Here, in the midst of our Giant and Terrifying Pause, our Groundhog Days on Steroids, we can sometimes spare a moment or two away from the news binge for a little reflection.
Behind us is a past many of us took for granted. In front of us lies a future that, at best, is dimly outlined, not quite discernable through the present fog. It’s a time, I think, to draw on tangible past experience that may provide a guide for getting through the fog to what’s on the other side. Past actions can, I think, provide a bit of hope: Staying open to the positive potential of new experiences could prove beneficial.
A somewhat long-winded way of saying, I was going through some old files and came across an essay that I wrote for my 50th college reunion. There is no question that Brandeis University changed me. But getting there was a bumpy ride at best. I share the following in the spirit of hope.
MUSH
September 1957. My new stepfather dropped me and my new stepbrother (headed for MIT) in Boston after our cross-country trip from California. My stepfather (a wonderful man who would drop dead over the breakfast table six years later, ending my divorced mother’s one shot at happiness) was in a big hurry to meet up with my mother in Denver for their honeymoon. “You guys will be fine,” he said, not looking back. “Fine” was not quite it.
I took the trolley, the T, from downtown Boston to Watertown, transferred to the bus. And then I think there was another transfer to the bus that went by campus. By myself, petrified with fear, knowing no one. Walking up the hill to the Castle. The Big Deal Sophomores were in the quad, telling people where to go. I was a music major. I was supposed to room with Sy (last name gone, I’m sorry to say). But he had rearranged things and was rooming with Bob Sekuler. I was posted to another room with a freshman, Eugene Turitz (“He’s not a music major, but he went to Music and Art.” And I think, Uh, okay. What’s music and art?). At that moment I heard the person who will turn out to be Jeff Golland say to someone he’s just met: “I’m pre-med. I’m going to be a doctor.” More terror. I had no idea what I wanted to be, no notion of a future road.
My new roommate is not in the room, but he has staked out a bed. There’s a saxophone case in a corner, by the desk he has staked out. I unpack my suitcase. My trunk comes upstairs. I stow that. Still no roommate. I think I’m hungry. I go downstairs to the snack bar, there on the ground floor of the Castle, at the back. There’s something called a “cabinet” on the menu board. I order a milk shake and an egg salad sandwich on white bread. (Are we getting the picture here? Is this person’s gestalt coming into focus?). The milk shake turns out to be ice cream-less milk and chocolate syrup. (The “cabinet” turns out to be what the West Coast calls a milkshake; lots to learn; like scrod.) The egg salad sandwich sits in the pit of my stomach. I somehow manage to not throw up. This sets a pattern for my first two years at Brandeis—sheer terror coupled with pride at not throwing up.
Gene later told me that he almost demanded a roommate change, sight unseen. Who was this person with the Hawaiian shirts (oh yes) from California? Gene was the essence of cool, played jazz, had jazz records, and had some very cool friends. Music and art was, of course New York’s High School of Music and Art. I knew nothing of this, nothing of the other special schools, Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Hunter High. I had no idea what I wanted to be. I had no idea what I wanted to know, needed to know, should know. I was mush. I was a far second academically in a small private boy’s high school in San Francisco, a pianist with some solid musicianship and rotten technique that would never improve, an only child from a non-religious but somewhat spiritual background, who had grown to mid-adolescence with absolutely no knowledge—direct or indirect—of Jews or Judaism. None. For me Brandeis was the co-ed college with the Leonard Bernstein music reputation that was close to Boston that gave me a scholarship and work-study. It wasn’t Cornell (early admission but in the back of beyond), Amherst or Harvard (wait-list), nor was it Brown (scholarship, but this was way before Brown became Brown.). Brandeis was about to turn me into a goy among the gentiles.
The sophomores on the floor were all from New York City. Well, Al Blumenthal was from Yonkers, but for me, that was the same. I osmosed stickball, JohnnyonaPony, the corner candy store. The dialect. The rhythm. California was nothing like this. Things were nice in California. I was edgeless.
For the kid from the West Coast with the dorky glasses and the crew-cut—who was not allowed, by his roommate, to wear his Hawaiian shirt—the standout of orientation was (do I have this right?) Marty Peretz leading a hootenanny outside by Hamilton pond. Everyone in the crowd knew exactly what was going on, knew all the words to all the songs, felt immediately at home. I’d just finished a summer counseling at a YMCA camp in the California redwoods. We sang “Abide With Me” at the campfire. You were all tough, with an inner fire. I was lost.
“Oh, great, we’re reading the Iliad again. I can use my notes from last year at Stuyvesant.” Really. The Iliad. Only one of a great mass of things I didn’t know existed. Until now, week one, freshman year. What was I going to do? With no idea how to read critically, I read everything and tried to absorb it all. I remember Ellen K. Lane, assistant registrar (?), and her “look to the left, look to the right, one of you will not be here in four years” speech as an added ingredient to my personal terror regime.
Some time in October or early November the campus shut down because of a flu epidemic. Those of us from the West Coast were offered room in the infirmary. No one offered to take me home. (In fairness, the inside of Gene’s house was being painted; there really wasn’t any room). The campus emptied. I was more homesick than I would have thought possible. I blew a good chunk of my summer earnings on a round trip plane ticket home to San Francisco. In what would become a pattern for virtually every vacation during every academic year, I lugged volumes of reading and notebooks along. And read very, very little. There was an excuse this time—I got the flu when I got home. Other vacations the guilt just piled up.
For me, my first “Brandeis” Thanksgiving was a peak experience, one that pulled university experience into a new perspective while pointing me deeper into—well, if not Judaism, then Jewishness.
You have to understand. I loved, still love the memory of, my California family. I was an only child, but there were aunts and uncles and cousins, grandparents.
On my father’s side, my Presbyterian grandmother could trace the Moulthrops back to the ship after the Mayflower and a town planner in New Haven. On my mother’s side, my grandfather had come from the Black Hills of South Dakota and had been in South Africa with his father looking for gold. My grandmother’s family ran a hotel in Penzance, in England. Grandpa’s family stayed there; he and Grandma fell in love. South Africa was unsuccessful. He went back to the States, up to Yreka in northern California where he panned for gold and sent his future wife money. My grandmother packed her trunk, came over steerage on the Lusitania in 1908, went through Ellis Island, then cross-country by train to meet and marry him in Yreka. They lost everything in the Depression. The uncles (and my father) served in WWII. Everybody worked. The kids played. Everyone seemed pretty happy. If not, no one talked about it. And certainly, no one said anything about The Others. Any of The Others. Of any ilk or hue.
There’s no prejudice. But there’s no awareness. Thanksgivings are just meals. Christmas and Easter are lightly tinged with ritual. But my consciousness is, at this time, very like Gertrude Stein’s definition of Oakland: When you get there, there is no there there.
That first Thanksgiving, 1957, my roommate, Gene Turitz, and I come down to New York for Thanksgiving by train. Gene’s father is an engineer. His mother is a social worker. His sister is studying social work. His grandfather, I will find out, was a founder of the Socialist Party in the northeast. We are going to Thanksgiving Day dinner to an aunt and uncle’s home in Nyack. Um, okay.
Wednesday evening is going to Manhattan, I see my first Broadway show, Gene finds me afterwards in Times Square (“I just looked for the guy walking down the street looking up at the tall buildings”), we meet up with some of his high school friends at a coffee house in the Village. There is someone playing a guitar, singing.
The house in Nyack is a converted farmhouse with rooms that seem to go on forever. The aunt is in social work, the uncle is a professor, I am told. There are cousins who are vocal, noisy, opinionated, Gene maintains this will be boring and that we will cut out as soon as we can. But one room holds a piano and a harpsichord; there are four-hand transcriptions of Beethoven symphonies open on the piano. A guitar and a lute hang on the wall.
Dinner has such exotica as mushroom-barley soup and kasha varnichkas. And suddenly—tasty Brussels sprouts. I recognize the turkey, but instead of white bread stuffing, there are oysters and chestnuts.
But it is the talk, the talk that swirls around the table, the ideas that lift and land only to be picked up and shaken. I hear views about the President, and Congressional policy. I hear the beginnings of ideas about social justice. I am eating strange food in a home full of music with people who are passionate about a life of ideas, a place where words can begin to be a foundation for actions, and the cranberry sauce doesn’t come from a can.
“This is boring,” says Gene, who thinks that all family gatherings are like this. We hitch a ride back into Manhattan and are dropped in the Village. We walk east, to The Five Spot. Thelonious Monk is playing. We listen for an hour, an eternity. When we come out, the November air is crisp and a light rain has mirrored the black asphalt, shooting and bouncing streetlights and neon into the atmosphere and around my brain. I run up Third Avenue, dancing on the sidewalk, screaming with joy. My life, truly, has changed forever.
Everyone’s college experience is unique. I think, for us non-Jews at Brandeis, our experience may have been unique-er. It’s like that dream where you discover a secret room in a house you thought you knew, the one where the door opens on new realms, new vistas, maybe even a luxuriant topiary garden. Imagine someone who has never been to a Seder, never known that this ritual meal existed, imagine this person sitting, for the first time, and listening to the stories, so rich with metaphor and meaning, stories about slavery and bondage, about freedom and responsibility. Imagine someone only dimly aware of the Holocaust watching the Brandeis Film Society screening of Nacht und Nebel, which then provides an opening to ask questions of dorm mates and others. Imagine falling seriously for an extremely politically active girl from the Mid-West whose already-formed social conscience begins to intrude on narrow Californian thinking. Imagine mush beginning to develop some hard edges.
After my sophomore year my father wanted me to transfer to UC Berkeley. His business was having a bad time, he said. And an anti-Semitic aunt was jumping up and down in the background. I had never talked back to my father in my life. But I did this time. I stayed at Brandeis. I was becoming more and more used to hearing people speak up, confront each other, confront authority. I think I was learning to be, if not a Jew, then at least, um, Jew…ish.
I stayed a music major (too many English credits required to change), but when I hit a wall with piano (two hours a day practicing; no progress), I looked out over the campus and discovered the kids having all the fun. I auditioned for Allegro, got the lead (much to my surprise), and was, from then, hooked into the theatre: Hi Charlie, orientation revues, G&S, my own production of the comedy The Play’s The Thing. In retrospect, it feels as if we were given lots of opportunities to create along with the responsibility to produce quality work. But someone was always pushing the boundaries, in the arts, in the political arena. I was too scared to picket at the Woolworth’s our senior year. But I was proud to be at a university where students were involved in important social issues outside the campus.
I got an MA in theatre from Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, but politics and political involvement now were part of my life. In DC, I worked part-time as a gofer for assistants to New York Senator Jacob Javits. And I went into the Peace Corps, ’63 to ’65, in Nigeria—right after independence and before the revolution; a time of hopeful excitement when political discourse in Ibadan’s high-life clubs was as heady as the palm wine. I wound up back in New York, working as an assistant to CUNY Chancellor Al Bowker at a time when the system was going to a policy of open admissions (and as John Roche’s former graduate assistant Joe Murphy—another goy among the gentiles—went from being Peace Corps Director in Ethiopia to president of Queens College). There were other jobs, back and forth from profit to non-, marketing director for Educational Testing Service during Nader’s Truth In Testing crusade, marketing director for two international public accounting firms (Deloitte, KPMG), for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, for the HealthCare Chaplaincy. But the social justice flame sparked at Brandeis has never been damped.
Like many, I marched in DC and in NYC in many of the Vietnam War protests, most memorably across the bridge to the Pentagon where our own Abbie Hoffman was going to levitate the building. My oldest son has memories of that (still last) anti-nuclear protest march in the 1970s, thousands of us, with Bread and Puppet Theatre giants showing the way. I was chilled by how we were treated at the Iraq War protests, where we were herded behind barricades by Cossacks on horseback, and at the Republican National Convention when we were photographed and many were illegally jailed.
But all politics really is local. When we were raising our family in the former pig farm suburb of Princeton Junction, there were school board issues, bond issues, sewer issues. And now, in Greenwich Village, there’s the war against the real estate interests who want to steamroller Landmarks and build luxury condos, and New York University’s equally odious landgrab. There’s Con Edison to fight as they tear up your block for a two-year project that takes five years. And there’s national politics to engage in on so many levels. Brandeis taught me, mostly it was you, my classmates who taught me, to move through the terror and stand up, to think through, to use my brain, to embrace ideas, to challenge.
It turns out the dream door to the dream mansion was a real door to a real world, one I had no idea existed until—just by being who you were, who you are, at an institution that demanded, through a sharp and demanding faculty, that we stand and define and defend the “truth even unto its innermost parts” we were seeking—you made manifest for me. As if huge bronze doors swung open, slowly and surely, and I was invited into the light.
By the way, I don’t agree with everything about the institution, now or in the past. All subject for another discussion. But it is absolutely true that Brandeis changed my life. For the better.
Shalom.