By
David Gottfried
For years, my friends have told me that they have heard about the Holocaust, are tired of hearing about it, and this resentment almost seems to make them receptive to a new Holocaust.
They think they know all about the Holocaust, and they have “Sound of Music” dreams of sweet nuns saving lots of Jewish babies, and their empty right wing minds are blissfully ignorant of things like the Nazi-Vatican Concordat, the British White Paper, Father Coughlin and so many things that I would love to address which perhaps have no place in a memoir (This originally was part of a memoir).
Nowadays we often hear references to the Holocaust, but when I grew up it was scarcely mentioned. We were led to believe that World War Two was a cheery little war and character-building experience just as all wars are character-building experiences. My stupid kiddie comrades and I watched a television show called Hogan’s Heros, a situation comedy which celebrated life in a Nazi Prisoner of War Camp. My friends and I learned to laugh at the German characters in the show, Sargeant Shultz and Colonel Clink, and to view them as bumbling or robotic, but certainly not menacing. I never saw any material – not a single documentary, fictionalized story, nothing -- on television regarding the holocaust. Also, when I was growing up, there was no Holocaust museum, there were no Holocaust memorials anywhere, and I never witnessed any discussion of the holocaust outside of the confines of the Synagogue and my family. Today, people talk about the Holocaust all the time, but most of what they say is fallacious. The salient fact of the Holocaust was not that the Germans were particularly cruel. The salient fact of the Holocaust was that most of Christian Europe thought it was fine and dandy. Of course, there were plenty of exceptions in Italy and Scandinavia and above all Yugoslavia, but the rest of Europe was, for the most part, a complete and utter moral failure, accepting and in many instances inviting German persecution and liquidation of the Jews.
When I was in my twenties, I spent several months traveling around Europe, omitting mention that I was Jewish because I wanted to take a poll of sorts. I wanted to know what European Christians thought of the Jews. After I got to know someone, I would try to nudge the conversation toward history, and then to World War
Two, and then I would allude to the Holocaust. After I said, “Wasn’t it a pity that so many Jews were killed,” many people whom I interviewed said, “Oh but the Jews had all the money.”
But back to the neighborhood of my childhood: While the Holocaust was ignored, we were taught to celebrate and herald the essential Christian nature of Americana.
Nothing seemed as strange as the sort of education I received, or should I say endured, in my local public school. Although I attended a school that was part of the New York City Public School System, one of the most heavily Jewish school systems in the nation, my public school seemed to be an auxiliary of the local Churches and seemed to give courses in religious instruction. Of course, my neighborhood, Bay Ridge, was like no other neighborhood in New York. It wasn’t the Bay Ridge one saw in “Saturday Night Fever.” I lived with Irish and German Roman Catholics and a heavy sprinkling of Norwegians.
There was an all-girls’ high school in Bay Ridge, and my Mother averred that it had an Aryan club for blond, Christian girls. (Pearl Harbor closed down that Nazi clan) My grandmother’s super had, in his living room, a photograph of Uncle Adolf well into the 1960s. When school desegregation was promoted in New York City, the local paper had a headline entitled, “The Niggers are Coming.”
My elementary school was quite proud of itself, and, in the nineteen sixties, it stood quite resolute against the flickerings of change in other school districts. First and foremost, it was proud that it maintained order and discipline. Second, it was proud that its students read well and that this gave the school time to teach the little tykes history.
However, the history I received was peculiar at best. I would not say that my teachers’ biases were American, or euro-Centric, or Caucasian. Rather, I would say that we had a papal-centered curriculum. Many things were taught with all the certitude with which the students believed that Wonderbread and Bacon consisted of wholesome food. My teachers, for example, taught us that the Catholic Church, and its glorious popes and other princes of piety, represented the height and acme of all scholarship, protected the elegance of antiquity during the ravages of the dark ages, and were, in a word, the most advanced and splendid people of Europe. That there was such a thing as a brilliant, Jewish Talmud my teachers were blissfully unaware. That Islamic thought, particularly in the days of theologians such as Averroes, was making such a stir that it had almost seduced the monasteries of Paris, they were happily oblivious. And of Asia – well that simply was a Continent which yielded Chow Mein, Chop Suey and fried rice.
The Middle Ages, I was advised, was a particularly blissful time. This bliss had been achieved through religious and quasi political unity as all of Europe bowed its heads toward Rome and its omnipotent Pope. Although my teachers paid lip service to democracy and the Enlightenment, they clearly had a special longing for the ancien regime, as they patiently explained that there was one ruler, the Pope, and that all of Europe beseeched the Pope for guidance. They may have said “One Pope” with all the manic conviction with which Germans had shouted “Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Fuhrer.” Likewise, the Crusaders were very gallant Christian men who went off to do battle to rescue the Holyland. Our teachers never mentioned that during the Twenty Centuries in which European Christendom marred the planet, the Jews were slaughtered for sport. The Jews were simply not discussed.
One might think that after having taught “history,” they might give us a little science. But science was disapproved of in my little Catholic Church of an elementary school. Instead, they used their free time to provide more Christian instruction.
We sang Christian hymns constantly. Not only at Christmas, but all year long. We sang them when we entered class in the morning. We learned them in the afternoon when our teacher tried out new hymns. We sang them in the school’s grandiose assemblies. (The hymns were Protestant and were written hundreds of years ago in England.)
All of the more senior members of the elementary school, that is all students in grades four through six, were given the distinct “privilege” of attending assembly once a week. This was an affair puffed up with great pomposity, which was supposed to serve some special purpose for which we should all be ready to sacrifice, but I never quite understood what all the fuss was about. We boys had to wear white shirts and ties, and the teachers gazed at us with a full measure of Prussian severity, and we paraded into the assembly room for an hour of musical hysteria.
The source of the musical hysteria was no diva among the students; we students were too scared and cowed for vocal exhibitionism. Rather, the diva was the histrionic teacher who took it upon herself to be the Master of Ceremonies or Conductress of the Assembly, one Mrs. Ruth Barth. This teacher belted the bible in our faces throughout the course of the year, and at assembly her religious proselytizing reached its zenith. She conveyed her convictions most emphatically when she told us how to sing.
I don’t know where she got her method of directing singing. I can say that it seemed as if she fancied herself the conductor of some great Viennese Orchestra. She violently thrust her arms in all directions as if they were the arrows on a map showing the paths of rampaging European armies. Although she may have been seventy, and although her hair had the color of steel tanks, she had the energy of Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favorite film propagandist, and she whirled her hands with an almost demonic athletic tempo, as if she were not so much a person as a visage from a futuristic canvass or the conductress of some mad fascist art project. When she wanted us to hit a high note, or a loud note, or to be particularly emphatic about something, she would leap into the air, as high as possible, and point her right hand up as far as possible, as if she were a gothic cathedral spiking God’s testicles. Throughout the entire assembly, she frowned, and she seemed very happy frowning.
Although my elementary school had become a rather avid adjunct of the neighborhood’s churches, providing copious instructions on Christian manners and pet peeves, the Jewish faith was treated as some dark aberration that no one would or should speak of.
If Judaism was ever discussed, it was discussed in only one sense: How could they, how dare they, smite our glorious lord. All of my Christian classmates received rigorous instruction in the cosmic crime of the Hebrews, and this crime often seemed to be uppermost in their minds. I was hounded and hated for the death of Christ which, to my classmates, may very well have occurred only yesterday. Their discontent was not some weighty historical thing. It was not something in the recesses of Church dogma and doctrine. For Children, everything is fresh and new and what they are taught burns with immediacy. And so, on Easter, or whenever a Priest or a sister made an impassioned speech depicting the horror of being nailed to a cross, my little hoodlum acquaintances would accost me in the Street, on the way to the Candy Store, or in the school yard and berate me for killing Christ. They were dumbfounded: Why did I do such a wanton, hideous thing. After all, I killed the sweetest, neatest guy who ever lived. They were hurt because I had deprived them of something wonderful. And most of all, they hated my fucking guts.
Actually, I sometimes felt sorry for the goyische rabble. They seemed like wind-up toys, little robots who had been programed to hate me by their miserable parents and priests.
Although nowadays America is seen as a fairly unreligious country, or at least the Eastern Seaboard and New York City is, in the late nineteen sixties the tumult of the sixties had not yet laid its hands on the white ethnic, Catholic enclaves of the major urban centers. Yes, the government had taken their sons and sent them to Vietnam – which was to some people, such as Cardinal Spellman of New York, a great Catholic crusade – but their ideology and their sentiments were still very much those of the austere and severe Irish Catholic Mother in “A Tree grows in Brooklyn.” They might like the Beatles, but it was with suspicion since they were British. In the mid and late sixties, plenty of old Irish folks were still talking about the Titanic, swearing that the ship went down because the bad Protestant boys who worked on the ship wrote graffiti in the engine room which besmirched the reputation of his holiness the Pope.
Although the Church seemed to be in love with hating the Jews for allegedly killing Jesus, the Church balanced-out the cruel and the gruesome with the enchanting and super cute. When you got a chill from looking at illustrations of Jesus being nailed to the cross, your heart was warmed with pics of Mommy Mary and Baby Jesus together. This faith had a ready for prime-time human interest story that would always take the lead in the evening news and beat any Hallmark Greeting Card in the sappy sentiment department. The momma-baby love theme was so intense that some of the more emotional old ladies, the Mamacitas and Sufridas and plain ordinary Irish Mary Agnus Gallaghers, would, in their more poetically psychotic moments, imagine that Mother Mary dropped by while they were baking scones or making Arroz con pollo and watching the Lawrence Welk show.
Next to the biggest Crime of all time, the death of the son of G-d, the Holocaust was trivial, an incident of history, or perhaps simply just retribution or another manifestation of the correctness of their faith, of the belief that the Jews had to suffer for killing Christ.
My reaction to all of this was quite logical. When I was seven and had heard that the day before Christmas was called “Christmas Eve,” it seemed very natural to me. After all, it is called eve because Christians are evil.
Most of my non-Jewish friends were lower middle-class Irish and Italian hoods in training and many or most of them have been rotting in penitentiaries. In a way, I felt sorry for them. In their Catholic Schools, such as that school two blocks from my apartment building, “Our Lady of Angels,” the nuns seemed thoroughly intent on berating, beating and bullying the boys. A group of girls on the first floor of our apartment building, who were madly in love with being snooty little Irish Catholic girls, told us, admiringly, of how the nuns continually beat the boys who were irredeemably noisy, sloppy, disobedient and just too masculine for the sort of abject submissiveness the Church loved. The nuns seemed more anti-male than a right-wing fantasy of Hillary Clinton and a gang of dominatrixes dressed up in leather and administering cock and ball torture.
Not a single one of those boys ever learned to love or even like learning.
However, I lost my sympathy for these wounded little boys when they decided it was time to beat the shit out of me, a time which came with the regularity of mass or eating fish on Friday. First, I had killed their lord. Second, being Fatherless, I was far from being the toughest guy on the block and when young boys espy a boy who is not particularly tough that boy is instantly and eagerly denounced as a faggot, a sissy, a fairy -- although half these boys couldn’t read, they had a stellar verbal ability when it came to creating new epithets for being less than ideally masculine.
But then a miracle came in the form of a war so unlike the Vietnam War. It was a fast, conclusive battle and it practically put hair on my chest.
It was June of 1967.
Israel was supposed to get its ass kicked. Three Arabs states vowed to throw the Jews into the sea, Arabs from other states volunteered to fight, the Muslims outnumbered the Jews by about 100 to 1, the French, which had been Israel’s supplier of warplanes, suddenly decided to cancel the shipment of planes Israel had already paid for, and America, depleted because of its involvement in Vietnam, was not inclined to lift a finger with the exception of making weary, ineffectual speeches at the United Nations. Egypt blockaded the Gulf of Aqaba. The upshot of this blockade meant that Israel could not bring any more petrol into the Port of Eilat. Without oil, Israel’s tanks and planes would be paralyzed.
And then, in early June, in six days, the number of days it took G-d to make the world, the Jews won. It was the happiest time of my life.
I walked around Bay Ridge with pride and without fear. When I told my Fourth-Grade teacher that “we were winning,” and she said that I was supposed to be loyal to America and not to Israel, I wondered why I should be loyal to a nation that was killing innocent villagers in Vietnam.
On the last day of the war, I had a treat. It was a Saturday. After I left the synagogue’s Saturday morning services, I passed a newsstand. I saw a copy of the New York Daily News. Three words filled up the entirety of the front page: “Israel invades Syria.” I swiftly got the newspaper, walked into a Syrian bakery that was adjacent to the newsstand, held up the paper and shouted, “We beat you. We beat you. We beat you.”
But that’s chicken shit toughness. I needed to do something that was truly manly and aggressive. I needed to beat someone till he began to bleed.
And I did it to Sasser, a guy who lived on my block. I lived on 77th Street and Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn. Fourth Avenue had only apartment buildings. I had to get to Fifth Avenue to get to the candy stores, pizzerias and participate in World commerce just as Israel had to get through the Gulf of Aqaba to get to the sea lanes of the Indian Ocean so it could get petrol from Iran. (Alliances change all the time).
But a guy named Sasser, and his friends from Our Lady of Angels Catholic School, tried to block my transit down 77th Street to get to Fifth Avenue. If I couldn’t get to Fifth Avenue to get pizza, candy and to search for fireworks -- we spent five months before the Fourth of July looking for fireworks -- I could not be a regular Brooklyn boy.
The name Sasser made my brain churn with associations. Of course, the name of the Egyptian leader, who closed the Gulf of Aqaba, was Nasser. Sasser sounded so much like Nasser. And just as Nasser was a member of an opposing faith, the Moslims (In those days, Muslims were called Moslims), Sasser was a member of an opposing faith, the Catholics.
So I decided to go to war against Sasser and his Irish Catholic friends. I decided to enlist the help of the black son of my apartment building’s superintendent, Ernie, and another guy who just followed whatever Ernie was inclined to do.
I found a rope that was about twenty-five feet long. I cut the rope down into three smaller ropes. I took a rope, and I gave Ernie and the other guy a rope, and I said that we would go down 77th Street and fight Sasser and his friends with our ropes.
We walked down the street and promptly found Sasser. (When school was not in sessions, kids were always on the street. No one ever went anywhere.) I immediately started lashing Sasser, and Ernie proceeded to whip one of Sasser’ buddies. The guy who had agreed to join us promptly switched sides as he recognized Sasser as a fellow inmate from Catholic School.
It was me and Ernie, a Jew and a black, against the White Christian world. I did not yet know that there was a rift between blacks and Jews that was beginning to grow. I only knew what I had been told by the Jewish Community House Day Camp and the Superintendent’s Wife, old, weary Mrs. Jordan. She always said that my people were slaves in Egypt and her people were slaves in the God forsaken South and that we should be friends. (Because it believed in slavery as did ancient Egypt, I knew the South was the incarnation of Evil, the rebirth of Babylon and Elizabeth Taylor in “Anthony and Cleopatra” all wrapped up into one.) We were Jewish and Negro soldiers “marching as to War.”
At one point, Sasser got an umbrella to use against my rope. He dropped it, and an adult man gave the umbrella to Sasser even though Sasser was about a foot and half taller than me and two years older than me. And then something miraculous happened. I grabbed the umbrella. I fought for it like I was fighting for life. And somehow, I pulled the umbrella out of his grasp. And he recognized my worthiness and my sea lanes to Fifth Avenue were freed from molestation.
And so for quite some time I was Mr. Jew. When I entered the sixth grade, I had the distinct misfortune of having a fervently Protestant teacher who had the primness and severity of rich bitchy ladies in Henry James and Edith Wharton novels. She read the bible at the opening of class every day, in patent violation of the United States Supreme Court. As she uttered the icy Anglican words of the King James translation, my friend, Michael, opened the genuine and Jewish Old Testament. She made him exit the classroom and put him in detention.
I left the school. When the school phoned me at home, and asked me why I had left, I said that I had done it in “protest.” The Sixties had invaded prim and privileged Bay Ridge.
Excellent. You are a fantastic writer..