Memories of Memories

Sample Chapter

Chapter 6: Why Is this Kid Different from All Other Kids

Sometime after my ninth birthday I became aware that I was very different from most of my friends and schoolmates. I certainly did not understand why I was different, though, now that I have written Remembrance and Renewal, I suspect in retrospect that this difference had its roots in my family background, which was so very different from the other children with whom I grew up. 

All I knew as a nine-year-old was that my friends and schoolmates had cousins in the Bronx or Brooklyn.  We had cousins in Italy, France, Argentina, Ecuador, Canada and Mexico.  They all spoke English at home; we spoke Italian and French and used English only when we had guests who did not speak those other languages.  Their fathers owned local retail stores or were suburban dentists or small-town lawyers; my father’s business, perhaps no larger than theirs, made products (or more precisely had products made for it under contract) that it sold globally. Their mothers generally did not work and often had not gone to university.  My mother had a doctorate and was a professor of chemistry.  Their parents drove, or aspired to drive, a Cadillac, generally pronounced Cad-E-Lack; my parents owned an English car, a Humber Super-Snipe.  When they went on vacation to the mountains, it meant a weekend of overeating at a borscht-belt resort in the Catskills; for my family it meant a couple of weeks of hiking in the Alps.  If they went to the beach for a vacation, it was generally to the Jersey Shore; for us a seaside vacation was a trip to Cape Cod, Nova Scotia, or the Riviera.  If their family owned a second house, it was a rough cabin by a lake in western New Jersey; we owned a villa in Italy.  For them a great day was to go the ball game; for us it was a trip to an art museum or an evening at the Philharmonic. They all loved to watch the Milton Berle and Jackie Gleason shows on television, and I was not allowed to watch either.  When they talked about the future, they thought in terms of days, weeks and months; we worked on a much longer time-frame. And, while my Jewish friends of Tsarist Russian extraction thought gefilte fish to be the culinary summum bonum, I found it revolting and could never force myself to eat it; even our cat put her nose up when we put some of it in her dish.

It was not that we were a lot richer than they were—indeed, I do not believe we were. We lived in a more modest house than many of my friends’ families, and most of my friends were indulged with many more things than my brothers and I. And we certainly were not smarter than they were—the crowd I grew up with was absolutely remarkable for how many really brilliant kids it included.  But my family tended to have very different values from most of my friends’ families, with more of a focus on world affairs, intellectual matters and high culture.  In short, we were Western European haut bourgeois, and they were part of the great American lower middle class.

I first realized how different I was from the American mainstream at summer camp the summer after the fourth grade, when I was not quite ten years’ old.  The camp I attended was Camp Greenbrier in the Blue Ridge Mountains of West Virginia.  The family connection to that camp dated back to my brothers’ childhoods, and I believe that my parents first heard about the camp from a teacher in the Teaneck schools who worked there as a camp counselor during the summers.  About two thirds of the boys in this camp came from various states of the American South, including Mississippi, Alabama, the Carolinas and the Virginias.  They all seemed fixated on regional collegiate football rivalries, typically between a university in their state and the equivalent institution in an adjacent state.  I was not even dimly aware of these particular rivalries, but they seemed to be terribly important to the majority of the other boys.  Almost every day at lunch or dinner, one table or another would begin chanting some taunt to another which proclaimed the strength, power, and athletic superiority of its favorite team, and the corresponding feebleness of its hated rival.

At Greenbrier, the campers were housed in large tents erected over permanent wooden platforms.  A typical tent would house four to six boys in bunk beds who were overseen by a counselor.  One of my tent-mates that summer was a boy named Jim from the small city of Galax in southern Virginia.  I had been to Italy for the early part of the summer and was at Greenbrier only for the second session.  One afternoon, Jim asked me why I had not been there for the first session, and I made the mistake of telling him that I was in Europe visiting my relatives.  He then began telling everyone that my name was Sassadonte the Forrinnahh, a name that he would make sure he pronounced as mockingly as possible. About a week later, I was cornered by Jim’s older brother Bill, a tall thin fellow about five years older than me and a yahoo who was even more ignorant than his little brother Jim.  Bill put his hands around my neck and snarled, “Hey, Sassadonte.  I hear yer a forrinahh and a Yankee to boot.  This is what we do to people like you back home in Galax!”  And then he lifted me by the head at least one foot off the ground. For a moment I thought I had breathed my last, but then he put me down again.  That day I learned a lesson to keep my differentness to myself.  And I made a studied effort to avoid Bill for the rest of the summer. 

From then on I discussed such matters only with people whose backgrounds and outlooks were more or less like those of my family.  It was often safer to blend in and keep a protective wall around myself.  Of course, the 1950s in America were a time that prized petty conformity, and the American South, where most of my camp-mates came from, prized it even more than the rest of the country.  It was the time of the Organization Man and The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit.  Nonetheless, even today, I find it better to avoid arousing resentment when I am working in the broader society than to call too much attention to myself, my abilities or my accomplishments.  The damage caused by the attendant jealousies often more than offsets the higher status or admiration one might expect to accrue from those differences.  There is no better example of the pervasiveness of this issue than the model common in many schools and children’s athletic programs in which every child gets a trophy independent of achievement.  It is seen as better to hide competency by giving the same awards equally to those with and without distinguishing ability than to call attention to those who excel in a given area.

That lesson was hammered home very forcefully in an early scene in Steven Spielberg’s movie, Schindler’s List. This scene centered on a German-Jewish woman who was a slave laborer in a Nazi concentration camp during the 1930s.  This woman had been detailed to a group that was building a barracks building.  The woman made the mistake of approaching the SS officer commanding her work team, offering to use her engineering training to make the work more efficient.  She thought that by making herself useful she would be more valued.  The SS man turned to her and sneered, “What have we here?  An educated Jew?”  He then drew his Luger and murdered her on the spot.

It is commonly said that women need to hide their intelligence and abilities to be accepted in the broader American society.  Actually this issue applies to both sexes to about the same degree.  In situations in which wealth, intelligence or ability are highly prized and valued, and one should use all of his or her gifts.  But there are also situations in which these capacities are more of a source of envy and resentment than a benefit. The trick is to know what set of rules apply in a given circumstance. As I write this essay I wonder if I am betraying my own advice in calling out many aspects of my own differentness.