said Deronda, impetuously, in the veiled voice of passion.

        This didn’t at all meet my case. It was far too overwrought. For one thing, I had never had the opportunity to question my mother. For another, I had not (absent the teasing of the dream) had Deronda’s premonitions. My moment in the Jerusalem bookshop, accosted by a matronly woman, did not compare with his in the Frankfurt synagogue. On the other hand, the response of Deronda’s mother did seem to hit a chord:

        “Why do you say you are glad? You are an English gentleman. I secured you that.”

        Another memory. I am sitting on the stairs in my pajamas, monitoring a parental dispute. The subject is myself, the place is on the edge of Dartmoor, and the year must be 1956 or so, because the topic is my future education. My father is arguing reasonably that private schooling is too expensive. My mother, in tones that I can still recall, is saying that money can be found. “If there is going to be an upper class in this country,” she says forcefully, “then Christopher is going to be in it.” My ideas about the ruling class are drawn from Arthurian legend at this point, but I like the sound of her reasoning. In any case, I yearn for boarding school and the adventure of quitting home. She must have had her way, as she customarily did, because a few months later I was outfitted for prep school and spent the next decade or so among playing fields, psalms, honors boards, and the rest of it. I thus became the first Hitchens ever to go to a “public” school, to have what is still called (because it applies to about one percent of the population) a “conventional” education, and to go to Oxford.

        Until very recently, I had thought of this parental sacrifice—I was ever aware that the costs were debilitating to the family budget—as the special certificate of social mobility. My father had come from a poor area of Portsmouth, was raised as a Baptist, and had made his way by dint of scholarships and the chance provided by the navy. My mother—well, now I saw why questions about her background had been quieted by solemn references to Dodo’s early bereavement. And now I wish I could ask my mother—Was all this effort expended, not just to make me a gentleman, but to make me an Englishman? An odd question to be asking myself, at my age, in a new country where all my friends thought of me as “a Brit.” But an attractive reflection, too, when I thought of the Jewish majority among my circle and the special place of the Jews in the internationalist tradition I most admired. It counted as plus and minus that I had not had to sacrifice anything to join up. No struggle or formative drama, true, but no bullying at school, no taunting, not the least temptation to dissemble or to wish otherwise. In its review at the time, The Tablet (what a name!) had complained of Daniel Deronda that George Eliot committed “a literary error when she makes Deronda abandon, on learning the fact of his Jewish birth, all that a modern English education weaves of Christianity and the results of Christianity into an English gentleman’s life.” Nobody would now speak with such presumption and certainty about “the results of Christianity,” but insofar as this abandonment would not be an act of supererogation on my part, it was by now impossible in any case. In other words, the discovery came to me like a free gift. Like Jonathan Miller in his famous writhe in Beyond the Fringe, could choose to be “not a Jew, but Jew-ish.”

        Or could it be that easy? I had two further visitations of memory to cogitate. At the age of about five, when the family lived in Scotland, I had heard my mother use the term “anti-Semitism.” As with one or two other words in very early life, as soon as I heard this one I immediately, in some indefinable way, knew what it meant. I also knew that it was one of those cold, sibilant, sinister-sounding words, innately repugnant in its implications. I had always found anti-Jewish sentiment to be disgusting, in the same way as all such prejudices but also in a different way, and somehow more so. To hear some ignorant person denouncing Pakistani or Jamaican immigrants in Britain was one thing—there would be foul-mouthed complaints about cooking smells, about body odors, and occasionally about sexual habits. This was the sort of plebeian bigotry that one had to learn to combat, in early days as an apprentice canvasser, as a sort of Tory secret weapon in the ranks of the Labour vote. But anti-Semitic propaganda was something else. More rarely encountered, it was a sort of theory: both pseudo- and anti-intellectual. It partook of a little learning about blood, soil, money, conspiracy. It had a fetidly religious and furtively superstitious feel to it. (Nobody accuses the blacks of trying to take over international finance, if only because racialists don’t believe them capable of mounting the conspiracy.) When I came across Yevtushenko’s poem Babi Yar at the age of sixteen, I realized that he had seized the essence of the horror that I felt: the backwardness and cunning that could be mobilized. I memorized the poem for a public reading that my school organized for the Venice in Peril Fund and can remember some lines even now without taking down the Peter Levi translation:

        No Jewish blood runs among my blood,

        But I am as bitterly and as hardly hated

        By every anti-Semite

        As if I were a Jew.

        That seemed to me a fine ambition, even if easily affected at a civilized English boys’ school. I know that it was at about this time that I noticed, in my early efforts at leftist propaganda, that among my few reliable allies in a fairly self-satisfied school were the boys with what I gradually understood were Jewish names. There was occasional nudging and smirking in chapel when we sang the line “Ye seeds of Israel’s chosen race” in the anthem “Crown Him.” What did it mean, chosen? Could it be serious? I hadn’t then read Daniel Deronda, but I would have shared his stiff and correct attitude (antedating his discovery) that:  of learned and accomplished Jews he took it for granted that they had dropped their religion, and wished to be merged in the people of their native lands. Scorn flung at a Jew as such would have roused all his sympathy in grief and inheritance; but the indiscriminate scorn of a race will often strike a specimen who has well-earned it on his own account.

        Oh, I was fair-minded all right. But strict fair-mindedness would suggest the conclusion that it didn’t matter who was Jewish. And to say that it didn’t matter seemed rather point-missing.

        The second memory was more tormenting. Shortly before her death, and in what was to be our last telephone conversation, my mother had suddenly announced that she wanted to move to Israel. This came to me as a complete surprise. (My grandmother, when I told her fifteen years later, was likewise unprepared for the revelation.) Now I ransacked that last exchange for any significance it might retrospectively possess. Having separated from my father and approaching middle life, my mother was urgently seeking to make up for time lost and spoke of all manner of fresh starts. Her praise for Israel was of the sort—“It’s a new country. It’s young. They work hard. They made the desert bloom”—that one read in the gentile as well as the Jewish press. The year was 1973 and the time was just after the Yom Kippur War, and, in trying to moderate her enthusiasm, I spoke of the precariousness of the situation. This was slightly dishonest of me, because I didn’t doubt Israel’s ability to outfight its neighbors. But I suspected that any mention of the Palestinians would be a pointless expense of breath. Besides, I wasn’t entirely sure myself how I then stood on that question.

        In June 1967, I had sympathized instinctively with the Jewish state, though I remember noting with interest and foreboding a report from Paris which said that triumphalist demonstrators on the Champs Elysées had honked their car horns—Is-ra-el vain-cra!—to the same beat as the OAS Al-gé-rie fran-çaise! My evolution since then had been like that of thousands of other radicals: misery at the rise of the Israeli Right and enhanced appreciation of the plight of the Palestinians, whether in exile or under occupation. Several visits to the region meant that I had met Palestinians and seen conclusively through those who had argued that they did not “really” exist.

        By the time I moved to the United States, the Left and even the liberals were thrown on the defensive. In America at least, a major part of the ideological cement for the Reagan-Thatcher epoch was being laid on by the neoconservative school, which was heavily influenced by the Middle East debate and which did not scruple to accuse its critics of anti-Semitism. My baptism of fire with this group came with the Timerman affair, which has been unjustly forgotten in the record of those years.

        Even though Jacobo Timerman had been incarcerated and tortured as a Jew, his Argentine fascist tormentors were nonetheless felt, by the Reagan Administration and by the pre-Falklands Thatcherites, to be fundamentally on our side. (This in spite of the horridly warm relations between the Buenos Aires junta and the Soviet Union.) They did not count, in the new kultur-kampf, as a tyranny within the meaning of the act. As a result, Jacobo Timerman had to be defamed.

        He was accused of making up his story. He was reviled, in an attack that presaged a later hot-favorite term, of covert sympathy for “terrorism” in Argentina. He was arraigned for making life harder, by his denunciation, for Argentina’s peaceable Jewish community. (This charge was given a special ironic tone by the accusation, made in parallel, that he had overstated the extent of anti-Semitism in that country.) Although some of this slander came from the Francoist Right, who were later to appear in their true colors under the banner of General Singlaub and Colonel North, the bulk of the calumny was provided by neoconservative Jewish columnists and publications. I shall never forget Irving Kristol telling a dinner table at the Lehrman Institute that he did not believe Timerman had been tortured in the first place.

        I was much affected by Timerman’s book Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, partly because I had once spent a few rather terrifying days in Buenos Aires, trying to get news of him while he was incommunicado. Not even the most pessimistic person had appreciated quite what he was actually going through. As I read the account of his torture at the hands of the people who were later picked by Reagan and Casey to begin the training of the Contras, I was struck by one page in particular. An ideologue of the junta is speaking:

        Argentina has three main enemies: Karl Marx, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of society; Sigmund Freud, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of the family; and Albert Einstein, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of time and space.  Here was the foe in plain view. As that pure Austrian Ernst Fischer puts it so pungently in his memoir An Opposing Man:

        The degree of a society’s culture can be measured against its attitude towards the Jews. All forms of anti-Semitism are evidence of a reversion to barbarism.

        Any system which persecutes the Jews, on whatever pretext, has forfeited all right to be regarded as progressive.

        Here were all my adopted godfathers in plain view as well: the three great anchors of the modern, revolutionary intelligence. It was for this reason that on the few occasions on which I had been asked if I was Jewish, I had been sad to say no, and even perhaps slightly jealous. On the other hand, when in early 1988 I told an editor my news, her response was sweet but rather shocking. “That should make your life easier,” she said. “Jewish people are allowed to criticize Israel.” I felt a surge of annoyance. Was that the use I was supposed to make of it? And did that response—typical, as I was to find—suggest the level to which the debate had fallen? It seemed to me that, since the Middle East was becoming nuclearized and since the United States was a principal armorer and paymaster, it was more the nature of a civic responsibility to take a critical interest. If Zionism was going to try to exploit gentile reticence in the post-Holocaust era, it might do so successfully for a time. But it would never be able to negate the tradition of reason and skepticism inaugurated by the real Jewish founding fathers. And one had not acquired that tradition by means of the genes.

        AS I WAS preparing for my father’s funeral and readying a short address I planned to give to the mourners, I scanned through a wartime novel in which he had featured as a character. Warren Tute was an author of the Cruel Sea school and had acquired a certain following by his meticulous depiction of life in the Royal Navy. His best-known book, The Cruiser, had my father in the character of Lieutenant Hale. I didn’t find anything in the narrative that would be appropriate for my eulogy. But I did find an internal monologue, conducted by the master-at-arms as he mentally reviewed the ship’s complement of HMS Antigone:

        He knew that Stoker First Class Danny Evans would be likely to celebrate his draft by going on the beer for a week in Tonypandy and then spending the next three months in the Second Class for Leave. He knew that Blacksmith First Class Rogers would try and smuggle service provisions ashore for his mother and that telegraphist Jacobs was a sea lawyer who kept a copy of Karl Marx in his kitbag.

        Good old telegraphist Jacobs! I could see him now, huddled defensively in his radio shack. Probably teased a bit for his bookishness (“a copy” of Marx, indeed), perhaps called “Four Eyes” for his glasses, and accused of “swallowing the dictionary” if he ever employed a long word. On shore leave at colonial ports, sticking up for the natives while his hearty shipmates rolled the taxi drivers and the whores. Perhaps enduring a certain amount of ragging at church parade or “divisions” (though perhaps not; the British lower deck is if anything overly respectful of “a man’s religion”). Resorted to by his comrades in the mess when there was a dispute over the King’s Regulations or the pay slips. Indefinitely relegated when promotion was discussed—a Captain Jacobs RN would have been more surprising than an Admiral Rickover. In those terrible days of war and blockade, where the air is full of bombast about fighting the Hun, or just fighting, Telegraphist Jacobs argues hoarsely that the enemy is fascism. Probably he has rattled a tin for Spain and collected bandages in the East End for the boys of the International Brigade (whose first British volunteers were two Jewish garment workers). When the wireless begins to use the weird and frightening new term total war, Telegraphist Jacobs already knows what it means. The rest of the time, he overhears the word troublemaker and privately considers it to be no insult.

        My father never knew that he had a potential Telegraphist Jacobs for a son, but he hardly ever complained at what he did get, and I salute him for that. I also think with pleasure and pride of him and Jacobs, their vessel battered by the Atlantic and the Third Reich, as they sailed through six years of hell together to total victory. Commander Hitchens, I know, would never have turned a Nelson eye to any bullying. They were, much as the navy dislikes the expression, in the same boat.

        As I’m told is common with elder sons, I feel more and more deprived, as the days pass, by the thought of conversations that never took place and now never will. In this case, having had the Joycean experience of finding myself an orphan and a Jew more or less simultaneously, I had at least the consolation of curiosity and interest. A week or so after returning from the funeral in England, I telephoned the only rabbi I knew personally and asked for a meeting. Rabbi Robert Goldburg is a most learned and dignified man, who had once invited me to address his Reform congregation in New Haven. He had married Arthur Miller to Marilyn Monroe (converting the latter to Judaism) but resisted the temptation to go on about it too much. After some initial banter about my disclosure (“Aren’t you ashamed? Did you see Rabin saying to break their bones?”), he appointed a time and place. I wanted to ask him what I had been missing.

        It may be a bit early to say what I learned from our discussion. The course of reading that was suggested is one I have not yet completed. No frontal challenge to my atheism was presented, though I was counseled to reexamine the “crude, Robert Ingersoll, nineteenth-century” profession of unbelief. Ever since Maimonides wrote of the Messiah that “he may tarry,” Judaism seems to have rubbed along with a relaxed attitude to the personal-savior question and a frankly skeptical one about questions of wish-thinking such as the afterlife. A. J. Ayer once pointed out that Voltaire was anti-Semitic because he blamed the Jews for Christianity, “and I’m very much afraid to say that he was quite right. It is a Jewish heresy.” When I had first heard him say that, I thought he might be being flippant. But as I discoursed more with Rabbi Goldburg, I thought that Judaism might turn out to be the most ethically sophisticated tributary of humanism. Einstein, who was urged on me as an alternative to Ingersoll, had allowed himself to speak of “the Old One” despite refusing allegiance to the god of Moses. He had also said that the Old One “does not play dice with the universe.” Certainly it was from Jews like him that I had learned to hate the humans who thought themselves fit to roll the dice at any time.

        Rabbi Goldburg’s congregation was well-to-do, and when visiting them as a speaker I had been very impressed by the apparent contrast between their lifestyle, for want of a better term, and their attitudes. I say “apparent contrast” because it is of course merely philistine to assume that people “vote their pocketbook” all the time or that such voting behavior is hard-headed realism instead of the fatuity it so often is. The well-known Jewish pseudointellectual who had so sweetly observed that American Jews have the income profile of Episcopalians and the voting habits of Puerto Ricans was a perfect exemplar of Reaganism, of what Saul Bellow once called “the mental rabble of the wised-up world.”

        Anyway, what struck me when I addressed this highly educated and professional group was the same as what had struck me when I had once talked to a gathering of Armenians in a leafy suburb in California. They did not scoff or recoil, even when they might disagree, as I droned on about the iniquity and brutality, the greed and myopia that marked Reagan’s low tide. They did not rise to suggest that the truth lay somewhere in between, or that moderation was the essential virtue, or that politics was the art of the possible. They seemed to lack that overlay of Panglossian emollience that had descended over the media and the Congress and, it sometimes seemed, over every damn thing. But nor did they bitch, as the English do, about how everything was getting worse, going to the dogs, and so on. That kind of plaintiveness is predicated on the myth of a golden past. Over drinks afterward, I suddenly thought: Of course. These people already know. They aren’t to be fooled by bubbles of prosperity and surges of good feeling. They know the worst can happen. It may not be in the genes, but it’s in the collective memory and in many individual ones, too.

        Was this perhaps why I had sometimes “felt” Jewish? As I look back over possible premonitions, echoes from early life, promptings of memory, I have to suspect my own motives. I am uneasy because to think in this way is, in Kipling’s frightening phrase, “to think with the blood.” Jews may think with the blood if they choose: it must be difficult not to do so. But they—we—must hope that thinking with the blood does not become general. This irony, too, must help impart and keep alive a sense of preparedness for the worst.

        Under the Nuremberg laws, I would have been counted a Blumenthal of Breslau, and the denial of that will stop with me. Under the Law of Return, I can supposedly redeem myself by moving into the Jerusalem home from which my friend Edward Said has been evicted. We must be able to do better than that. We still live in the prehistory of the human race, where no tribalism can be much better than another and where humanism and internationalism, so much derided and betrayed, need an unsentimental and decisive restatement. [To be continued]

        (Grand Street, Summer 1988)