As almost everybody knows, (almost) all Jewish children are geniuses and (almost) all geniuses are Jewish. Margaret Blocher Anavi tells here of the efforts of one bright little girl from the wrong side of the intellectual tracks to assimilate herself to a genial company.
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My parents moved around a great deal during my childhood. Every place we lived, my brother and I were sent to Sunday school. If the Baptist church happened to be nearer our home than the Methodist church, we were Baptists. If the Episcopalians maintained a church school nearer yet, we were Episcopalians. Our parents were more interested in maintaining, through us, the family’s standing as churchgoers in the community than in the religious instruction we might or might not be receiving. I had, therefore, a most eclectic view of religion in general and no personal opinions or preferences whatever.
A few months after we moved to Baltimore, Maryland, I was transferred out of the regular seventh-grade class in the public school and placed in a group which quickly became known to the rest of the school as the “genius class.” We were all children who had broken the thermometer on the Stanford-Binet I.Q. test. Progressive theories in education had permeated the public school system just enough to make school authorities think of the “over-bright child” as a Problem. Our genius class was an attempt to deal with the problem by segregating us from the rest of the school community and giving a special course of instruction, known as an Enrichment Program, designed to cope with our supposedly gigantic mentalities. As it happened, of the forty children assigned to the class on the basis of their I.Q.’s, I was the only Gentile; everyone else was Jewish.
At the time, I had attended some seven different schools in five different states. My experiences with free public education had not been too happy. My schoolmates liked to ask me if I had “swallowed the dictionary,” and they disapproved of my complete helplessness at any sort of game. My teachers found me impudent, inattentive, and far too talkative. In the new genius class, everything was different. I found friends who could talk just as fast and just as much as I could—and did! Our teachers thought our questions interesting rather than pert. I loved the work; and I was completely happy for the first time in my school career. There was only one fly in my ointment: I didn’t feel I completely belonged to the group because they were all Jewish and I was something called a goy. Nobody was mean to me, or even called attention to this unfortunate fact. It was just something about me which everyone knew and was kind enough to ignore—almost.
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I took the matter up with my mother while she was darning socks.
“Mother, may I be a Jew?”
My sole source of information about Jews at that time was the Bible in Sunday school, and I don’t recall connecting Hebrew and Jew. I asked to become Jewish as I would have asked permission to change to the Sunday school where they served ice cream.
Mother stopped sewing a moment and said, “A what?”
“A Jew. Everybody’s a Jew. I’ve been everything else so I don’t see why I can’t be a Jew. It’s a religion.”
“Why?” She began darning again while I explained to her as best I could. She nodded and said:
Very well. Be whatever you want to be.
The next day in school, I said to a few of my best friends: “I’m a Jew too. I didn’t know about it before because my parents didn’t tell me. Now you’ll have to explain what you mean when you say things in Jewish and tell me what’s Jewish.”
The explanation was accepted calmly. My fellow students had never cared particularly what I was; my feelings of being left out were largely self-created. It made a great difference to me, however, and I applied myself to aping my friends in every possible way.
As a Protestant, white, fairly well-to-do child, I had always enjoyed a privileged position in society, even if I didn’t know it. Even as an abstract concept, I found discrimination difficult to understand. I was a direct descendant of the gods and expected everyone to understand it and behave accordingly.
One afternoon I stayed after school to wash the blackboards for a favored teacher. She thanked me and added that my hair looked nice tied back with a ribbon and that I should always wear it that way.
“No one would guess you were Jewish; you don’t look it,” she said with the air of one who pays a compliment.
“What does Jewish look like?” I asked. If she’d told me I looked or didn’t look like a panda or a Hottentot the question Would have been the same.
“Well—” she answered in some confusion, “your nose isn’t noticeable and you’re a blonde. . . .” Her voice trailed off and then she suggested briskly that I’d better be going home as it was getting late.
But I thought I had grasped her description of Jewish. A Prussian ancestor had gifted me with a perfectly straight nose and a lot of it. My mother told me firmly, and often, that my nose was aristocratic. Who was I to argue? My best friend, Leona Silberstein, was also a blonde with a straight nose. It was several months, therefore, before I discovered that what people called a typically Jewish appearance did not necessarily include blond hair and a long, straight (according to my mother, aristocratic) nose.
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Our class was asked to collect money for the Red Cross. The project was presented to us as worthy of our best efforts. With the enthusiasm that was typical of us as a group, we worked hard for several months and managed to raise about two hundred dollars. Most of it was earned money, not donations from our parents. I was on the committee that took the money to the Hygiene teacher who was in charge of collections. This teacher, an elderly and kindly person, made quite a fuss over the amount and we all stood around grinning delightedly and feeling pretty good about it.
“Yes indeed,” she remarked, “it certainly takes you children to raise money all right.”
That was all she said, but by some telepathy I knew she meant Jewish children might be expected to excel in money-raising activities. There was something wrong with that picture somewhere, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it The incident retired into the filing cabinet I used for a mind and rested there beside my nose that “wasn’t noticeable.”
A girl whom I had known slightly before I was placed in the genius class asked to see my first report card of the term. We were in the locker room and I put my books down obligingly and handed over the card. As usual, my Handwriting, Spelling, and Arithmetic had failed to meet minimum requirements and the Gymnasium teacher wasn’t too happy with me either. I accepted these deficiencies philosophically. I seldom brought home a straight “A” report card. The girl looked at my averages and sniffed.
“I got an ‘A’ in everything and you’re in the genius class. What’s so smart about you? I guess my mother’s right; you have to be a Yid to be smart around here.”
On the lesser breed outside the law I never wasted time. I was in the special class and she was not. This I pointed out while I spilled ink all over her books. She attempted retaliation, but if I wasn’t good in gym, I could run.
Minor incidents, chance remarks, even sidelong looks, began to accumulate in the filing cabinet one after the other. I didn’t think about these things, exactly; I just got a peculiar baffled feeling, tinged with anger, at some of the things people said. Ordinarily I should have discussed this with my parents, who were very good at explaining practically anything. I never did mention it because I overheard my mother say to my father:
This experience is doing Margaret a lot of good, Ralph. I’m glad she’s in this class—only I wish she wouldn’t pick up that Jewish accent.
My mother hadn’t objected, in my hearing, to my ear-cracking Midwestern r, picked up the year before. She had accepted the flat New England speech the year before that. As for this so-called Jewish accent, it consisted mostly of saying “hanking” for “hanging” and paying a bit more attention to diction and enunciation than the Southern norm required. When I heard her say this to my father I got that baffled feeling and decided, on some half-conscious level, not to discuss the matter with them.
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My schoolmates were busy, unusually happy children for the most part. They had the same attitude toward anti-Semitism that I had toward Spelling. Nothing could be done about it so why worry? The only reason it bothered me, I suppose, was the privileged position I had occupied for the previous twelve years. I wasn’t used to it. Besides, my new friends were very valuable to me and I resented any criticism of them.
As a group, a lot more trouble was caused us by our being considered geniuses than we ever had out of being Jewish. The rest of the children resented us, envied us, or paid us exaggerated respect. Regardless of which attitude, they wanted no part of us. In the schoolyard and on the way home we were forced to associate with each other exclusively.
Our teachers alternated between wild enthusiasm and openly expressed disapproval. They rejoiced in the opportunity to teach bright children and were bitterly disappointed to discover that most of us possessed highly specialized minds. Benson Sonnheim, for example, read textbooks in chemistry and math the way other children read comic books. He could not write a decent sentence, however, and made the English teacher wonder aloud how he ever got into the Enrichment Program. The Arithmetic teacher wondered aloud how I ever got into the Enrichment Program and devoted her time and energies to more rewarding pupils like Benson. That was fine with me; I’d been looking for a math teacher who would ignore me for years.
None of us was the least bit of use with our hands. The Manual Training teacher, for the boys, and the Sewing teacher, for the girls, despaired, of us. They struck up quite a romance while agreeing together in the lunchroom that the genius class was composed mostly of half-wits.
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As so few of us were all-around geniuses, we found ourselves living in a continual atmosphere of disapproval. Each of our teachers, selected on the basis of previous excellence, felt it an honor to be assigned our class. They all wanted to show results in the form of superior work and loaded us down with homework. In every subject we were supposed to have a Project and the Project was supposed to enrich us. A Project would be an original play, written, produced, and acted by us, illustrating what we were learning in History, for example. We loved our Projects and worked on them furiously. Only there were so many of them! Nor was every child able to enter into every Project. To this day I don’t know what the math Project was supposed to be. It had something to do with a notebook, but Benson made me my notebook in return for a few English compositions I wrote for him. I daresay Benson couldn’t tell anyone today that the English Project was in the form of biographical essays. Meat and drink for me—impossible for him.
After a few months of Enrichment we found ourselves doing four hours of homework a night, living in isolation from the rest of the school, and suffering from a general sense of inadequacy to the demands being made upon us. The tension and competition among our teachers affected us, as did the exclusive company of our high-powered selves. We were edgy, tired, irritable.
Benson Sonnheim, for whom I had a special affection, socked Teddy Field during recess one day. Teddy socked back and the two boys rolled around on the grass pummeling each other. The fight was over nothing; it really represented overwrought nerves after a particularly harrowing morning during which we had been scolded by three teachers in a row. Miss Harrison, a popular and youthful teacher of Music, broke up the fight and said severely: “I’m surprised to find you children fighting!”
Prompted by who knows what combination of irritations, I suddenly drew back my foot and kicked the agreeable Miss Harrison on her shin. It was quite a kick, and my friends looked at me aghast. So did Miss Harrison, rubbing her shin and too amazed to speak.
“Jews can fight!” I said, grimly.
“Wh-a-a-a-t!” The look on the teacher’s face was too completely thunderstruck to be misunderstood. The idea of Jewishness had never entered her mind.
“See here, young lady,” she began in justifiable wrath, “you people are entirely too sensitive. What do you mean by kicking me? It’s people like you who make trouble for yourselves—” etc., etc.
I stood under her tongue-lashing and felt utterly mixed up. Black anger, shame, embarrassment, a stubborn idea that I was more sinned against than sinning, boiled around inside of me and squeezed helpless tears from my eyes. Worst of all, the little crowd around me stepped back a few feet. They weren’t deserting me, but my behavior did not meet with their approval.
I burst out with a tearful harangue to the effect that we had too much homework and none of our teachers were fair—all because we were Jewish! Miss Harrison’s face became less angry and she took me by the arm and said, quietly, “I think we’d better pay a little visit to the Principal’s office, Margaret.”
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Mrs. Gibson, our Principal, had instigated and shepherded the Enrichment Program from its inception. She was an intelligent, patient old lady, and she listened to Miss Harrison’s truthful and complete version of the schoolyard crisis without comment.
“Sit down, Margaret,” she told me coldly. I was not afraid of Mrs. Gibson, but I was considerably sobered.
She took Miss Harrison into her private office and talked to her a few moments in a low tone. The teacher came out, smiled kindly at me, and left. Mrs. Gibson’s voice summoned me to her desk. I stood looking at her unhappily while she looked back at me with an amused expression.
“Margaret,” she began, “are you—”
I knew—and this time I was absolutely certain—that she was about to ask me if I was Jewish. Something in my. face told her to stop, perhaps. In any event she began again.
“I’d like to ask you why you feel your teachers are unfair. And why you think you have too much homework.”
I answered her by showing her my notebook, which had remained clutched in my hand throughout the entire affair. In it were listed my homework assignments for the past few weeks. I told her, laying it on a bit thick, how long it took me to do each assignment. I also told her about the way the teachers had been scolding us for not all being smart in every single subject.
She nodded when I was finished and handed my notebook back to me.
“You may go back to your class now,” she said. “And Margaret—if you ever kick a teacher in this school again, I shall be forced to expel you. Is that clear?”
“Yes Ma’am,” I said politely, and prepared to leave. She called me back and began to question me again, looking at a pencil in her hand while she talked, instead of at me.
“Do you feel that some of your teachers are—unreasonably unfair? That they don’t really want to teach you?”
I had a hunch she was asking me if any of our teachers didn’t like teaching Jewish children exclusively. There were two who had made it pretty clear that they disliked each and every one of us. One of them was the Sewing teacher, but she had pretty good reasons; we couldn’t learn to sew. The other was the History teacher.
I had no way of telling Mrs. Gibson in so many words that our History teacher was an anti-Semite. I stumbled around for a while, trying to tell the truth and make myself clear. Mrs. Gibson was a fine woman with a lot of experience with children. She cut me short and sent me back to class.
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My punishment was waiting for me. My classmates, especially the important Benson, made it clear that they found me a pain in the neck. My behavior was described in most unflattering terms to those students who had not been present at the infamous kick. I had been criticized before by people my own age, but this was the first licking I took from people I liked. The whole incident has remained fresh in my mind because I thought about it so much at the time. I was willing to admit I was wrong—but just where and how? At what point does one get angry and how may that anger be legitimately expressed? I was still unwilling to discuss it at home.
Benson solved my problem, at least partly, within a few days. He would have none of me for a while, and then he came to my desk before school started and asked me to draft a petition. It seemed some of the boys had been talking it over and decided to draw up a statement concerning homework which we would all sign and which would be presented to Mrs. Gibson.
I eagerly drafted the petition and experienced the first agonies of outraged authorship when the informal committee in charge of petitions rewrote everything I’d done. I disagreed with them loudly and took overruling with very poor grace. Benson lectured me some more and I daresay it all did me a great deal of good and I began to learn about Democracy and the Rule of the Majority and all that sort of thing. At least I’ve never kicked anyone since. But I still don’t like to have my copy rewritten.
The effect of the petition was a visit from the Principal. She told us that teachers were to agree on homework assignments before they were given to us in the future. Two hours work at home were to be considered sufficient and we were to feel free to protest if overloaded.
Another change was made in the Enrichment Program after that. Several of the pupils who had not been doing well were dropped from the class and others added from the general school. None of the newcomers was Jewish. The change made no difference to us at all. The students who were dropped were the kind who had never quite fitted in and the new ones were our kind of people. The unity of the group was heightened by the additions. In a short time about a third of us were Gentile. After this period I have no memory of any anti-Semitism. Either it died out or I no longer felt it.
Oh yes, one other change—we got a new History teacher.
I have often wondered, in the years since I was enriched by the Baltimore public school system, just how much native intelligence accounted for the brightness of myself and my fellows? In the culture neither of Brahmin New England nor of intellectual Jewry is a boy condemned because he likes to read books more than he likes to play baseball, or a girl valued only for her looks. My friends and myself all came from homes where parents respected and encouraged intellectual ability. (How unfair, actually, to give us a special program when our whole lives at home were a special program! The children who really needed and would have profited from such a program were just the ones excluded or dropped out.)
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Still, despite this common emphasis on things of the mind, there were significant differences between a New England and a Jewish background. I recall saying plaintively to my mother: “Please Mother—no bacon and tomato sandwiches when I bring Leona home tomorrow!” Many of my friends’ families had become kosher as a reaction to what was going on in Europe at the time. They took their food laws pretty seriously and their children were filled with the new regime. Others had always been kosher. My familiarity with “kosher” was to come in handy for the family.
My mother gave a party for some of my father’s salesmen and their wives. Nobody ate much of anything, and my mother was deeply offended. While she was discussing this with my father, I broke in to say briefly: “Not kosher.”
“I never thought of that!” my mother said, amazed.
She gave me her full and flattering attention while I instructed her. Our next party was quite a success and my mother was gratified to note that everything got eaten. We developed a passion for lox ourselves about this time, and my mother complained she could never keep any on hand because we all ate it so fast and in such quantity. Leona’s mother, on the other hand, asked me to ask my mother for the recipe for apple pan dowdy, which Leona had mentioned favorably after eating it at our house.
Leona introduced me to a way of life I had never imagined. My own family were chips off the rock-bound coast of New England. I grew up on such maxims as: “Praise to the face is open disgrace,” or “Fools’ names and faces are always found in public places.” I was expected to obey my parents without question and on the instant. They loved me, and I knew it, but they didn’t praise me or pet me very often.
The first time I had dinner at Leona’s house I couldn’t eat for surprise. Her father smacked his lips after he ate his soup. What awful table manners! I was embarrassed for Leona. Her grandmother asked me what my father did for a living. “Personal questions are not asked by ladies and gentlemen of other ladies and gentlemen.” I misunderstood the old lady’s kindly interest and sat in shocked silence. In other children’s homes I had met unfamiliar behavior, but no other children had been valued and respected friends. The home itself was very like my own, too. At twelve, one does not notice furniture so much as one does a general atmosphere. I could not say what curtains Mrs. Silberstein had at the windows, but I knew this was a home equal to my own in every respect. It felt familiar to me as no other strange home did. There were pictures on the walls, and bookshelves, and other things which seemed right and normal to me.
But Mr. Silberstein smacked his lips!
And Leona’s grandmother asked me what my father did for a living!
I was completely at sea and could only pick at my dinner. Then Mrs. Silberstein and her mother-in-law engaged in an acrimonious discussion of the salt in the meat.
“Well, you have no taste in your mouth,” one of them said, and I couldn’t believe my ears. If one of my grandmothers had been spoken to like that, and in that tone of voice, there would have been no further conversation between the two parties to the argument for the next several years. Yet both women appeared to have forgotten about it within a few minutes.
After dinner Mr. Silberstein pushed back his chair and suggested we all go to the movies. My parents did not approve of movies for children and I had only been taken to about four during my entire life. All four had been highly educational. I assumed Leona and I would be left home and was overjoyed to discover that we were both included. What a wild free life! Movies—just like that!
Some months later Leona showed me some folders from a summer camp. It seemed she was to select the one to which she wished to be sent. I went to camp myself; but of course my parents decided upon the camp and my opinions were not asked.
When Leona wanted extra pocket money for some reason, she had only to ask. Usually she got it. My parents gave me an allowance and would have been deeply shocked if I had asked for more.
For a while I envied Leona passionately. There was in my friend’s home an open affection, an ability to handle emotion, which was lacking in my own background. When you got mad you didn’t have to kick teachers and when you liked people you weren’t afraid to say so. It seemed to me that Leona’s folks loved her more than mine did me; and what’s more, they seemed to love me more than mine. They made such a fuss over me during every visit that I hated to leave. But after a while, I realized that my parents seemed somewhat attractive to Leona. She liked the way my mother laid down certain rules and left me alone within those rules. She liked the consistency of our household, where disciplinary action assumed the pattern of a navy court martial: everybody knew the rules and everybody was free to present evidence and argument as to why those rules had been broken. She also said I could “talk” to my mother. She meant that any subject under heaven and earth was worthy of full-dress discussion in my parents’ eyes and that children were entitled to adult explanations. In essence, Leona admitted that my parents fussed over me less than hers did, and exacted stricter obedience, but she appeared to think they respected me more.
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I stopped being a Jew about two-thirty in the afternoon two weeks after my twelfth birthday. The disaster happened in Geography and I still can’t think of it without embarrassment.
The teacher was running through some of the questions contained in her syllabus of work for her regular classes. We had covered all of this material some time before, so the questions appeared infantile to our mature young minds. She came to a question, began to smile, and said: “Would any of you be able to tell me what Zionism is?”
There was a general giggle. I, inhabited temporarily by some malevolent demon, leaped to my feet and announced confidently: “Zionists are some people who live in Zion City, Illinois, and still think the world is flat!”
The class and the teacher collapsed in hysterics, while I stood there with a particularly stupid expression on my face. Nobody, but nobody would believe I was a Jew after that.
It didn’t make any difference, though. Benson and Leona and the others had long ago accepted me as one of themselves—a little erratic perhaps—but definitely one of the gang. That was all I’d ever wanted anyway. If any survivors of Enrichment in Baltimore, circa 1935, read this, please accept my thanks for enriching me more than I could ever tell you.
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