He not only gave me a severe beating, but he called me a "damn Jew."

In this summary fashion, at the age of eight, one of my Gentile school-fellows first made me aware that I was not just a boy, but something more, a something that was to affect me in many ways, culminating with the withdrawal of a bid to a college fraternity which had not known of my race.

I was born in a small town in the Rockies. My parents were among the leading business and social lights of a community of ten (sic) million. My father was born in Berlin, but came to America at the age of two. My mother, a descendant of a good Hungarian stock, was born in New York. My father, in private to me, often used to disparage the "aristocracy" 2of my mother's family. She was an East New Yorker. When they were married, and as I grew up, I got the idea that this was an awful place, inhabited only by people a shade better than the poor, tubercular "Kikes" with numerous progeny, who were "persuaded" to leave my hometown under the guise of aid.

As I said, my father spoke slightingly of my maternal grandfather, although my paternal ancestor had been a saloon-keeper and frontier merchant in the days when the West was young. If my mother reads this now, it will be the first time she will have learned of my father's attitude towards her people.

My mother was an innate aristocrat, a college woman, ambitious and cultured. She recoiled from the harsh pioneer Main Streetism of my birthplace, and I was to be a lawyer or journalist if she could bring it about. That was partly responsible for my being brought up entirely in the English tongue, although father and mother and his people spoke German.

3

The Seder service and my grandmother's German accent were delightful to me as a boy, and still are. These were the only "foreign" in my consciousness, and I was impregnated with a distaste for Jews born outside of the United States. When I made a trip to New York at the age of seven, the memory of "fearsome Italians" was stronger with me than that of the long bearded, be-derbied old Hebrews of the East Side. This seems significant to me now. I ascribe it to an avoidance by my mother of any communication of the idea of our racial ties.

It may be said then that in the Far West, and this is true of all but the very largest cities where there are Ghettos, a Jew is not a Jew. All the leading merchants are Hebraic; the older generation, now rapidly disappearing, preserved the racial unity, founded synagogues, invariably Reform, but sought to lose their Hebraic characteristics as rapidly as possible. The middle generation is drifting away from even that unity with its leaning towards Jesus Christ. Discussion of anti-Semitism is barred in the Reform pulpit. The Polish and Russian Jews are eternally 4Being pushed out of the small cities into the Ghettos of Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and the larger places - by their own people, mind you. The wealthy ones, the formidable, of course, are apologetically accepted, attain culture, lose their accent, and are absorbed in a few years.

The younger generation, - but that's may story. I was sent to the Synagogue Sunday School, where I learned mainly Jewish History, and thought it strange to be in church on days when my schoolmates were at school across the street. After the beating and the appelation my opponent gave me, which first made me aware of the difference, I began to be ashamed to be seen entering the Sunday School by my chums, who invariably were at recess across the way.

As I grew older, and could understand, my father inculcated in me a prejudice, and my actions were guided by that fear so that I might never leave myself open to insult or be reminded. And yet my father often spoke 5to me of becoming a rabbi - a good Reform rabbi has a life position and makes $10,000 to $15,000 a year.

Then a rabbi came into my life and flattered me into interest in my Sunday School work, and began to instil the "under dog" and "cling together" philosophies into me. I was confirmed in a service, partly in Hebrew and mostly in English, in which the ceremonial and display aptitudes of the Jew predominated. We thought one boy insane who learned Hebrew and became "bar mitzvah."

The beauty of the service won me and awoke my poetic sense, which is nearly all that remains to me of Jewry. I was in a fair way to becoming an ardent Judaist, perhaps a rabbi, a class whom I thought and still think the most broadly educated and informed of all men, when the rabbi who confirmed me was railroaded from my home town by his executive board on a charge of immorality. He was not even given a hearing, and this aroused all my fighting instincts. Those who brought the charge against him were 6virtual dictators of the congregation by reason of wealth alone. The "Holier than thou" idea little became them. This was in war time.

And along with the after-the-war cynicism that came to me, was a correct understanding of the case. He was an Englishman; the majority of his flock were Germans. Jews against a Jew, just as in the case of the "persuading" of the "Kikes" to leave town.

I went to college, lived at a YMCA, was rejected by a Gentile fraternity when they learned I was a Jew, after they had bid me, came East, changed my name, and my very employers today do not know my nationality.

The transformation of a Jew in a Far Western town is closely parelleled in New York. The procession out of the Ghetto to the Bronx, and from the Bronx to the Drive, equals the degeneration of the generations of the West. One place is as another. I do not moralize or condemn, for the freedom of movement, the universal viewpoint, represent distinct achievement, but not the ultimate!

7

That is what I have discovered. The two million Jews in New York in the main are potentially or actually mirror reflections of myself, and of what I stand for. But the Jew in New York has made me proud of my Jewish blood. Let me explain. I see his, the Ghetto man's simplicity in all the leading fields of thought and endeavor. It took New York to give me this.

I do not have to become a "member in good standing" of any Jewish body, or to affiliate myself with my people, to recognize their worth. Evangelism and conversion to me are forms of hysteria. But understanding and consistency are everything. And respect. I cannot put my finger on the exact point of my belief here when this understanding and respect have come, but I should be afraid of appearing patronizing to them, were not the admirable qualities of the Ghetto Jew, the "Kike" Jew and also his brother the Reformed "snob" (as many of them are), so evident.

The realization comes to me that in the arts which I worship, and the sciences which fascinate me, I am beholden to the Jews, and as a Jew am in the position of a petitioner to Jews!