The Great Good Thing (2 page)

There was a lot at stake. So it seemed to me at any rate. I don't mean salvation—heaven over hell. I wasn't thinking in those terms at all. But my life. What effect would baptism have on my life?

There would be no hiding it, that was for sure. I was a writer. I had no secrets. I hadn't had a thought in years that hadn't ended up in print somewhere. If I became a Christian I would be bound to declare it in some article or some interview or something. And what then? Would I lose work because of it? At the time, I was making good money in Hollywood, turning out ghost-story scripts and murder mysteries. Would producers stop considering me for such assignments? Would they assume I was too pious to produce rollicking good tales about masked madmen with butcher knives chasing half-naked women across the screen?

And would I
become
too pious, in fact? What a nightmare
that would be! As a writer, I prided myself on seeing and describing the world as it was, not as I wanted it or thought it was supposed to be. I had made my living writing hard-boiled fiction about tough, cynical men and femmes fatales swept up in ugly underworlds of crime, sex, and murder. Would I suddenly be reduced to penning saccharine fluff about some little girl who lost her pet bunny but Jesus brought it back again? “Oh, God,” I prayed fervently more than once, “whatever happens, don't let me become a Christian novelist!”

Even that prospect, terrible as it was, was only a part of the greater danger. If I became a Christian, would I lose my freedom of thought? Would I sacrifice my ability to question every proposition and examine every belief to the bone? Would I lose my realism and my tragic sensibility? Would I descend into that smiley-faced religious idiocy that mistakes the good health and prosperity of the moment for the supernatural favor of God?

These were not just academic questions. I was living a good life now, and I was content, but that hadn't always been the case. I'd been miserable and twisted as a young man, angry and soul-sick and mired in foolish delusions. My sanity had been hard fought for and hard won. Reality mattered to me: it was the medicine that kept me well. I had no desire whatsoever to cling to any comforting lies, or to any lies at all. I had no desire whatsoever to believe in a God who wasn't there.

Then, too, there was the matter of my Jewish identity, surely as big a stumbling block as any. I had never been a religious Jew. I had been forced to go to Hebrew School as a child,
and I had been bar-mitzvahed at thirteen. But I had hated the Jewish rite of passage, not for itself but because it was an act of hypocrisy in my case. I had rejected the faith—and all faith—not long afterward.

Still, a Jew I remained, racially and culturally. I had the face for it, no question, and the wise-guy urban attitudes, the love of intellection and debate, and the irreverent sense of humor, an almost pathological inability to take myself or anyone else seriously. I knew the history of my people well and identified with it: both our miraculous triumphs and achievements and the correspondingly demonic hatred we inspired. I was proud when a Jew won a Nobel Prize or hit a home run. And I never let an ugly remark go unanswered, or tried to pass myself off as anything other than what I was.

If I had any discomfort with my Jewishness, it arose in the face of cultural clichés, the sort of stereotypes that were circulated as often by other Jews as by gentiles. I didn't like to see Jews in books and movies routinely portrayed as weak or cowardly, incompetent with machinery or uncomfortable with the outdoors. I wasn't anything like that. I'd been in plenty of schoolyard duke-outs as a kid and proved I could take a punch and throw one. Like my father before me, I could fix pretty much anything given the right tools. And I'd been an outdoorsman, camping and fishing and hiking, much of my life. I didn't like it when Jews were described as cosmopolitan either, unattached citizens of the world. Me, I was American through and through. I was born here, and a patriot to my bones.

But to turn away from my Jewish heritage—even to seem to turn away—to join what many of my fellow Jews considered the religion of the enemy—was no small thing, not to me. I had thought and read and written a good deal about the causes and effects of anti-Semitism, and for a time I had wholly immersed myself in studying the unfathomable wickedness of the Holocaust. No thinking person would call such cruelties “Christian,” but likewise no one could deny the historic role and responsibility of the church in this inextinguishable hatred and its resulting atrocities. It was the default belief of many Jews that a Jew who converted was trying to exempt himself from that hostility, trying to ingratiate himself with his gentile oppressors. (“They'll still throw you in the ovens,” was the immediate response of one Jewish friend when I told him about my baptism.) I was a public man. I wrote and said things and people read and heard them. I did not want anyone, anywhere, ever to think I had betrayed my people, the greatest and most persecuted among the nations of the earth.

And I knew there was one person who would believe exactly that, one person who would think me a coward and a traitor to my kind, without question, without a doubt: my father. We were not friends, my father and I, and there were many times through the years when we had been at daggers drawn. We lived on opposite coasts. We didn't see each other much. We rarely spoke and, when we did, I never told him more than the most superficial news about my life. But he was old now, and I was middle-aged. We were both good men, or tried to be. We were both men of integrity, or tried to be. He
had been a kind and generous grandfather to my children, and there had been peace and even amicability between us for at least a decade. My baptism would end that peace, I was certain. My father had once told me he would disown me if I ever converted. I knew he would never forgive me. I hated the thought of bringing trouble to my house.

For five months, winter into spring, I drove the hills of Santa Barbara and prayed. I questioned my sincerity and my intentions. I analyzed the philosophical steps that had led me to the brink of conversion, holding them to the light one after another like a jeweler with a set of gems, turning each one this way and that to study its facets and pronounce upon its qualities. I reviewed the experiences that had gone into my decision. I tried to tell myself the story of my life as a novelist would tell it, highlighting the formative moments, exposing the ways in which personal history shaped my ideas and possibly distorted my view of the world. And because I am a novelist, and because books I've read and books I've written have molded my mind as much as the events I've lived through and the people I've met, I revisited and reconsidered the stories and poems and works of philosophy that had meant the most to me, the authors who had served as my invisible mentors through a life in which living mentors had been in short supply.

This memoir is, to some extent, that long meditation remembered. I don't mean it to be an autobiography or a psychological confession or anything like that. It records my memory of things, even when it might be faulty, because my
memory guided me at the time. It's definitely not intended as an exposé of my own sins or anyone else's; I hope to leave out as many of both as possible! I've also tried to tiptoe quietly around the private lives of anyone who did not directly affect my ultimate decision, especially the lives of my brothers, three men I love and admire, who have the right to remember our shared family history in their own ways. Nor am I trying to preach or argue with or prove anything to anyone. I'm not a theologian or a philosopher. I'm just a barefoot teller of tales, as I frequently explain to my long-suffering wife. Anyway, God is not susceptible to proofs and disproofs. If you believe, the evidence is all around you. If you don't believe, no evidence can be enough.

All the same, I feel the need to explain myself to myself, to set my reasons down on the page where I can look them over. Other men are born into their faith and never leave it. I was planted elsewhere and had to find my way. And when my five-month pilgrimage through the Santa Barbara hills was done, I came home rejoicing. I was convinced and fully convinced: my mind was God's, my soul was Christ's, my faith was true. How had that happened and why? Given the spiritual distance I'd traveled, given the depths of my doubts, given the darkness of my most uncertain places, and given, most of all, the elation and wonder I felt at the journey's end, it seems to me a story worth telling.

T
he town I grew up in is named Great Neck. It is situated on a peninsula on the north shore of Long Island, about twenty-five miles east of Manhattan. It was, in my boyhood, as it is today, a wealthy town, a well-tailored suburban refuge from the swarming city.

The riches here weren't inherited, they were earned. Great Neck had been associated with new money at least since the twenties, when F. Scott Fitzgerald used parts of it as the inspiration for the West Egg of his novel
The Great Gatsby
. In my teens, I dated a girl who lived in a mansion that sat pretty near where Gatsby's sat, if not on the very spot. I remember chasing her once through the high grass on the flatlands below her hilltop home, breaking out into the open to catch her on the shore of Manhasset Bay.
“There
,
”
she said breathlessly, as I wrapped my arms around her. Pointing across the dark water, she told me: There was Sands Point, the East Egg of the novel,
where the green light had shone. Gatsby, a self-made man, a bootlegger with aspirations toward elegance, would often gaze across the water at that spot, as we were doing now. He would dream of finding his lost love Daisy and of entering her world of old money and sophistication and class.

Great Neck had changed since those days, but in many ways, Gatsby's dream was still alive there. After World War II, the sons and daughters of Jewish immigrants who, like their gentile predecessors, had made enough money to leave the city, began to move out to the luxurious suburb. By the late fifties, when my father—a rising New York disc jockey with a popular morning show—brought his young family there, the town was a haven for newly rich Jews. And like the newly rich Gatsby, they were in love with the dream of WASP American elegance and wanted to become an accepted part of the mainstream and the upper rung.

The result was the town I grew up in—to all appearances a high-end version of the classic 1950s suburb, a place that could have sprung to life from one of the popular television situation comedies of those days:
Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, Leave It to Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet
.
The Dick Van Dyke Show
, in fact, was written and produced by two old friends of my father's and involved a character like the comedian Sid Caesar, himself a Great Neck resident. The show's central family, while not based on my family, bore similarities to us, with its mixture of showbiz temperament and suburban normalcy.

These happy-go-lucky sitcoms edited every trace of
dysfunction out of the world I knew. That was a distortion obviously—an ideal. But the ideal and the reality played off each other. The TV shows looked like Great Neck and, consciously or not, Great Neck modeled itself on the shows. Maybe in our real families, Father didn't always know Best. Maybe he wouldn't have known Best if Best rose up and bit him on the leg! But he caught the train to the city every morning. He paid the bills and kept the lights burning, mowed the lawn and fixed the car and backed up mother's discipline with his fearsome presence: he was a father. Maybe real-life Mom didn't vacuum the house flawlessly arrayed in pearls and a pleated skirt like the mother on
Leave It to Beaver
. Maybe she flirted with the milkman or waited for the kids to go to bed so she could hammer back a couple of mugs of vodka pretending it was tea. But she was there to greet us when we came home from school in the afternoon. She made us dinner, kept watch on us through the kitchen window, put Band-Aids on our scrapes and bruises. She was Mom and that was no small thing, not to us. Likewise big brothers who hit you with a pillow on television, hit you in real life so hard with their fists you saw stars and bluebirds. And little sisters who were virgin princesses on the small screen were harpies from hell on a bad day in the big world. All the same, they were brothers; they were sisters. They did what siblings do: drive you crazy, hurt you, love you, show you the way. The ideal suburbs of TV sitcoms were a fiction, but there was enough truth in that fiction to allow us to recognize our lives.

So Great Neck was a suburb, like all the other suburbs
around the country that inspired the television shows that, in turn, inspired us. But in Great Neck, the Great Neck of my childhood, there was one central difference. In those other towns, and in those TV towns that represented them, when Sundays came, the moms and daughters in their best dresses and the dads and sons wearing suits and ties and slicked-back hair would head for church. In Great Neck, the Sabbath was Saturday, and we went to synagogue. We knew this made us different from our Christian counterparts, but we also saw, again, that it looked very much the same.

It was
supposed
to look the same. It was supposed to
be
the same, for all intents and purposes. All the cultural machinery of the town was geared toward blending that local discrepancy into the greater national culture. With families named Bernstein and Levine and Schwartz living on streets named Chadwick, Andover, Old Colony, and Piccadilly, Great Neck was a sort of gigantic contraption engineered to assimilate upper-middle-class Jews into the predominant Protestant-American society around them. If there was any potential conflict between our two cultural identities—if we even
had
two cultural identities—no one told us so, no one outside our homes anyway, no one I knew.

Sure, there were families that were more religious than mine, more rooted in their Jewishness. There were houses where some grandparent with an accent and a grudge kept the Old World hostilities alive and kicking. But not outside, not on the rolling lawns, not on the happy anglophile Great Neck streets, not for me or for my friends. For us, in school,
when we were taught about “our history,” it was American history. When we learned about “our forefathers,” they were the American founders. Until I was eleven or so, I thought I was a direct descendant of George Washington and Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. To my mind, they were as much my ancestors as Moses and David and the rest of the biblical gang.

Then, as now, I never thought of myself as anything but American. My values were American values: freedom above all things, live-and-let-live tolerance, truth, justice, fair play. My games were American games. My heroes were the same as the heroes of the other kids around the country: astronauts and Davy Crockett, baseball players, Superman and the president. What's more, since so many of the kids I knew were Jewish, most of the typical characters in an American kid's life were, in my life, also Jews. In a gentile town, maybe the odd Jewish kid or two would stand out. Maybe they'd have been relegated to stereotypical Jewish roles: outsiders, scholars, yeshiva boys, swots. But in my town, the high school football heroes were Jews and the lover boys were Jews and so were the beauty queens and the hoydens and many of the delinquents as well. When we were little at least, the idea that our Jewishness might somehow prevent us from being fully American—from being fully what we so obviously were—simply did not exist among the kids I knew.

Nor did it ever occur to us—it never occurred to me, anyway—that any differences between the Jewish and gentile kids in town were due to race or religion. Great Neck's population was about 50 percent Jewish. And while the Jews tended
to cluster together in their neighborhoods, the gentile kids at school were never excluded, or even noted as gentile. That my one or two gentile pals went to church on Sunday or had pictures of Jesus in their houses were matters of interest, but not very much interest really.

There was no racial animosity among us that I saw. There was hardly even any racial awareness. I was thirty years old—literally thirty—before I realized that a certain number of the fistfights I had gotten into in junior high school had begun when some large Polish Catholic lummox had started picking on some smaller Jewish geek. At the time, there had been no appearance of anything racial or religious in the conflict. No one had slung any racial slurs or taunts in either direction. It was just a big guy picking on a little guy, that's all I knew.

I was aware there was such a thing as anti-Semitism. Of course I was: my father was obsessed with it, increasingly obsessed as the years went on. The Holocaust had ended not twenty years before. So, sure, we all knew it was there. But it was a foreign thing, we thought, and a thing of the past. I never actually experienced it as a little kid. Not once. When I was fifteen or sixteen, during one of the very last fights I was ever in, my opponent called me a
kike
. That was the first time that had ever happened. Even then, it seemed only tangentially connected to my Jewish identity. The fight hadn't been about that. The guy's girlfriend had been flirting with me over a pinball game in the local bowling alley. The guy had gotten tough about it and we stepped outside to settle the matter. As the guy's punk friends encircled us, shouting, we duked it out
and I got the better of him. He screamed the slur after me as I walked away. I was startled—I'd never heard the word used seriously before—but I shrugged it off. Nowadays people get hysterical over such “hate speech.” But really, let's face it, you have to have
some
nasty thing to call your enemies. If I'd been Irish or black or Italian, the kid would have called me something else. I didn't think he hated Jews. I still don't think so. I just think he hated getting dusted in front of his pals.

No. I was an American. In Great Neck, we were all Americans. We said the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag every morning in school. We went to the Fourth of July parade. We played baseball and watched baseball on TV and collected baseball cards and traded them and gambled them in a million different makeshift games. When I was seven and the New York Yankees' Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth's home run record, I jumped up and down on my bed, cheering, as the news came over the radio (even though I was secretly a little disappointed it hadn't been my hero Mickey Mantle who'd won the day). When I was nine and a boy rushed into our fourth-grade classroom to announce that “the Reds killed Kennedy,” that was my president who had been murdered, my nation that mourned, my world, the only world I knew, that had turned upside-down. I was an American, through and through. I am one still.

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.