Nothing about the Jews is fixed, not even the reactions they evoke. The metropolis with its Jewish masses, the small town with its dozen families, the isolated village or farm where the Jew is but the echo of a name—each sees the Jews differently.

An island is a thing apart. There the inheritance of religion and social tradition is most pure, the intercourse with Jews most rare and incidental. There, paradoxically, the rejection of the Jew gains color, but at the same time suffers a discount, too, because of the rejection of the mainland and all its works. Detachment builds, for good and ill, a refuge from the world.

On such an island off the coast of New England, beloved of vacationists, and even more of natives, I sensed the special attitude to Jews long before the outbreak of the scandal about the preacher.

Visiting its remote moors was like stepping into the 17th century. The speech had almost an Elizabethan ring; many a word which elsewhere is confined to the library is here put to work every day. I detected in the antagonism—I hesitate to call it anti-Semitism since it was so little self-conscious or energetic—an underlying stiffness which testified to inherited feeling. In personal intercourse, on the other hand, there was an ease which answered to the relaxed and uncomplicated life of the islanders. It was a latent, not an urgent antagonism. There was a palimpsest quality about it, with the writing of the old received culture clearer than the modern superscription.

It was difficult to espy this highly abstract feeling in the bearing of the local correspondent of the island newspaper. Miss Miriam Hasting’s larger design of social exclusiveness seemed to swallow up all the lesser passions. Not that she was more sophisticated than her neighbors; her reportage spoke only in homespun:

Miss Margaret Wells went to the mainland on Tuesday to do some shopping and returned on Wednesday.

It was Mrs. Donald Foss, not Mrs. Donald Franklin, who was one of the committee on fancywork at the recent sale held by the Ladies’ Aid Society, and her due of the credit should go to her.

But to the constant reader familiar with village affairs, Miss Hasting was unreconstructed 19th century. The famous movie star who owned a pretentiously simple cottage overlooking the Sound seldom succeeded in “crashing” her column. Miss Hasting had not yet come to terms with the stage as a social institution, let alone the motion pictures. It hardly helped that the universally worshipped face stemmed from Boston Irish. Like her island, our correspondent was off the coast of traditional New England.

Within her inviolate social ramparts, however, Miss Hasting dispensed a broad tolerance, political as well as religious. When I met her I was staying with a friend who is much to the left of center, though not a Communist. But he was born into a sufficiently old New Haven family to make his radicalism not merely pardonable but irrelevant. An aristocrat may indulge an ideological aberration. And the friends of acceptable friends are acceptable. Hence, despite my own mysterious origins, I beat the movie star and made a frequent entry into Miss Hasting’s empire under my friend’s patrician wing. Few of my doings went unrecorded in the weekly column: a stray picnic, plans for an article, even a short evening call.

To this old lace of social stratification, Mrs. Rebecca Kent added a thread of disingenuous provincialism. She ran a modest shop which displayed stationery, gifts, and a few antique pieces, mostly to summer visitors. She had absented herself from the island only once in twenty-four years, on the exigent occasion of a serious illness. I asked her once, in the manner of the wide-eyed cosmopolite, whether she did not miss the advantages of the mainland.

“Advantages?” she had asked. “And what do they have good on the mainland that we don’t have right here on our island?”

Brought up so sharply, I was at a loss. Perhaps she was not so wrong after all; the island was weaving its net around me, too.

Until the last decade or so, Mrs. Kent had had very little contact with Jews, and her image of them was a distillation of ancient and fragile legend. The newer realities puzzled her. One day a Jewish customer had firmly challenged a newspaper bill as far too low. When he had corrected the error, paid, and walked out, Mrs. Kent had turned to another islander and exclaimed:

Mary! Jews are honest people!

_____________

 

More assured, and also more invidious, was the attitude of Mr. Edward Hornsby, a slight, vandyke-bearded man who owned a large estate named, with an irrevocable finality, “Throughlooking.” On this New England island, as perhaps on other islands, the most serious social offense, tantamount to original sin, was “off-islandism.” The minimum qualification for membership in the local club was a residence of fifty years! Poor Mr. Hornsby, who was a very rich man, had invested a mere thirty years in the profession of becoming an islander, and he was no longer young. He would never make it. He seemed a little sad.

Some ten years ago he brought back from the great world, where he spent the harsher winter months, a sophisticated anti-Semitism then current in certain fashionable circles. One evening he arose in town meeting to urge that the villagers agree not to sell or rent property to Jews.

The debate which this proposal provoked was brought to a close by Mrs. Ruth Milton, a huge and outspoken woman who brought all discussions on the island to a close. Her late husband had become extremely popular as the long-suffering victim of a domestic dictatorship. For many years he had indulged a wish to marry an elderly and soft-spoken friend of the family when Mrs. Milton—Heaven forbid—should die. It would be restful.

Mrs. Milton, who had no weaknesses and therefore no jealousy, had walked in sincere sadness to both their funerals.

It was this woman who now looked out over her bosom at Mr. Hornsby and announced that, whatever others might do, as for herself she proposed to go right on renting her summer “camps” to whomever she wished, Jews or non-Jews. She remarked, and all her remarks were insistences, that she had found Jews reliable, prompt-paying tenants. She had come to know them, indeed, as very considerate people. With a touch of fresh irrelevance, she concluded that no one had been more surprised than she when she had discovered that she liked Jews. This was the last that was heard of Mr. Hornsby’s campaign.

The Cohens were an entirely Christian family who had inherited their name from a solitary Jewish ancestor. It had never occurred to them that family names are changed. Without any self-consciousness, they were articulate about their small ration of Jewish blood. But they shared completely the naive and traditional sentiments of their neighbors. I recall one evening when, at a party where islanders and summer residents mixed freely, as indeed they generally did, a teen-age Cohen sidled up to me and, perhaps by way of innocent ingratiation, informed me that his great-grandfather had been a Jew. It was gratuitous—I knew it already.

“You see, you can be very frank with me,” Cohen said. “Do tell me the secrets.”

_____________

 

I learned about the scandal involving the preacher quite unexpectedly. I was taking a sailing lesson with an old sailorman, John Wilson, upon whom the community had conferred the courtesy title of Captain. We had just set out from the little cove that served us for a port when he suddenly remarked that it had begun to be suspected that the village preacher was a Jew. My grip on the tiller loosened, and before I knew it our small sloop had veered sharply to port, the sail had spilled the wind, and we were “luffing.” I turned the tiller back slowly and, as we caught the wind again, I counted the Captain’s next words:

Of course, it’s only a rumor, but it sure has been spreading. Otherwise the new preacher is right popular.

Of course, the Captain meant that the preacher was Jewish by birth or origin.

“Oh no!” said the Captain with a promptness unusual for him. “It isn’t what he may have been or what his people were. They say he is Jewish right now.”

Was the old sailorman pulling my leg? Was he being sardonic or disingenuous? He knew I was Jewish, or so I had naturally assumed.

My Captain’s tone was remotely and vaguely objective, neither especially sympathetic nor latently fanatical—no more than the traditional faint stiffness to my kind. As a matter of fact, he had always been kind to me, and it takes a lot of patience to watch somebody learning how to sail.

Through a huge naval glass from his house on the top of the hill—the view over several bodies of water: ocean, sound, inlet, was, by the way, breathtaking—he surveyed the small and rather safe bay in which I sailed. When the weather was threatening or I was in trouble, he would come down to the shore and, if I were near enough, shout instructions. He was formally correct, alternating “doctor” and “professor” on a certain mysterious plan. He did like to strike a good bargain, but the price always turned out to be ridiculously low, not because I was a better bargainer, but because Captain Wilson liked shrewdness only for its own sake. He was in his 70’s and took out sailing parties largely as an avocation.

I felt quite free to question him about the new preacher. Why had the villagers been so careless as to engage a Jew for a Protestant pulpit? The Captain insisted that they had pursued the usual procedure. Following the death of their old preacher, they had written to the central office of their Church in New York for a recommendation.

I remarked with some impatience that the Church office was hardly likely to go about packing country pulpits with Jews.

“Of course not,” the Captain chuckled. “But they say down in the village that our letter may have been delivered to the wrong office, I mean the wrong Church.”

Wouldn’t the two offices rectify such a mistake? The Captain’s face lighted up.

“No error that! They say that some smart fellow in town, maybe of our Church, maybe of another, thought he would play a little joke.”

So that was it—the ancient wariness of the city slicker, the fear of having something put over on innocent country folk.

I suggested that they put the whole matter up to Reverend Guldberg himself. Oh no! Goodness gracious, they could never do that! They wouldn’t think of exposing him to such unpleasantness. They really thought him a good sort. And suppose the rumor were false: it would embarrass him to be asked such a question. And if it was true, it would embarrass everybody. . . .

Well then, I asked, what were the villagers going to do about it?

“I don’t know,” Captain Wilson drawled. “I guess we’ll just set and see.”

_____________

 

I soon had an opportunity to meet and listen to Reverend Guldberg. Though my leftist friend was an unbeliever, he had become so integrated into the community that he attended church quite regularly. The following Sunday, as it chanced, the minister dropped in to dinner, on his way from the other side of the island.

His connection with the church of our village was only one of several. Each Sunday he began by preaching in the crowded port that provided our only link with the mainland. Then he drove his old car to the stark moors of our windswept and isolated corner. Here he held services in the early afternoon in a tiny, fresh-painted church which was much too large for the parish, and certainly for the church-going part of it. After chatting briefly with the villagers on the green, he returned for a third service in the “thickly-settled” areas, as the rhombic yellow-and-black road signs boasted to the passers-by. There was, I think, a fourth assignment somewhere on the island, but I do not recall how it fitted, or how it could have fitted, into the preacher’s schedule.

Yet Reverend Guldberg seemed none the worse for wear. He was a consciously earnest young man in his early or middle 30’s, fair-haired and fair-skinned, very broad-shouldered, and almost handsome but for a heaviness of face that portended a future of jowls. He just missed being tall. The conversation turned to politics and the state of the war; it was July of 1944 and the war with Japan was still on. Reverend Guldberg’s views stamped him immediately as belonging to the extreme liberal wing of his Church. He seemed to be a good deal more concerned over the human suffering and fierce passions engendered by the war than over political issues.

Perhaps, I thought to myself, it was his leanings toward pacifism, primitive Christianity, and the philosophy of his compatriot Kierkegaard that had been taken for evidence of Judaism. If he ever had been a Jew, which seemed most unlikely both to my radical friend and to myself, he certainly had become a good enough Protestant minister by now.

After a hurried dinner, we accompanied Reverend Guldberg to church. On the way, he stopped to pick up two female parishioners who were waiting at the roadside, apparently by arrangement. At church, I felt an increasing sympathy for the preacher. He was not swaying thousands! Nearly a fourth of the worshipers he had brought with him. Captain Wilson-was there to wind the grandfather’s clock in the comer and to supply most of the vocal power, while his married daughter played on a small organ. Mrs. Kent, Mrs. Hornsby, Mrs. Milton, and Mrs. Cohen were there.

The small group was not perfectly attentive. I am afraid I noticed that my Captain removed his hearing aid when Reverend Guldberg rose to speak. I myself daydreamed. During earlier years as a newspaperman I had lost the capacity to listen to any sort of public oratory, a capacity I have fortunately been unable to recover. But remotely I did gather that the preacher dealt with the heights of sacrifice and devotion that human society attains in moments of emergency and disaster. It was as much a secular moral essay as a sermon, and a Jew might just as conveniently have delivered it as a Christian. As Reverend Guldberg was drawing his moral, a pious but late dog strolled up the aisle and stopped to look carefully at him. After considering briefly the grandeur of society in moments of emergency, the dog turned away with dignity and walked noiselessly into the smooth sunshine.

_____________

 

I began to piece bits together. Reverend Soren Guldberg’s name was, of course, untainted Danish. Some too-keen islander, perhaps also a poor speller, had taken it for Goldberg. The preacher’s expression and features, for whatever they might be worth in such an issue, lent some possible countenance to the classification. His sermons were so liberal that one parishioner—very likely the same islander—had been moved to breathe the dreaded word “red.”

“He doesn’t talk much about the war,” Captain Wilson had observed, as though that were entirely self-explanatory.

Once suspicion was awake, everybody noticed that the sermons were highly untheological in tone and subject.

None of these considerations was decisive in itself, it is true, but together they contrived to build up a persuasion that, somehow, through some fantastic misunderstanding or chicane, a Jew was holding down a Christian pulpit and preaching unsanctified doctrine from it every Sunday!

But from that point, the islanders were unable to resolve the crisis. On one side, there were the suspicion of the stranger and the unknown, characteristic of the inbred community, and inherited predispositions. But on the other hand, there were the deeper sensibilities and diplomatic hesitancies inherent in the situation. Economic stringencies, group competition, and political tensions were alike lacking on this happy island, as was any considerable and compact Jewish settlement. Far away, in the small town, a few Jewish families had settled and fitted inconspicuously into commercial and even public life. And even on this island, “our” Jews are different. . . .

The result was that the rumor about the preacher, after some weeks of tension, hung fire. The other parishes in which the Reverend Guldberg was serving made no move. I learned from my friend’s correspondence that, as the summer wore on, the excitement began to languish for want of fresh nourishment, and particularly of initiative. Not until the following summer did I hear of the sermon that administered the coup de grâce to the scandal.

_____________

 

On the very first day of my vacation I went to see Captain Wilson about a sloop I intended to rent for the season. I asked him whether Reverend Guldberg was back.

“Oh yes,” he replied. “We’re glad to have him again. He was very popular, you know. If I remember now, you heard him preach yourself once.”

Nothing more.

I reminded him of the Jewish issue.

“Oh that!”

He seemed none too eager to talk about it, but I did not mean to let him off. It came out, slowly, that toward the end of the summer, Reverend Guldberg announced a sermon entitled “Who is a Jew?”

The village was electrified. Did the minister know about the rumor? Was he going to declare himself? On our island local calls are free and unlimited. For a week the telephone wires burned.

For the first time in years the little church was half full.

The preacher began by expressing sympathy with the Jews of Europe. He dilated upon the conventional relations, historic and religious, between Christianity and Judaism.

“I and you, and you, and you,” he concluded, pointing dramatically at the worshipers in turn, “all of us are the spiritual descendants of the ancient Jews.”

The captain was silent.

I prodded him. How could that settle the matter; how did that sermon prove that the minister was not a Jew?

A shrewd gleam brightened my captain’s eye. He looked the sharp enough fellow he thought himself, the fellow no one could take in. He was Tolstoi’s Lavrushka—the Cossack who saw “a sharp piece of cunning” in everything that was said.

“He was a smart one, that Reverend Guldberg,” he said. “You see, in a way he was saying that maybe he was a Jew. . . . But did he suppose this village was made up of fools? We didn’t believe him!”

_____________

 

+ A A -
You may also like
Share via
Copy link