The problem of segregation in modern America is, also, sometimes a problem of self-segregation, the theme of the present article.

_____________

Unlike most of the families who bought a “resale” in North Shore Community Homes, we had no relatives living there. But we did have friends, and when they asked us out for dinner one evening we accepted their invitation with interest. We were curious to see this fabulous Long Island development we had heard so much about, laid out for “planned living” on what had once been a vast potato field. The NSCH people had smartly kept abreast of the times: their houses were modern, glass transparencied split-levels (“Tomorrow’s Living Today”), with all the latest utilities and a string of “features” (one of them—a picture window which at the touch of a button rolled up to become a floor-to-ceiling screened porch—had been prominently written up in the home magazines). Winding streets cut down speedsters, there were ample playground and recreational facilities, and the homes were pivoted on their oversize plots in an attempt to disguise the fact that all 483 houses had the identical floor plan.

It was a heroic try, but I was not fooled; to my eyes NSCH looked exactly like what it was—a huge housing development flung across a potato patch. My wife saw it differently, however. “How can you possibly not like it? Look how practical it is! Look how much house for the money.” My friends basked in her enthusiasm (“You know, she’s right, Alan; if you find one available, you’d be smart to grab it”), and I got the impression we were being pressured into throwing in our lot with the happy NSC suburbanites.

After dinner, our hosts proposed that we sample one of the attractions of life in the “community” (their unvarying terminology for NSCH), a talk by a nationally syndicated political analyst, part of a lecture series run by the township. Tonight’s lecture was to be held only a short distance away, in the temple situated in the heart of the development.

As we got out of the car in the enormous parking lot behind the modernistic temple (which looked like an outsize Howard Johnson’s, complete to cupola on top), someone ran up to my wife and tugged at her arm.

“What on earth are you doing here?”

“Mary O’Connell! What are you. . . .”

It turned out that my wife and Mary had gone to college together in New England. As we all went into the temple, I managed to pull my wife aside.

“What’s she doing at the temple?”

My wife gave me one of those looks. “Weren’t you paying attention at dinner? This is a public lecture series. The temple is just providing its facilities.”

Inside, the temple was airy and shimmered with glass, and I had plenty of occasion to look around because the evening did not get under way for nearly a half hour. Finally the chairman signaled the organist and we rose to the introduction of the “Star Spangled Banner.” When the national anthem was over, I started to sit down. Mary O’Connell flashed me a sympathetic look. The organist was playing another selection, and I heard a sudden swell of singing around me. I don’t know who was more embarrassed, Mary or I, as I watched her mouth the words, in a conscientious effort to join in the community sing of “Hatikvah.”

A few week ends later I was hardly surprised to find myself back in NSCH, driving around its serpentine streets. A real estate broker by my side chanted the litany: “It’s really the last word in modern conveniences. . . . Where else can you get so much house for the money? (Even though in two and a half years it had jumped $3,000 over its original price.) It’s a once-in-a-life-time buy. Besides,” he said as a clincher, “you’ve got your own temple right in the community.”

It was the casualness rather than the remark itself which startled me. “Wood” isn’t a Jewish name, and neither my wife nor I looks Jewish. Obviously we knew there was a neighborhood temple, but we had not mentioned our own religious affiliation to him. Nevertheless, the agent had hit a responsive chord. We had been house-hunting in Connecticut, Westchester, Long Island, and New Jersey. We had found the best values in New Jersey, and one day we happened to wind up in a particularly lovely section within reasonable distance of New York. I asked a broker to show us around and we were already on our way when I asked him if there were any other Jewish families in the area. The broker hesitated for a long moment and then brightened. “Well, there’s a nice merchant a few blocks away, and of course there’s the dentist.” Then delivering what I gather he considered a master stroke, he added: “And you’d be just like pioneers!”

_____________

It appeared we’d be in no danger of trailblazing in NSCH, after we had spent a very pleasant half hour with the very pleasant local rabbi. Or, to be accurate, one of the two local rabbis, for as the old joke goes about the Jew on the desert island who builds two shuls—one he wouldn’t be caught dead in—the community had two rabbis, one for the Conservatives and one for the Liberal/Reform. Such an abundance of spiritual leadership interested me, and I asked whether the community’s make-up was such that it could support two rabbis. NSC had been 50-50 to begin with, the rabbi said, but perhaps because of the temple in its midst it had become approximately 60 per cent Jewish.

I was to discover that was the underestimate of the year, but I had no reason to challenge the figure at the moment, having more immediate concerns, such as how to face the derision of my friends from the City when they learned I had moved to Candytuft Lane. It was small consolation that mine was hardly worse than the rest of the addresses in the “flower section” (Anemone Lane, Alyssum Drive, Cornflower Road) and that strict adherence to accuracy could have doomed us to “Spud Drive” or “Nematode Lane.” I was discussing this appalling situation with a neighbor a few houses away—a “resale” too—when I happened to inquire why his original owner had moved. “He was a Gentile,” my neighbor said. It seemed to him to constitute full and sufficient explanation.

Some time later I had occasion to meet this Gentile, whose taste in landscaping I had long admired, and I asked him why, if he loved the community as much as he professed, he had left. He was quite frank about it. He was perfectly happy to live in a mixed neighborhood, he said, until one day his wife gave a birthday party for his daughter and asked all the neighbors’ children to come. “Of the thirty-two children invited, thirty were Jewish,” he said. “Somehow that didn’t seem a natural environment in which to raise my children.”

I could hardly blame him, although I myself had never felt too many effects of this imbalance. True, the local holiday lighting effects appeared on Chanukah rather than Christmas, and everyone stayed home on High Holy Days. The local newspaper, once a staunch bastion of rock-ribbed Republicanism, now found itself having to print complaining letters concerning the local columnist’s tasteless anti-Democratic jokes; and its pages seemed more and more heavily weighted with Hadassah and Sisterhood doings. But that hardly affected us; by now the neighborhood had settled into a sort of stability, and people lived and let live. Kaffee klatches had disappeared, the block party had become a thing of the past, and even the annual musical production, featuring the North Shorenuffs, had had to cancel its performance because of a lack of stage hands and volunteer actors (there were always enough actresses). Although the community was hardly homogeneous, in one respect it had assumed its own brand of conformity: whenever a house was sold it was to Jews, and across our street all three Gentile families had moved away.

_____________

That was the situation, three years after we had moved into North Shore Community Homes, when we bought another house elsewhere which was better suited to the needs of our growing family. We dared take such a foolhardy step without having found a purchaser for our own home because in the five and a half years of the NSCH’s existence it had become one of the most sought-after communities on the North Shore. Homes were sold over a week end and then directly to principals, without brokers. Confident it would be only a question of accepting the highest bidder, we ran an ad in the Saturday and Sunday papers: Choice Nsch Split for Sale. Princ Only!

We were deluged with telephone calls. All week end people marched through our rooms, peered into our closets, thumped our walls. Time and again they cut off my modest sales talk. “We know the house,” they said, and proved it by reeling off our type of model, an accurate tabulation of the improvements we had made, the adaptability of our house to their particular requirements. By Sunday night we were giddy, exhausted, and optimistic. It was only when Wednesday came along that we realized no one had made us an offer.

A little less ebullient, we placed the ad for the next week end. Again an invasion, although somewhat less intensive than the first week; again no offers. The third week end it rained, and our confidence began to wane slightly. Still, it had only been three weeks—what did we expect? But we considerably expanded our ad before listing it again, and then listened apprehensively for the week-end weather reports. They were hardly encouraging: thunderstorms were predicted for Saturday, with scattered showers Sunday.

It was with no little relief, therefore, that I answered the doorbell on Saturday morning and assured a Mr. Wilson we would be happy to show him the house. Mr. Wilson, his beautiful wife, and two lovely children walked through the rooms carefully. Then they inspected the grounds. Then they asked to see the house again, this time going up into the attic, down into the basement and playroom, inspecting the kitchen equipment, and finally the grounds again. In the course of all this, they told me that Mr. Wilson had been transferred East by his company, and that they were anxious to get settled as soon as possible. Although they were strangers to the North Shore of Long Island, they had seen nothing that appealed to them nearly as much as our house.

I had heard this before, so I was unprepared for the phone call early Sunday morning. Had we sold the house? Mr. Wilson asked anxiously, because if not he wanted to buy it. When we got down to terms, they couldn’t have been better. He was offering close to the asking price, he had the cash differential between our figure and the existing mortgage, he wanted to move in as fast as we wanted to move out. Still, it was only Sunday morning and—who knew?—maybe the ad would pull someone who would offer us even more. I asked Mr. Wilson to talk to his bank and call me Monday evening. I hung up the phone and told my wife. She looked at me.

“What are you going to do?” she said.

“What do you mean, do?”

“I mean Mr. and Mrs. Wilson are Christians,” she said. “Are you going to tell them about the neighborhood?”

I have always considered myself an ethical person. For some reason, perhaps because it so strongly involved religious considerations, I chose to regard this as an ethical question. But ethics were something you discussed abstractly at study groups, temple breakfasts, or Great Books (my one “interfaith” activity, since it was the only place I could meet local Christians). How could ethics resolve my peculiar dilemma?

What made it worse was that, by now, I badly wanted to sell the house. Far from being sure it would be only a question of accepting the highest bidder, I foresaw not only a lot of lost week ends but the very real possibility of a last-minute squeeze which would shave thousands off my price. I had a bid in hand, but was afraid that if I described the community the Wilsons would fly away. So, for the first time since my wife and I had visited him before moving to NSCH, I phoned the rabbi for a professional visit. He was out of town.

My wife in the meanwhile was going through the NSC phone book. To our pleasant surprise, quite a few non-Jewish families appeared to be still living in the community. Unfortunately none in our particular area; our section was solidly Jewish. I was beginning to realize the irony of our situation. Discrimination worked in reverse in NSCH. I stood to lose a sale because my customer was a Gentile.

_____________

I needed someone with experience in practical, everyday ethics, and so I called a friend of mine who belongs to Ethical Culture.

He listened carefully and sympathetically and agreed this certainly ought to fall within the Society’s province. But when it came to suggestions, he confessed he was stumped.

“Are you sure they know nothing about the area?” he asked.

“I’m not sure of anything, but they said they’d just been transferred East. There’s no reason for them to know.”

“But didn’t you say that after seeing your house they drove around the community?”

“Sure, but with all the changed names what would that prove?”

That stopped him.

“I guess you’re right,” he said. “Well, if worse comes to worst there’s always the standard business maxim.”

“What’s that?”

“Caveat emptor—let the buyer beware.”

So much for ethics in our business society. I decided to call another rabbi, also a friend of mine. His wife answered the phone and told me he was out of town, too. It was the week end of a rabbinical convention.

“He’ll be calling me this evening, though,” she said. “Is there anything you want me to to tell him?”

“It’s the damnedest thing,” I said. “I’m up against something, and I could use his advice as a rabbi. As a matter of fact, you might be able to help me out.” And I went through the situation again. “What I wanted to ask him is, do I tell them or don’t I?”

She sounded enthralled. “Serves them right!”

“Who? The Wilsons?”

“No, the Jews. They’ve built themselves back into the ghetto; now they’re getting what they deserve.” Then she stopped.

“I’m sorry, Alan, I guess that doesn’t help you much, but it’s just that NSCH isn’t the only one; area after area is becoming solidly Jewish. Don’t misunderstand,” she said, “I’m all for more Jews, it keeps us in business; but what gets me is that they’re herding together for all the wrong reasons. Mainly because they’re scared.”

“What are you talking about? Most of them wouldn’t know an anti-Semite if it reached up and bit them.”

“Not scared that way, although there may be some element of that in it. Most of them are scared of their own Jewishness. They have so few positive reasons why they’re Jews they’re afraid to live in a mixed area where they might have to stand up and be identified. So they flock to these all-Jewish communities where they can be anonymous and the problem doesn’t exist.”

“At least they admit they’re Jews.”

“Yes, that’s true. And they’re more comfortable among their own, they say. But what they don’t tell you is that they head for these communities because it makes them feel safer. They won’t encounter any embarrassments; more important, their kids won’t either. So they go right on building the same fears. It makes me sick.”

“Right now,” I said, “it makes me sicker than you. It may cost me a sale.”

“We’ll,” she said with a laugh, “you can always call the NAACP. They’ve had a lot of experience with blockbusting.”

I put down the phone. The remark was less flippant than it sounded, I realized; for the phenomenon of self-ghettoization, Jewish and non-Jewish, was spreading not only over the Island, but in Westchester and Connecticut, too. The pattern was a familiar one. Communities that started out mixed would maintain their proportions for a while; then, almost before anyone realized it, a selling wave would sweep the area and, all at once, it would become populated with members of a single faith. As a matter of fact, the problem had become so acute in our own area that our Ministers Board had instituted a study of ways to arrest this one-sided migration. Remembering that, I wondered if perhaps the Board might not be of some help. I looked up the phone number of its head and was just about to call him when I stopped.

_____________

I’m no more chauvinistic than the next Jew, but how do you go about phoning a Christian, a relative stranger, and tell him your area has become so solidly Jewish you wonder if it’s right to sell to a Christian? Had discrimination indeed made an about-face and was the problem now anti-Gentilism? True, this exodus of non-Jews had probably been initiated by the non-Jews. But now that I thought about it, I began to recall a smattering of anti-Gentile remarks I had heard. They were most heated during school elections, in which NSC had fought for, and won, a separate elementary school even though NSCH belonged to a larger, predominantly Christian, school district. Would some of the outspoken, injudicious remarks have been made, I now wondered, without an all-Jewish neighborhood (in which Jews could feel “comfortable”) to back them up? Wasn’t it likely, then, that some families in the community might like to see its uniformity preserved?

Still, I felt sure that at worst these were unconscious drives. Most of my neighbors assuredly felt as we did—we deplored the fact that our Gentile neighbor next door had had to move out, and we would have preferred that our children grew up in a neighborhood that somewhat more realistically reflected proportions as they exist in the outside world (anywhere outside New York City, that is). And wasn’t this exactly the problem the Ministers Board was concerned about? Thus decided, I dialed, and the minister, a bright peppery firebrand, answered the phone himself.

“Sell it to ’em!” he said, after I had barely got past my introduction.

“Just like that?” I said, even as I felt relief at official sanction for not having to tell the Wilsons.

“Why not? This is just what we’ve been fighting. Why, only at the last Ministers meeting, Charley Gold told us his Christian neighbor had decided to move. Charley went over and begged him to reconsider, but no luck. And the neighbor had been living in Wildwood nearly seventeen years.”

Wildwood! Five years ago, when NSCH went up, Wildwood was reputed to have a gentleman’s agreement not to sell to Jews.

“Frankly,” the minister said, “our worst problem is brokers. They’re the ones who give the terrific impetus to making communities one-sided. Once they decide an area is predominantly Jewish or Catholic, they perpetuate the situation by showing houses only to Jews or Catholics. And there’s nothing we can do about it.”

“Well, they mustn’t have been completely successful,” I said (hoping the minister did not know how few brokers operated in NSC), “we did some cursory checking ourselves, and I see quite a few Gentiles still live in our community.”

“Really? I had estimated the figure in North Shore at 90 to 95 per cent Jewish.”

“That high?”

“That would be my guess. I know two members of my congregation live in the community, but both are mixed marriages. And in both cases their spouses are Jewish. What’s the Wilsons’ family situation? Do they have any small children?”

“Two. A little boy and girl.”

“Do they know the community?”

I told him I had doubts, frankly.

The minister paused. “I guess you had better tell them.” He thought for a moment: “But I hope to hell they buy it!”

So there I was, back where I started. To make matters worse, no prospective buyers turned up on Sunday. There wasn’t even a phone call.

When I came home Monday night, my wife told me Wilson had phoned. There had been another call, too; a Mr. Cohen wanted to see the house at eight. I decided to postpone the call to Wilson at least until after the Cohens left.

At seven-thirty a Cadillac drove up our driveway. Mr. and Mrs. Cohen, a good-looking couple in their late thirties, came in. Mr. Cohen took in the living room and back yard at a glance. “I like it,” he said. Then he said something else: “I couldn’t tell from the ‘Wood,’ but when I saw the mezuzzah over the door I knew I’d really like it. Tell me, are there many Jews in the neighborhood?”

_____________

It was almost laughable. Here we had gone to such great pains to assure ourselves that some mixture still existed for the Wilsons, and now we were selling the other side of the street. We’d have to sell it hard, too, I knew, when I overheard Mrs. Cohen’s remark to my wife: “We’re not prejudiced, much!”

“What would you say the percentage of Jews is around here?” Mr. Cohen asked.

I had that figure, all right. “About 90 to 95 per cent.”

Mr. Cohen gave me a satisfied look.

“Now all we have to do is make it 100 per cent, right?”

A sale is a sale, and, from the way Cohen talked, he was sold, but good. Still, he had to talk to his lawyer, so he asked me to stall my other buyer until he could call me Tuesday afternoon. But I couldn’t; I felt too much like a coward. Besides, from the sound of Cohen, I no longer had anything to lose.

After the Cohens left, I rehearsed my prepared speech. (“I was glad to hear you and your wife drove around the community, Mr. Wilson. Undoubtedly you noticed it’s predominantly Jewish. I didn’t want you to be under any misapprehensions, although, of course, I realize it will make no difference to you.” Well, you try to toss that off as an aside!) Then I called. The Wilsons were out; I had one more reprieve.

On the way to work the next morning I felt pretty good. The most important thing was settled; I had at least one buyer for the house. The larger aspects of the problem had relegated themselves to the realm of speculation, where ethics safely belonged, and I was just as thankful. But late that afternoon my wife called me at the office. The Cadillac must have been bought on time, she said; Cohen’s lawyer told him he didn’t have money enough to swing the deal.

“By the way,” she said, “Wilson phoned. He wants you to call him back.”

I waited until everyone in the office had gone home. Then I called Wilson. Mrs. Wilson answered. She had just returned from a day’s house-hunting, she said, but she had seen nothing to match our house. She had even been over to—and—, and she named two of the wealthiest communities on the South Shore. I knew the communities. Cohen would have loved them; they were 100 per cent Jewish. “But the broker wouldn’t show us a thing,” Mrs. Wilson said. “He said we’d be unwanted.”

It was these words, I think, which brought home with full force the grotesqueness of the whole situation. All at once I could picture the woman on the other end of the phone. If ever there was a magazine-conception all-American family, the Wilsons were it. Mrs. Wilson had been a stewardess before she had married; she was a tall, willowy, flaming redhead. Her husband had been a Marine captain, and their two children were beautiful blue-eyed blonds. This family of American White Protestants was being steered away from communities of their choice because they might not be wanted! And all of a sudden I thought to myself of the bitter rejoinder “You could always be pioneers!”

But Mrs. Wilson had asked something else, and now, after all the pussyfooting, after all the conscience-searching, after all the worrying about an ethical position (because I knew I had one now; I didn’t care if it cost me the sale, I was going to tell her), I heard the question:

Tell me, are there any Christians at all in the North Shore homes?

So I could talk about it at last. And because she had raised the question, not because she spared me from having to bring it up (that no longer mattered), and since it showed she was aware of the situation, I told her everything I had learned. I told her about the estimated percentage, about the presence and location of other Gentiles, about my talk with the minister, and that I knew he and everyone else would do everything in their power to make the Wilsons feel at home.

It seemed to more than satisfy her; she even thanked me for all she said I had done on her behalf. “As a matter of fact, you were right,” she said. “It doesn’t make any difference to us, we’re not that religious. We just wanted to make sure for the children’s sake that we were not the only Christians.”

With clear conscience I assured her she was not. Then she put her husband on the line, and he confirmed that they were buying the house. They would be over first thing in the morning to sign the papers. When I hung up, it was with great shame. After all my pious moralizing, I had succumbed to the same fear I deplored. I had had so little faith in myself and in my neighbors I was convinced that once the Wilsons learned the truth they would never want the house. These people had made me feel humble; by God, I was proud of being a blockbuster, and I had reason to believe some of my neighbors would feel proud, too. Between us and the ministers we’d make sure the Wilsons were wanted in NSCH. There would be a victory—albeit a modest one—for integration on Candytuft Lane.

Which makes the outcome of the Wilson affair all the more anticlimactic; but then fact is stranger than fiction, and, with the obvious exception of names and places, everything in this report is true. Early the next morning, my wife got a call from Wilson, who was intensely apologetic. On the way to our place to close the deal, it seems they passed an area they had never investigated. They saw this house for sale and—to make a long story short—bought it on the spot. It was my neighbor who stressed the fact that it was located in the most restricted Gentile town on Long Island.

_____________

* * *

A few weeks later, a man turned up at our door, his arm wrapped protectively around his thirteen-year-old daughter. “We saw the temple near-by,” he said. “I was looking for a place where my daughter can grow up among Jews. . . .”

We made the sale. So North Shore Community Homes can relax now; all’s quiet on Candytuft Lane.

_____________