The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ

  That was why so many decades later, when I felt myself called to faith in Jesus Christ, when, distraught and in confusion, I drove up into the mountains to question the integrity of my convictions, to cross-examine my motives day after day, week after week, month after month, I had to ask myself: Was this a real religious conversion or was it merely the final stage in the process of assimilation that had begun in my hometown so long ago? Was I putting on the whole armor of God or merely joining the church of the majority?

  Are you a Jew?

  From time to time, someone in the wider world would ask this question of a Great Neck teenager. And so often, he or she would answer, “Well, my parents are.”

  Well, my parents are. Or as Jonathan Miller put it in the British comedy revue Beyond the Fringe, “I’m not really a Jew. Just Jew-ish. I never went the whole hog.” Jew-ish, that’s it. A lot of us Great Neckers said some version of that in our teens. As we came into that age when people begin to think seriously about who they are, being a Jew just felt like, you know, our parents’ thing, yesterday’s thing, history’s, not today’s. We had not become ashamed of our Jewishness exactly. It had simply begun to seem alien to us, archaic, extraneous. The turn-of-the-century Russian shtetl Jews in the exuberant musical Fiddler on the Roof—which hit Broadway when I was ten years old—could sing about the joys of “Tradition!” all they liked. But what traditions were they talking about exactly? A smothering, claustrophobic ghetto, estranged from the society around it? An ancient language no one else spoke written in antiquated letters no one else could read? Funny-looking skullcaps? Corkscrew sidelocks? Over-long beards?

  Tradition might have been some consolation for our grandfathers in the Old Country. In the Old Country, they had been strangers in a strange land, hated and excluded by the natives. But what did we need it here for, in glorious America? Here, everyone was a stranger and so everyone was part of the mix. Thanks for the Hebrew lesson and the yarmulke, Rabbi, real nice, but oh look, my fellow American just planted my flag on the moon! My flag! On the moon! See you later, Rabbi.

  Are you a Jew?

  Well, my parents are. Jew-ish.

  For each of us, in every Leave It to Beaver house, on Oxford Boulevard and on Plymouth and Cambridge and Hampshire Roads, the path to all-American selfhood was bound to pass through such areas of shadow. They were like the half-lit corridors and corners in a psychic maze from which, with any luck, we would emerge into the light of an integrated cultural identity.

  For me, in my house, in my family, it was a maze of multiple dimensions, some passageways haunted, some corners dark.

  My parents despised Great Neck in many ways. They constantly spoke of moving—to Manhattan, to California, overseas—but somehow never did, never could. My mother, I suspect, would have hit the road in a heartbeat, given free rein. She didn’t particularly take to playing Just Mommy in the suburbs. She loved bright lights and Broadway shows and wanted to live in the city. But my dad was not the traveling kind. Once planted, he stayed. And as he became one of the most popular DJs in the city, living in the high-end suburb felt like success to him, even when it got on his nerves. Still, both he and Mom exhibited a degree of disdain for the town they raised us in, and they taught us, their four sons, to disdain it too. They wanted us to be in it, but not of it.

  Our neighbors were nouveau riche, they told us. They were tradesmen who had earned their money later in life. They didn’t know how to handle their wealth with the panache of the aristocracy. The irony of hearing this from my dad and mom—the son of a pawnbroker and the daughter of a disbarred ambulance-chasing lawyer who had to move house every other month to beat the landlord—somehow never occurred to us boys, or at least not to me. All I knew was the fact—and it was a fact—that my parents were indeed more urbane, more elegant, more sophisticated, more classy than the parents of many of my friends.

  My friends’ parents drove insanely massive Cadillacs, each one two tons of garish flash that seemed to take up both lanes on Great Neck’s narrow horse-and-buggy roads. My dad, conversely, brought home a chic succession of European compacts: a Citroen, an MG, several Volvos, and the like. Many of my friends lived in mansions with columned porticoes and swimming pools on their acres of land. We had a relatively modest colonial clapboard, gracefully decorated inside by my mother who really did have excellent taste. When we were teenagers, Dad had an asphalt badminton court built in our backyard. But no pool. Never a pool. Pools were garish. Nouveau riche.

  Pools were garish and too much jewelry was garish. Fur coats and overly colorful shirts and talking too loud and talking about how much money you had—all nouveau riche. Rambunctious boys though we were, my brothers and I had good manners when we needed them. We learned to speak softly—oh, and most importantly, we never ever spoke with a New York or Long Island accent.

  A NuYawk accent! Or, heaven help us, a Lawn Guyland accent—that squawking horror of a dialect that gave the Guyland its nickname! As an up-and-coming performer on both TV and radio, my father had trained any hint of localism out of his voice. An expert at imitating accents and dialects of all kinds, he claimed he could no longer speak in the manner of his native Baltimore (Balmer!) because he had labored so long to unlearn it. He and my mother passed this speech training onto their sons with a passion. No closed vowel or dropped g that escaped our lips went uncorrected. We were told to repeat the phrase, “My family is in a class by itself,” not just so as to incorporate the truth of its meaning (as I later realized), but to drill us out of anything that sounded even remotely like, “Muy fehmly is in a clehss buy itself.” To this day, my children tease me because I say chahklet and dahnkey rather than chocolate and donkey, having worked so hard as a lad not to say chawklet or dawnkey. Often as I’ve tried, I find I can’t make the adjustment.

  All this attention to gentility had its benefits, of course. There’s certainly nothing wrong with having good manners. Good diction comes in handy too. And no one ever died from having understated tastes in decor and clothing.

  But my parents’ commitment to our elegance as a family was always stated in opposition to the perceived inelegance of the families around us—the families of our friends, the only people we knew. Ultimately, I think, this contributed to an insular and contrarian misanthropy in us boys. We developed the absurd sense that we were somehow superior to “ordinary people.” And given our circumstances, that meant we were superior to ordinary Jews.

  This snobbery—and its underlying racism—emanated mostly from my mother. Despite his hostility toward the world in general, my father was a democratic fellow at heart. He knew where he came from and had no pretensions to aristocracy. For him, I think, teaching us genteel behavior and uninflected diction was a matter of show biz more than anything else. As a performer, he wanted us to be presentable to the largest possible audience.

  In my mother, however—my tasteful, elegant, and sophisticated mother—for whom taste, elegance, and sophistication were qualities of the utmost value—the whole training program smacked of anti-Semitism. She did have . . . not pretensions exactly. Aspirations would be closer to the truth. She had spent long hours of her unhappy youth playing hooky, ensconced in movie theaters, watching sparkling, chic stars swan across the flickering screen. Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Ginger Rogers. That was who she wanted to be like, I think. Upper-crust Englishmen and WASP college professors—they were as gods to her. And, of course, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. With his four terms, he was president for her entire girlhood. Even when she was well into her eighties, you only had to mention his name—you only had to mention his initials—to evoke her Pavlovian gasp of admiration: “Ah, he spoke the King’s English!” She loved that sort of thing.

  She would have sent us to fancy private schools, if my father would’ve plunked for it. She would have had us wearing tennis-anyone whites and country-club blue blazers with crests on the pockets, though what the crests would have been I can’t for the life of me imagine. To her, Great Neck was not ju
st a town full of nouveau riche. It was a town, specifically, full of nouveau riche Jews. The fancy cars, the jewelry, the brash voices with their Guyland bray: Jew stuff. Loud, garish Jew stuff and she detested it.

  She was an anti-Semite. It’s true. She was just as Jewish as the rest of us, mind—only not. Not in her own imagination anyway. For one thing, she had some Austrian blood. I’m not sure how much, but enough, I guess, to give her bragging rights over Ashkenazi or Eastern European Jews who are traditionally regarded as lower class by the upper-class Germans and Austrians. Her uncle—her mother’s brother—was actually named Adolf! He went missing in action fighting for the Austrian empire in World War I. When Hitler rose to power in the thirties, my Ashkenazi grandfather is said to have remarked, “Well, I guess now we know what happened to Adolf.” Still, Mom was very proud her family had given one up for the Fatherland.

  That—the Austrian line—was on her mother’s side. Mom’s mother was a very impressive figure apparently, a real hard case. Escaped from Europe with her younger siblings hidden in a haycart, as I recall the tale—escaped not from government oppression, either, but from an evil stepmother who abused and beat her. She was only thirteen years old. She came to America where she grew up to become a radical socialist, a feminist, and an atheist. She divorced her first husband and left their son in his custody. She became a chiropodist, a rare professional woman. She was said to have once performed a do-it-yourself abortion by flinging herself down a flight of stairs. So yeah, a hard case, no doubt about it.

  Mom’s big sister, my aunt, was a gifted scholar. That won their mother’s affection. But my mom was a different matter entirely. Mom’s mother dismissed her as a girly flibbertigibbet. “She had no time for me,” Mom would say. “But my father liked me because I was pretty.”

  She was pretty too. In her youth, she looked something like those movie stars she admired so much. So whatever parental affection my mother got, it came from her father, who liked a girly flibbertigibbet just fine. Gammy, we boys called him. I knew him only as an old man and can barely remember him. But in his heyday, he was apparently quite dashing and a bit of a rascal. Whenever she got in trouble in school, my mother said, Gammy would come and charm the female teacher and all would be forgiven. He was handsome, big, and athletic. He put himself through college on a basketball scholarship. I’ve seen his photograph in a book about Jewish American athletes. It was very rare stuff for a Jew of his time.

  He became a lawyer but was caught up in one of the reformist sweeps of late-1920s New York City. He was disbarred when he failed to show up in court to face charges of ambulance chasing. He had given a business card to the parents of a boy who’d been in a bicycle accident, something like that. His disgrace was a great source of pain and shame to my mother. She never even told us about it until the old man died, and then she only told my older brother and me. He and I were teenagers then. We thought it was amusing and cool to have a criminal in the family. It suited our roguish sense of ourselves. But it had clearly been traumatic for Mom. After his disbarment, Gammy was employed only sporadically and my mother’s family was often broke. Throughout the Great Depression, they were forced to move from place to place whenever they couldn’t come up with the rent. They bounced around New York first, and later through Baltimore and its suburbs.

  And each time they moved, so my mother told us—and told us proudly too!—before they moved, her father would scan the local phone books to make sure there were no Jewish names near their new location. Gammy didn’t want to live in a neighborhood with other Jews.

  I don’t think he was in denial about who or what he was. A family legend says he once attended a Labor Day parade in Manhattan where a cadre of Hassids were marching along with the rest. Hassids—those are the Orthodox Jews who dress in black and leave their beards and sidelocks unshaven. A couple of thugs on the sidelines started jeering the Jews. Gammy grabbed the punks by their collars, one in each of his big, b-baller hands. He lifted them off their feet, drew their faces close to his, and said through gritted teeth, “Your Lord looked like that, you know.” Then he set them down again, silenced.

  But he was . . . an ardent assimilationist, I guess you could say. An immigrant, he was proud he had no trace of a greenhorn accent. Proud of his smooth, non-Jewish-seeming features. Proud to have nothing to do with his religion. Proud to go where other Jews could not. When my father arrived to pick up my mother for their first date, he was appalled to find her family living in a house outside of Baltimore across the street from a sign that said “Restricted Neighborhood,” meaning No Jews Allowed. “What on earth are you doing here?” Dad said to her.

  Gammy’s antipathies took hold in his younger daughter, his favorite. Like him, she was elegant, charming, and urbane. Like him, she wanted nothing to do with Old World behaviors. The more traditional forms of the Jewish religion were anathema to her. When my parents were married, the traditionalist side of my father’s family insisted my mother take a mikvah before the wedding. It’s a ritual Jewish bath for brides. It involves getting naked while other women wash you. My mother had never heard of the practice and—well!—she thought it absolutely barbaric. She flatly refused to have anything to do with such a thing. There is an entire wing of my extended family that apparently includes famous rabbis and Jewish theologians, but I’ve never met any of them because they never forgave my mother for blowing off the bath. They never spoke to us after that day.

  It wasn’t the religion that bothered her most, though. She could live with that. It was the cultural lines she wouldn’t cross. The mikvah did not offend her spiritual sense. It just struck her as uncivilized, that’s all. A civilized person takes her baths in private, thank you very much. A civilized, British-style person doesn’t speak some guttural hodge-podge language like Yiddish. I can honestly say, with no exaggeration whatsoever, I’ve learned more Yiddish words from my WASP-Irish-American wife than I ever learned from Mom. Likewise, any suggestion she was behaving like a clichéd “Jewish mother”—overbearing, smothering, manipulative—made her bridle. In all fairness, she was not that way. She was, rather, aloof and guarded. Hurt in youth and fearful, she lived at some inner distance from the surface of the world.

  There is one incident, one exchange between her and my father, that I remember particularly. I must have been no more than four or five at the time, but it struck me even then and stays with me still.

  My father, as I’ve said, was a master of accents and dialects. He could speak gibberish Italian to an Italian and convince the man he was speaking his native tongue. On his radio show every morning, he would pretend to be various characters with various funny voices. His straight man partner, Dee Finch, would interview these make-believe people about the weather or the news or whatever product was being advertised. The radio team—Klavan and Finch—had a little rolling closet in their studio in which they kept a collection of sound props: a guitar, a tambourine, a squeezy car horn that went aruga and so on.

  But the central prop was the closet door itself. My father would snap the door open and fling it shut—bang—to indicate to the listening audience that a new “person” had entered the room. Then he would launch into one of his character voices. There was Trevor Traffic, who would read the traffic report while my father rolled a marble around in an empty can to make it sound as if he were in a helicopter above the highways. There was the doctor Sy Kology, the poet Victor Verse, the Italian singer Emilio Percolator, and so on. All of them were admirably complete creations with their own personalities, accents, and ethnicities.

  Among the most popular of this imaginary crowd was Mr. Nat. He was an enthusiastic but hapless middle-manager with some hilariously meaningless title like “Coordinator of Interrelations.” I think he represented my father’s hostility toward the radio station’s various corporate suits who thought they should have some say in the content of his show. Nat would come sailing through the prop door calling out his catchphrase, “Mr. Nat is here!” And you could hear immediate
ly that he had a thick Jewish accent. He sounded like the Brooklyn-born son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.

  The audience loved Nat. What New Yorker didn’t have some corporate clown like this in his life? One time when I was suffering from food poisoning, my father took me to the local emergency room. There was a man there who had had a heart attack, a bad one by the looks of it. He was lying on a gurney, near death to all appearances. He recognized my father. He was a listener, a fan. As a nurse arrived with no small sense of urgency to roll him off to the OR, the poor guy managed to lift his hand to Dad in a weak greeting. He drew the oxygen mask down from his face and whispered faintly, “Mr. Nat is here!” and was then wheeled away to what fate God only knows.

  My father’s show played on the kitchen radio in my house every morning. We heard his voice in the background all through breakfast. My mother went on listening until the show was over at ten o’clock. Often, Dad came home right afterward, in the middle of the day. If he had done some routine he was particularly proud of, he might ask my mother whether she had heard it and if it made her laugh.

  This one time he came in, I was playing on the yellow linoleum kitchen floor. My mother was standing at the sink washing dishes. I know how old I was because I was playing with a figure of the One-Eyed, One-Horned, Flyin’ Purple People Eater, a character from a novelty song of the late 1950s. The song’s producers had given the toy to my father in hopes he would promote the song on his show. My father had passed it along to me.