When I read Henry Adams' copious antisemitic screeds, I can't keep away the glum thought that in his eminent, powerful family he couldn't have been the only one who thought that way. On the other hand, I also cringe as I consider that Hemingway, and probably Fitzgerald, and other heroes of my youth were also antisemites. Indeed, in my own Boston Irish milieu I need go no further than my own home and my parents' generation to find innumerable similar bigotries: kike, sheeny, spic, frog, wop, kraut, limey, nigger -- all hideous common words in the world of my youth.
I think I reached the age of eleven before it came to me there was something wrong here. By the time I was fifteen or sixteen and the editor of the local Catholic Youth Organization newspaper, my horror at realizing how I'd talked just a few years before led me to produce writhing editorials against antisemitism and its like. Luckily, I was smartypants enough to become the first person in my huge family tree (except for a cousin of my mother who became a Jesuit priest) to go to college. Then, at my Ivy league institution, I almost got thrown out because of my gaudy protest over the compulsory Baptist chapel that all the Jews who sat with me at our refectory table were compelled to attend. I'm aware this posting smacks of wearisome pride: "See where I came from, and look at me now!" In fact, though, the dominant insight is how lucky I was. I save 'pride' for things we achieve because of hard work. But the reason I rejected my milieu's attitude toward Jews was because of a wrenching humiliation I had. As a paperboy, I was sitting in the car that was taking two or three of us over the paper route, and I spouted a line I'd heard at home to the effect that the only thing Hitler got right was his attitude toward the Jews. Our good driver, with no rage in his voice just said, "I'm Jewish." I felt I'd just been scalded with water of my own boiling. For once I became speechless - and ashamed. It left me changed. Words use the user. Beware of their psychoactive, hallucinatory, effects.
